Maybe this dog really is a poi dog.
The strangest dog diet I’ve ever heard of isn’t a modern fad diet.
No, those are all too run of the mill.
If you want to find a strange diet for a dog, you can find no stranger case than that of the dog belonging to the Native Hawaiians before colonization.
The Polynesian people had dogs that they fattened for human consumption. After all, Hawaii has no native large game species, and dogs were an important source of meat.
Throughout history, lots of people have raised dogs to eat, so the Hawaiian dogs aren’t exceptional for that reason.
What is interesting about the Hawaiian dogs is that they were fattened almost exclusively on vegetable matter. Indeed, the dogs were fed mostly poi, which is a dish made from the taro root.
Now, today, it is not unusual to hear of people feeding dogs a vegan diet.
But for the Hawaiians, feeding their dogs this diet was a necessity. Even if they had killed some hogs for dinner or caught enough fish for a meal, they could not afford to feed their dogs these food items. They had to feed them poi.
Now, if we fed our Western dogs this diet, I don’t think they would do very well.
In fact, judging from the descriptions of the poi dogs, I don’t think they did very well.
The dogs had flattened heads, short legs, and pot-bellies. The flattened heads are believed to be the result of the dogs living on a diet that required no chewing whatsoever. Most dogs have well-developed temporalis muscles, as well as having a rather well-defined temporal fossa. These are both believed to have developed from the chewing action that most dogs engage in while eating. Poi has high levels of calcium and phosphorous , but it does not have it at the ratios needed to produce strong limb bones in a dog. As a result, the dogs may have developed their short legs as a result of having poor nutrition or as an adaptation to the poor nutrition.
The dogs themselves were said to be incredibly sluggish and stupid. Poi doesn’t have much protein in it, and protein is necessary to develop a large brain and a nervous system for an active animal.
The tendency is to believe that poi dogs went extinct. In fact, there was an attempt to recreate the breed in the 1990’s, using dogs that were thought to resemble the poi dogs.
However, I think a lot reasons why poi dogs looked and acted the way they did had more to do with the diets that these dogs had. As soon as Europeans and North Americans arrived, meat and bones became easier to get, and dog eating fell out of favor as a practice. The dogs began to eat like normal dogs, and as a result, they started to look like normal pariah-type dogs.
Every once in a while someone claims to have seen one, but because the dogs are not on that diet anymore, it is very hard to determine whether these dogs are the same thing.
I’ve seen dogs that were of this type in Hawaii. In fact, we once spent an afternoon at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park with a dog that looked like what I imagine a poi dog would look like if it had been fed a more appropriate diet. This dog knew how to milk tourists out of food. Heck, some members of my family even got him water!
There was no danger of him being eaten. After all, I think we were calling him “Jack” by the end of the afternoon.
This is interesting because a while back I was looking for information on the healthiest food to feed dogs and in doing some research on the net found the rawfeeding site and yahoo groups. They advocate feeding only raw meaty bones and organ meat, that is, mostly protein to dogs because they argue that dogs can’t digest carbs or vegetable matter. I have been serving my two goldens this diet for the past few months and they seem to be thriving on it, and they don’t have dental tartar issues, bad doggie breath or large bowel movements. When I informed my vet that I was taking this approach she was skeptical and said dogs needed a balanced diet like humans do and that I should feed commercial kibble also (note: she sells kibble in the office). In light of the poi dog article above, I was wondering what you feed your goldens or what your diet recommendation are.
I feed my dog Beneful. I had two goldens that lived into their teens on Purina Dog Chow.
I am not opposed to raw feeding. If it works for you, keep on doing it! I think that what bothers a lot of people is that the raw food diets are not backed by lots of research, as the commercial foods are. Now, I do agree with you that I don’t think it makes sense to feed dogs lots of carbs or grains, but those are a prioris in the commercial dog food science.
I have found that some goldens don’t do well on a corn-based diet.
I do have one study from the Journal of Animal Physiology & Animal Nutrition in which groups of dogs were fed diets with varying ratios of protein sources, % from corn gluten meal::% from chicken. They did find that there was some correlation between diet (mostly the higher-grain concentrations) and “correlation between loss of lean mass and markers of proteasome-dependent proteolysis.” If you want to take a gander, let me know.
It’s interesting to theorize the effects of such a weird diet upon the structure of dogs. And to think people were trying to bring this back as a breed…as if we haven’t learned enough lessons from deformed dogs already!
Believe it or not, I’ve seen that one.
Wait a minute– No, I’ve not seen that one!
Yes, please send me a link or pdf!
My favorite trendy food is those very expensive ‘grain-free’ dog foods. The binder ingredient is usually potatoes. Potatoes have carbs. Plenty of them. Just like grains.
One of my favorite raw feedings sites says that because dogs don’t produce amylase in their saliva they cannot digest grains. Um, dogs don’t chew. They don’t need amylase in their saliva. They produce plenty with their pancreas. They then proceed to throw doubts on cooked diets because ‘you can’t tell how much calcium is being absorbed when you feed calcium carbonate or bone meal, you dog might not be getting enough.’ You can’t tell how much calcium is being absorbed from bones, either.
You can’t ask the hardliners for studies to back their info up, either, because only the dog food companies can afford to do studies, which are then tainted by association.
Manny, there is no ‘healthiest food to feed dogs.’ It all depends on the individual dog. Two apparently identical dogs might have very different dietary needs. My favorite site on dog food is http://www.dogfoodproject.com It’s pretty much dogma free.
I hate the thought of people forcing their dog to eat a vegan diet. Oy vey.
Interesting tidbits about Poi Dogs, I often wonder about them in the modern day.
Are dogs able to synthesize a complete protein from poi? That’s the only way this makes any sense to me energetically.
Actually, dogs can synthesize protein from plant matter alone. That’s why there are vegan dogs these days.
It may be that these dogs evolved a better way of synthesizing this protein.
I really don’t know. No one has analyzed the remains of these dogs.
Wow – that’s fascinating. I did not know that – I thought that amongst mammals, that ability was largely restricted to ruminants. I imagine that synthesizing proteins must be rather energy intensive, but probably useful for a scavenger. It’d be interesting to compare the relative efficiency of protein synthesis between dogs, wolves, and coyotes; I wonder if there’s enough evolutionary distance between them to see a difference.
Now that last one is a question worth asking, but as far as I know, no scientist has looked at it. Wolves have better immune systems than dogs do. A big part of the immune system in in the GI tract.
Isn’t that the way of it? So many questions, so little time/money/knowledge/ability to answer them all…
The immune system makes sense to me – if pariah dogs were the original dogs, then they’d likely be eating leftover cooked/cleaned foods prepared by humans; even if found in a village waste dump, I imagine food would have considerably fewer pathogens than a carcass left out in the open. Besides spending less energy seeking food, the immune system probably became less of a selection pressure.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if selection pressures for synthesizing aminos actually points in the other direction. If a species lives in an ecological niche where complete proteins are readily available, then maintaining the ‘machinery’ to do so becomes more costly, and the ability should degrade in dog populations close to humans.
Science is fun. Especially when you’re only speculating, and don’t actually have to do the legwork to prove/disprove your hypothesis.
Another baffling question: if there is no large game species native to the islands, where the heck did large predators like dogs come from?
Boats.
They came with the Polynesians on dugouts.
I’m not disputing that, but doesn’t that seem somewhat insane? I mean, if I’m going to sail fifty bajillion miles across open ocean in a dugout, about the last thing I would think to pack is my dog.
a dog might be a good meat source to take, since it can subsist on human leavings and you wouldn’t have to bring (much) food for it.
This article is interesting! I never tried to eat dog’s meat. Do it taste like chicken or pork? This kind of dog is extinct.
I’ve never tried it, but I hear it’s good.
I seldom leave comments, but after browsing some of the responses on The strangest
dog diet ever | The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife Blog.
I do have 2 questions for you if it’s okay. Is it just me or does it seem like a few of these remarks look like they are written by brain dead folks? :-P And, if you are writing on additional social sites, I’d like
to keep up with anything fresh you have to post. Could you list of all of all your shared pages like your twitter
feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile?