January 26, 2026 • 52 mins
In this invention-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the origins of the humble dog biscuit or “scooby snack,” from discussions of dog bread in Ancient Rome to the Victorian origin of dog cake.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, I guess if
everything is going according to plan. This is our first
video episode publishing simultaneously to Netflix, though I think some
of the episodes we recorded in the past few weeks
are also being uploaded there. So if you are just
listening to us in audio format right now, you can
(00:35):
now find us in video podcast format on Netflix. This
is brand new for us, so we kind of don't
know what we're doing yet. We hope it's okay.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, we're in three D to understand they had three dimensions.
Smell vision has also been deployed. Really, all the bells
and whistles.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
If only we could arrange the tingler to come into
all of your home.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I was told the tingler option was available. Check your
Netflix settings, I guess. But yeah, it's exciting here we
are recording from our respective abodes.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
This is my dank basement.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And I'm attending to you from the limitless dark void.
That's where I am.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Aka the guest room.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Sometimes it's a guest room. Sometimes it's a limitless dark void.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yes, but hey, so we were trying to think what
would be the most amazingly compelling subject matter to talk
about for our first ever video format episode, and we
decided to talk about dog biscuits.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah. I originally brought the idea up as a joke
because we were like, well, can we do that's a
single episode? Well, we could do an invention episode. We've
done a lot of invention style episodes over the years,
and we used to do an invention podcast. You can
find all that wherever you get your audio podcasts. And
so I was like, okay, we could do an invention
and I don't know, off the cuff, I was like
(01:52):
dog biscuits because the term is inherently funny. The actual
item is, of course thoroughly mundane. But then I kept
thinking about it, and then I dug into it just
a tiny bit and instantly became convinced, No, this is
no joke. We absolutely need to talk about dog biscuits.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
There is something to talk about, and hey, if you're
new to our show, I guess kind of part of
what we do is try to figure out what's interesting
about everything, and that would everything does include dog biscuits.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, we may talk about black holes one week, we
may talk about you know, psychological concept or philosophical concept
another week, and then it could be dog biscuits. It
could be something that if you take for granted, but
then when you apply a little bit of scrutiny and
you dig into it, it's fascinating and is indeed mind blowing.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
So you're not a dog owner, but you are a
cat owner. And what I've been curious about is are
there cat biscuits?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I mean, not so much in my experience and my experience,
you have the little cat treats, which they love, and
that's the I guess, the equivalent the dessert for cats.
It is hard, whereas my cat's normal food is soft
and wet and or absolute liquid. She's old, she gets
many different types of foods at this point, but she
still loves the little hard treats. But they are they're
(03:10):
not the big like bone shaped biscuit that the big
you know, the Scooby snack, the treat that we associate
with dogs. That there may be products like that on
the market for cats, and I'm just not aware of them.
But when you go through certainly when you go through
the pet store checkout line. What I'm used to seeing
is that kind of cafeteria style selection of dog treats
(03:32):
where it's like all sorts of shapes, some of them
bone shaped and so forth, but others look like an
oreo cookie or some sort of you know, cookies, snacks,
some sort of human dessert treat, which can be very
confusing if you're going through there with like a toddler
and they're like, I want some of the obvious human
foods here, and you're like, no, no, no, those are
just for canines.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
This is funny because I was thinking before we started
recording about how dog treats. I mean, I guess pet
treats in general, but you know, dog treats are sort
of the big one that people think about. They're weird
because they're marketed as if they're designed to appeal to dogs.
So you see the commercial for them on TV or
(04:13):
I remember the ones when I was a kid, at least,
for like, do you remember the commercials for bacon strips
that are dogs. Don't no, it's not bacon, it's bacon,
you remember, Yeah, Yeah, So the whole thing in the
commercial is they're showing you how much dogs want this
treat and how good they feel when they get it.
But dogs can't buy treats. They don't have credit cards,
(04:35):
they don't have money, so they can't go get treats
for themselves. Humans do all of the buying and selling
of dog treats, so dog treats are actually marketed to
appeal not to dogs, but to humans. So the seller
has to appeal to something you might call preference by proxy.
It's kind of like advertising toys to kids, you know,
(04:56):
because kids don't usually have money to spend. I mean,
you know, things been their allowance or whatever. But usually
if you're trying to sell a toy to a kid,
you have to find a way to get the parents
or caregivers to buy the toy for the kid. Except
there's a difference between kids and dogs. At least with kids.
After a certain age, they can tell adults what they want,
(05:17):
So there is an added layer of complexity because the
purchase is gatelocked behind a secondary decision maker. You have
to appeal to the kid and then also get past
the approval of the money spender. So dogs are kind
of like that, except you kind of skip the primary
preference holder entirely because the commercial is not for the dog.
Your appeal goes straight to the buyer, and it's like, human,
(05:41):
imagine what kind of treat you would want if you
were a dog. You will almost certainly not be tasting
this yourself, So you're never gonna know. You know, you
just think, like, wow, my dog really liked that. But
in my experience, dogs like all food that you give them,
So how can you really tell.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, yeah, a kid and a dog may have an
actual desire for something, especially something to eat that is
actually kind of gross or rather gross sometimes in the
case of dogs, you know. But yeah, like you're saying
it's marketed towards the human beings, and you said that
humans will probably not taste it. But on the other hand,
humans will generally almost taste it because humans will smell
(06:22):
the dog food. And that's a whole point. Yeah, that's
a whole important aspect of dog food design. I'm to
understand is that humans do have to on some level
want to eat the dog food or the cat food,
or whatever the child may be. I guess it breaks
down a bit when you get into lizard food and
so forth, but with cats and dogs, it's certainly the case.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Well in the same way that the toy that is
most viscerally appealing to a child may not actually pass
the adult buyer test because like a lot of such
toys would be extremely dangerous or detrimental to a child's
health or something, you know, like the child wants the
bebe gun or whatever, so like you can't do that.
(06:59):
In the same I think, what is most viscerally appealing
to a dog may well not pass the human smell test.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That's right, But again the humans have to buy it. Yeah,
so this will all be important stuff to keep in
mind as we take this journey through ultimately the deep
history of dog snacks. I'd say that this was the
big surprise for me, not knowing anything about the history
of dog treats dog biscuits, is that I really just
(07:28):
assumed that it was a fairly recent invention. Like if
you were to just quiz me on the street, I
would say like, oh, I don't know, nineteen forties, nineteen fifties,
something like that. But ultimately the roots go far deeper.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Goes way back. Are you ready for me to talk
a little bit about this paper I looked up about
the science of dog snacks.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, let's get into it, so I dug up a.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Paper that was published in twenty twenty four in Frontiers
and Animal Science called the Science of Snacks a Review
of Dog Treats to review. The authors are Bogden, Alexandru Callencia,
Sarana Diina, and Adrian Makri. And in this paper, the
authors are doing kind of a general overview of research
(08:13):
on the market for dog treats and associated trends in
pet ownership. So they cover things like nutrition and safety
in the treat sector, but also more relevant to me,
they talk a bit about changes in dog owner's psychology
and how that relates to the history of treat giving behavior.
So just to mention a few interesting things. In their
(08:34):
background section, they talk about how the population of companion animals,
including dogs, is increasing worldwide and treats account for about
fifteen percent of the total value of the US pet
food market. The pet food market has grown in recent years,
and the greatest sector of growth within it has been
snacks and treats. So pet treats are on the come
(08:56):
up and this reflects, they say, an evolving relationship between
humans and dogs in recent decades, where dog owners of
today are more likely than dog owners of previous generations
to report having deep bonds and emotional relationships with their animals.
(09:18):
And this isn't to say that you know, nobody ever
had a deep feeling of companionship with the dog before today,
but that more people report those kinds of feelings as
time goes on, and people also reflect differences across the
span of their lives, like adults now talk about their
dog being a part of the family or feeling closer
to their dogs now than they remember from when they
(09:39):
were children. So it seems to be like an increasing
cultural trend to have these deeper attachments to our companion animals.
And this deeper attachment manifests in feeding behavior, where dog
owners express their love by giving food and especially by
giving treats, because food, you know that might be viewed
(10:00):
as functional or nutritional, treats are more like a gift.
That's how you just really show your love that the
dog's love language is, you know, bagan strips or whatever.
And the authors mention one study that found that dog
owners tended to believe that not giving their dogs treats
was similar to not giving their children toys and believed
(10:21):
that dog owners believed the giving of treats to be
a necessary part of the human's relationship with a dog. Also,
you can just notice that dog owners describe taking care
of their dogs today in many of the same terms
that parents use to describe caring for their kids.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Now, you'll have to speak to this more since you
have been a dog owner in your adult life and
I have not. But treats are also an important part
of just the behavior of the dog, right, and training
to some extent the dog, right.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I mean, I think this is a shift somewhat that
treats used to be seen more as as functional rewards,
as something that you would use to to you know,
provide a motive or incentive to the dog to pay
attention and you know, repeat good behaviors during training, and
(11:14):
probably in past you know years, they would they would
use more negative incentives as well, but more and more
all the time, it seems like treats are for bonding.
They are a gift given out of love to show
the bond between the human and the animal and to
make the animal happy.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Gotcha.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
So the authors of this paper, they list they or
they at least cite another paper that mentioned six major
categories of dog treats. I love. Somebody's made the taxonomy here,
so you got biscuit, bone, chew, dental meat product, and
raw hide. And of biscuits specifically, they had a few notes.
They say, usually made from wheat flour, baked and dried
(11:55):
slowly in an oven, and it creates this crunchy texture.
A lot of dog treats on the market today advertise
dental health benefits, you know, they say, like the crunching
will you know? It is of such a texture that
it may help clean the dog's teeth, or at least
it's advertised to do that. And as of a twenty
sixteen study by White at All biscuits were the most
(12:17):
popular type of treats given to dogs in the US,
accounting for seventy seven percent of all treats. So it's
biscuits by a mile, and that they actually have multiple benefits,
not just in what people think their dogs might want
to eat, probably also in affordability compared to some other
types of treats, but also dog biscuits tend to have
a long shelf life because of their low moisture content.
(12:40):
It's kind of like hard tack that you'd give to
an army on the road.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Have you, in fact, ever in your life attempted to
take a little nibble off of a dog treat.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
No, I never have, because I did as a child.
Really we did, even without a dog.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
No. No, we had a dog when I was a kid.
But we were a kid. Okay, yeah, what is that?
A different era of dog ownership? You know, this is
the dog that lived outdoors and we lived in the country.
But I at some point just had to sort of like,
you know, at least stick my tongue to it and see, like,
is this something that a human could eat? No, they
could not, but I think you could. You can understand
(13:14):
why someone might be tempted. In part, I blame Scooby
Doo because Shaggy would eat Scooby snacks as well for
some reason, right, but also.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
For some reason, And what was that reason.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Because I don't know he liked he just liked him.
I don't know it was their incentive for solving crimes.
But I think the thing to drive home here, and
you touched on this already talking about the composition of
the dog treats is that they are bread. They are
a bread product, and bread is for humans. So like
we can't help but think we recognize it on some
(13:49):
level as being human food, even though it is so
incredibly hard that it is not, among other reasons inadvisable
that we attempt to consume it.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah, not suited to human taste. So I have never
tried a dog treat or dog food. But I was
actually just talking to my wife Rachel before we recorded today,
and it came up. We're like, did you ever try
a dog treat? And she has. She did it actually
when she was a kid. She proposed to her little sister.
(14:22):
She said, hey, will you give me fifty cents if
I eat this? Actually I don't remember. She said it
was a piece of dog kibble or a dog treat.
It was one or the other. And her sister was like, okay,
I guess I will. And so she started to eat it,
but it was so disgusting she couldn't finish it. But
she ate half of it. So she made her little
sister pay her twenty five cents. Oh wow, it seems
(14:43):
only fair.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
That one could have. Really, that could have become tied
up in legal proceedings there, like it technically didn't eat
the whole treat or the whole kibble. But no, okay,
everyone left happy.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
This is why you get everything in writing before do
deals like this, you know. So thinking about these changes
in dog treats and pet treats generally, it brought me
(15:15):
to another thing. So I was reading more generally about
how there is research on growing trends in the pet
food market that point out this increasing trend toward anthropomorphization
in dog treats. Or maybe that's not the right word.
That might imply the dog treats are taking human form.
But dog treats, instead of taking human form, taking the
(15:37):
form of human food. So you would have treats with
visual design, naming, and supposedly flavor. But who's going to know,
I guess unless you try it yourself. You know, supposedly
flavor that is said to mimic human foods, so you
can think of little doggy pizza bites. I was looking
(15:57):
some of these up before we started. You know, it's
not gonna be like human pizza. Instead, it's some kind
of biscuit like thing that looks like human pizza. I
found one that was advertising something called a Margurrita flavor,
and you know, little doggy tacos and little doggy hamburgers
and all that kind of stuff. And then so that's
(16:19):
like dog treats made out of normal dog treat stuff
shaped and made to look like human foods. And then
you can also think about these dog friendly versions of
human treats, like dog ice cream. Obviously it's a different
formula here. You know, dogs do not need that much sugar.
I mean, I guess humans don't either, but you know,
(16:40):
dogs really shouldn't need that much sugar, so you know,
you don't give them human ice cream. There's like a
special dog ice cream. And then the pop cup phenomenon.
Have you heard about this?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
No, what's a pop cup?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
I think it's like I've never gotten one of these,
but I've heard of them. It's like certain places do
drive throughs. I think maybe Starbucks would do this where
they will create it's like a whip cream type treat
in a cup that you get for your dog that's
riding in the car with you, and you give it
to them and they lick up all the cream. And
even the best thing I came across while doing this
(17:12):
was dog beer. All right, people don't feed your dog's
real beer. It's not good for dogs. They shouldn't have alcohol.
But there are fully marketed dog beers sold in cans
that look like beer cans. For example, Bush Dog Brew.
It's not beer, there's no alcohol in it. Instead, it's
(17:33):
like a meat broth thing with such you know, this
is like turkey broth with sweet potatoes in it or something.
And I think stuff like this appeals to people because
it allows you to bring the dog in. You know,
these are not just like things we consume for nutrition.
You're not going out for ice cream or drinking beer
(17:54):
for nutritional value. It's like a social ritual that you
do with friends or that you do with family. And
because people increasingly see their dogs as a friend or
as part of the family, you feel like you need
to include them in these, you know, consume consumptive social rituals.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah. Absolutely. Another big one I'm to understand is if
you have a birthday party for a dog, you want
a dog birthday cake. Like, just a mile and a
half from me, there is a dedicated dog bakery. I've
driven past it a million times, but I had to
look at their website for the first time, and sure enough,
you can just straight up birthday cakes for dogs. Dog
friendly birthday cakes, as you pointed out, but still like
(18:34):
full blown birthday cakes. And as I was researching this episode,
I was just seeing like dog biscuits and fancy dog
treats everywhere. Like I went into a coffee shop and
I was like, oh, man, there are as many dog
treats in here as there are human treats. Yeah, I
mean I assume they were human treats. Maybe those are
dog treats too, Maybe I was in the wrong establishment.
But my espresso did not taste of turkey broths, so
(18:57):
I guess it was all right.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Before our dog passed away a few years ago, you know,
he was like many dogs and that he would eat
basically anything, so it was sometimes hard to distinguish, like
what the really highly desired foods are, because it's all
highly desired unless it's I remember, I guess one time
I dropped a klipino pepper on the floor and he
picked it up in his mouth and took a bite
(19:20):
and then just kind of dropped it. So he never
wanted that. But you eat almost anything else, I mean,
whatever he found out on a walk, you know, to
discarded chicken bones, that's delicious, of course, But he really
loved carrots.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well we'll get into the really
fascinating history of the changing dietary habits of the domesticated dog.
But I guess we should again point out what is
a biscuit a dog biscuit in the modern sense. Again,
we're talking about a dry, hard, generally flower based biscuit,
(19:55):
and we should point out that we're, of course, when
we say biscuit, we're really lean more towards the the
British use of the term biscuit, which is like a cookie,
as opposed to biscuits in the US and parts of Canada,
where it is like a fluffier quick bread. Though if
you ask dogs they'll be like, give me the fluffy
(20:16):
quick bread. I will also eat that. Now, as we've
been pointing out, the dog biscuit is generally not considered
the primary food source. It's an extra, it's the dessert,
like to your point, part of the bonding process between
a contemporary dog person and their dog. It's not altogether necessary.
(20:37):
The domestic dog is a meat leaning, opportunistic omnivore. They
lean meat eater and meat scavenger. But due to their
long association with human beings, the human beings that domesticated them,
they've acquired the genes necessary for increased starch consumption. So
in other words, they've adapted to eat human scraps, human
(20:58):
table scraps, they've come to cast off bits of vegetables,
especially things like lagoons, grains, and of course that towering
human food technology bread. A reminder here, we've talked about
bread plenty of times on the show before. In the
invention of bread, if you will, bread actually predates human agriculture.
(21:19):
One hundred gatherers made bread in the neighborhood of like
fourteen thousand years ago. Dog domestication is even older than this,
dating back depending on how you're crunching the numbers, what
twenty thousand to forty thousand years. And of course this
is another reason that the idea of the invention of
the dog biscuit, or really any dedicated dog chow might
(21:39):
seem like something without anything besides twentieth century roots, right,
because these are creatures that have adapted over time to
just eat what we are eating, or eat what we
didn't eat. But along the way these treats emerge for
different reasons. But also I think it's worth acknowledging throughout
this history you can still identify some of the same reasons,
(22:02):
or you can easily imagine some version of that same
bond that a contemporary dog person has that you could
you know, you can compare to someone in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Even yeah, even if these ancient peoples had a much
more working relationship with their dogs than most modern people
do with companion dogs, I think you can still kind
of see the beginnings of this long road that ends
up with pup cups and dog beer if you look
at some of the early evidence.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, yeah, so again, domesticated dogs have had the chance
to munch down on some bread of some sort for
a very long time. But the question that really underlines
the topic here today is how long have humans been
making bread for dogs, perhaps exclusively for dogs. And we
have a few different avenues to take here. So first
(22:54):
of all, what do we have in the way of
physical evidence of domesticated dogs that had a based diet.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
That's a great question, and of course it is important
to separate the question of whend were domestic dogs consuming
a grain based diet versus looking at specifically engineered dog
bread products, because sometimes you can't tell from the evidence
exactly what the product would have been, but you can
(23:23):
infer some things about it. So I was reading about
this in a twenty twenty one article in the Journal
of World Prehistory called Dogs that ate plants Changes in
the canine diet during the Late Bronze Age and First
Iron Age in the Northeast Iberian Peninsula. This was by
a number of authors. The lead author is Sylvia Albizouri.
(23:46):
At least some of the authors here are affiliated with
the University of Barcelona. So this study looked at skeletal
remains of several dozen domestic dogs found buried at a
site in northeastern Spain called con Roquetta, which is near
the modern city of Barcelona. The konrachetasite has been inhabited
(24:07):
by different human groups since prehistoric times, and by studying
the different layers of deposition there we can learn a
lot about changes in human life in the Iberian Peninsula
over the centuries. So the bones the authors studied here
were from different time periods, ranging from the Late Bronze
Age to the First Iron Age, and this would be
(24:30):
roughly the period from thirteen hundred to five point fifty BCE.
And then by using isotopic analysis of the bones, the
authors were able to learn about what the dogs were
primarily eating, and then compare that data to other remains
found in the same strata. And this type of analysis
(24:53):
works because different food sources result in different concentrations of
stable isotopes in the bone, c isotopes like carbon thirteen
and nitrogen fifteen. And then so you look at that
and you find the ratios of different atomic nuclei in
the bones, and that can tell you what fed the
growth of the animal's body hundreds or even thousands of
(25:14):
years ago. So it's cool technique. So what they found was,
despite the fact that dogs evolved from carnivorous predators, you know,
they're evolved from mostly carnivorous wolves, these dogs living alongside
humans from the Bronze Age to the First Iron Age,
with a few exceptions, were already getting a large proportion
(25:37):
of their dietary protein from vegetarian sources, specifically grains. So,
for example, the Bronze Age dogs were eating mostly what
are called C three cereals that include cereals like wheat
and barley, so they're probably eating a lot of barley.
The later dogs seem to have been getting a greater
(25:58):
proportion of what are called seaf four grains like millet.
Now there were a few exceptions. This finding does not
mean the dogs ate zero animal protein. Later dogs tended
to show more diversity in diet than the earlier Bronze
Age dogs, which may be a result of more social
(26:18):
and labor based diversification within the human cultures there. So,
for example, there's one cluster of dogs they identified that
the authors call Group three. I think that seem to
have eaten significantly more meat than all of the other groups,
and the authors speculate that this could be because these
dogs were involved in different types of human labor assistance
(26:42):
or lifestyle. So we don't know exactly what caused this difference.
This is just me extrapolating, but imagine you've got most
of the dogs in a culture living nearby the human
settlement and eating these grain based foods. I'll talk more
about that in a second. But then you have the
other subset of dogs who are involved in helping humans
(27:04):
with hunting or with long distance travel. So this could
be part of a sort of military class, or as
companions to people involved in trade long distance travel for
trade or for gathering materials of some kind. So these
dogs would travel around and exist more maybe on hunting
and foraging, or maybe just they would be fed what
(27:25):
the humans were eating while traveling, and humans while traveling
might be subsisting more on you know, freshly hunted game
or something. So, whatever the reason, these dogs have a
more diverse diet or they're eating more meats, whereas most
dogs at can Rokatta over the ages stay close to
the human settlement and eat grain based foods. So this
(27:45):
dog you know, almost vegetarianism or semi vegetarianism appears to
be not a result of dogs foraging for human scraps
and all that's left over as grains, but instead, the
authors argue it's evidence of a deliberate feeding regime controlled
by humans. And as evidence of this, the authors point
(28:09):
to consistency in the values of these nutritional inputs, which
they interpret to mean that humans were preparing their dog's food. So,
when we think about the evolution of domestic dogs from
their wild ancestors, sometimes this dietary adaptation of dogs, you
(28:30):
know that coming from a carnivorous evolutionary heritage and moving
into a more flexible omnivorous diet. Sometimes this is presented
as a pure accident of evolution that nobody planned, you know,
like proto dog. The story often goes that proto dogs
ate scraps leftover from human hunter gatherers, and the ones
(28:53):
that were behaviorally more compatible with proximity to humans and
metabolically more coll a rent of human food, these would
have a survival advantage, and they began to branch off
from their wild ancestors. But at least within the prehistoric
Bronze Age Iberian setting. Here, the exposure to an omnivorous
(29:15):
diet is no longer an accident. At this point. It's
not just that the dogs are eating whatever's around and
that's forcing them to adapt to a more omnivorous diet,
because the dogs don't seem to be just getting leftovers
of whatever the humans happened to be eating. The humans
seem to have been fully feeding the dogs a deliberate
grain heavy diet even when the humans were eating other things.
(29:39):
And now that's interesting, why would they do that? While
the authors talk about how, you know, these were not pets,
obviously they were working dogs, so they'd be involved in
all kinds of tasks like animal herding would be a
big thing, or you know, sometimes they were used for
moving loads, you know, moving loads across the ground on
sledges of some kind, whatever the they're doing. You don't
(30:01):
want your working dogs to be distracted from their work
trying to run off and forage for food because they're hungry.
So it kind of makes sense to stuff them with
calorie dense, abundant, grain based foods so they have plenty
of energy and they're not tempted to stray from tasks
to go get a bite to eat.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, especially if that bite to eat might be the
animals they're hurting.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, even worse. Yeah, So I don't know. Interesting in
this context that you go back three thousand years ago
in the Iberian Peninsula and people are feeding their dogs.
It's not necessarily going to be milk bones, but they're
feeding them some kind of grain based food as a
core staple of their diet and doing so deliberately.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah. Yeah, really fascinating. Again, the roots here digging far
deeper into the past than I anticipated. Now at this point,
we're going to fast forward a bit and we're going
(31:08):
to we're going to move to the ancient Romans. Generally,
we're gonna be looking at the imperial era here. First,
I thought we might consider this line from the Roman
poet Juvenile from his second century CE work Satire five.
I shall read it here for you is a dinner
worth all the insults with which you have to pay
(31:30):
for It is your hunger so importunate. That means troublesomely urgent,
when it might, with greater dignity be shivering where you
are and munching dirty scraps of dog's bread.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So juvenile? Is Chriswell? Am I getting that right?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah? Chriswell predicts, Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Here's predicting in
a way, right, talking about dog bread a Pannis Canarius.
So what is he talking about here? Will? I had
to dig into this a little bit more. And what
he's to here is at once actually bread for dogs,
but also maybe not quite bread cooked just for dogs.
(32:08):
According to Consuelo Manetta in Our Daily Bread in Italy,
it's meaning in the Roman period and today this is
a material culture of twenty sixteen. Bread making technologies reached
a high point of production during the Roman Imperial period,
so there were a great many different bread products, including
different breads for soldiers and sailors, such as you know,
(32:28):
hard tack like product, high quality breads, breads with clay
added and also bread for dogs.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I love the bread with clay added.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't. I didn't have time to follow
that tangent. But I mean, you know, things have been
added to bread throughout history to sort of bulk it up,
to make up for lack of ingredients and so forth.
So the general idea, though here alluded to by Juvenal,
is that there were different types of due to where
(33:01):
they stood in the bread making process and then what
social classes were given to dine on them. Dog bread
was the lowest quality bread possible made as a byproduct,
you know, from the scraps that were left over from
the milling process, so namely brand and husks, and was
generally considered suitable only for dogs and was apparently fed
(33:24):
to dogs. Like it's not just a situation where it's like, oh,
only a dog could eat that, but humans do. Like
this was also bread that was given expressly to dogs.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
That sounds like health food now, right, wouldn't this be
high fiber?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah? Yeah, and that that is that's where we're going
with this. Yeah, really, this is where we come back
to this idea of like working dogs deserving a working
dog's meal. But then also it gets into very there
are various class attributes to it as well. So here's
a quote from another work. This is from Marcus Tarentius
(33:57):
Varro's on Agriculture, and the author writes a lot about
the upkeep of a farm and all the stuff that
goes into it, talks a good bit about dogs working dogs,
and at one point writes quote, the food of dogs
is more like that of man than that of sheep.
They eat scraps of meat and bones, not grass and leaves.
But then he later says you should also feed them
(34:20):
barley bread, but not without soaking it in milk, for
when they have become accustomed to eating that kind of food,
they will not soon stray from the flock.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
M Okay, So you give the dog good food to eat,
yummy food, bread soaked in milk, it's not gonna run away.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Right right, And it's not going to bite your flock
and so forth. And the bread he's advising to be
soaked in milk would be the aforementioned dog bread. Now
another take on bread and dogs in the Roman world.
I was reading in Around the Roman Table, Food and
Feasting in Ancient Rome. This is by Patrick Fass. He
points out that when you were having like a fancy,
(34:59):
upper class theatrical Roman dinner. After the main course, like
before dessert, bread is passed around for guests to wipe
their mouths and hands, and then given to the dogs
quote who were dedicated to Hecate, the goddess of night
and witchcraft. So bread here used just as like a
(35:20):
precursor to the napkin or a napkin substitute, and then
given to the dogs, who will gladly eat it because
it is bread, and it also maybe has a little
extra fun flavoring based on whatever was on your hands
and on your mouth.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
This is interesting because the use of bread as napkins here,
which I don't think I was aware of this before,
but it reminds me of the widespread use of bread
products as essentially plates or other you know what we
would use plates for today. You know the idea of
the trencher that you'd eat food out of a big
piece of stale bread, and then afterwards you might throw
that bread to the dogs or maybe to the poor
(35:55):
in some contexts.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, yeah, And in this case especially the bread that
you're using is of course maybe not ideal for human consumption,
but the dogs are game. I was reading Bread and
Bones Feeding Roman Dogs published in Classical World twenty twenty
one by Sarah M. Harvey, and she gets into a
good bit of this, and some of her key points
are that, first of all, providing a plan diet to
(36:19):
your dog, generally like a working dog, a hunting dog,
a guard dog, a sheep dog was a status symbol.
Like here, I am an elite owner of an elite dog,
and it's an extension of my place in society that
I give my dog what is considered a proper diet,
the kind of diet that is written about. It works
(36:40):
like on agriculture, so my dog is where well cared for,
well fed, and fed on a regular schedule. That's something
that she stresses as well. Meanwhile, that doesn't mean every
dog in the Roman Imperial Roman world is eating like
this common dogs. They're going to maybe be fed more
on table scraps. But dog bread was thought to be ideal,
(37:04):
especially again for working dogs, dogs that need a lot
of energy to do whatever they're doing. Dogs that you
want to look very healthy and robust in the case
of a guard dog, but also but not like fat
and lazy. You want the dog to be a little
bit intimidating. I guess, so the ideal was a grain
heavy diet, but she points out that evidence suggests that
(37:25):
dog diets at the time had a high level of
animal protein, and this might have been due in part
to availability, so you know, you would still have meat
on hand post hunt, post butchery activities, but also it
might have been just the place where experience and tradition
meet literary ideals. So there's there's what was recommended and
(37:47):
what was you know, the ideal dog meal. But then
in reality there's still going to be a certain amount
of feeding the scraps to the dogs, and it's going
to be different depending on, you know, what level of society. Now,
another source that I looked at was a melting pot
of Roman dogs north of the Alps with high phenotypic
and genetic diversity and similar diets by Granado at All.
(38:10):
This was in scientific reports from twenty twenty three and
it indicates that there are quote numerous archaeological, epigraphic and
literary evidence for dog food in the Roman Empire that
show a large proportion of vegetable components cereals, bread made
of barley, wheat or spelt, and a minor component of meat, bones, milk,
(38:32):
and whey. But they also point out it is known
that the Romans were feeding their dogs differently according to
a number of factors, including function and age, but most
likely the majority of Roman dogs were relying primarily on
table scraps. So again, there's the ideal, and there's like
sort of the high class, you know, elite diet for
(38:53):
the dogs, and then there's what is maybe the reality
just throughout dog owning culture at the time in the area.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
But it sounds to me like you're saying that even
in the Roman context, while we did have these prescriptions
for certain ways to prepare grain based or bread products
for dogs that were thought of as ideal, these would
not be mass produced dog biscuits like we think of today.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
This would be just a byproduct of the breadmaking industry
that was at large in the area at the time. Yeah,
to really find the origin of like the modern industrial
specified dog biscuit, we have a very specific origin story,
which is always nice, especially for covering on a show,
(39:39):
and it's a Victorian innovation. Generally, most sources point to
a singular Victorian innovator, and that is James Spratt. He
was a British born American inventor and entrepreneur, and generally,
from what I was reading, just a great salesman, great marketer.
And he was at the time he was traveling a
(40:00):
back and forth between America and England at the time,
selling his own patented lightning rods. And the story goes
that he was in he was in England, he was,
you know, at the docks, and he saw some dogs
eating some hardtack. I guess some sailors gave them some
of this, you know, the hard bits of bread that
(40:23):
are meant for rations. The dogs were loving it, and
he had this epiphany, I should make bread just for
dogs and market it as such, And in eighteen sixty
he started doing it. The product Sprats Meat fibrine dog Cake,
with the target audience being English sporting dogs, or rather
(40:44):
the owners of fine English sporting dogs. So already it's
fascinating how that lines up with so many different things
we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, so appealing to the owners who think that their
dog is special and that this product will cater to
the specialness of their animal.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yes, absolutely, yeah, it is an elite, an elite and
specialized diet for special dogs. And there's prestige tied up
into it and everything. So I was reading an article
about this from the Hagley Museum and Library, and they
point out that that Spratt was just a masterful marketer
on this, successfully selling a product that, to be clear,
(41:23):
people didn't actually need, like the dogs, the dogs.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
That people weren't like, what am I going to feed
my dog?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Right? Like, yeah, we'd figured. I'm not saying that dogs
necessarily had the best diet in all cases, but a
certain equilibrium had been attained, and so the dogs at
the time, they say, were probably eating mostly take table scraps.
It seemed to work out. But he pushed this really hard,
like he was traveling around presenting this. At the eighteen
(41:50):
seventy six Centennial Exhibition in the US, he presented that
he sold it to the American Kennel Club and reportedly
introduced the idea there were appropriate foods for different dog
life stages. Now, I think maybe the Romans had some
version of this as well, And I think in general,
if you were feeding a very old dog as opposed
(42:11):
to a young dog, you might at some point realize, well,
maybe they do need something different, at least structurally. But yeah,
the idea is that he like just really dug into this,
and it was like, Yeah, there's a market for this,
and then I can expand that market and I can
go after different sorts of clientele. Now you can look
up there's all there. You know, this is an age
(42:33):
from which we have a number of surviving advertisements. You
can find images of what these biscuits looked like. I
recommend them. I mean, I recommend checking out the advertisements. Again,
I cannot speak for the dog cakes, the historic dog cakes,
but you can look up images of them, and they
did not look like bones. They looked more like a biscuit,
you know, like an English biscuit, like some sort of
(42:54):
a big square cookie type thing.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I bet the dogs didn't mind.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
No, no, they present Probably they love them. But more
to the point, the humans that had the dogs loved them. Now,
when it comes to the dog bone shape, like the
(43:20):
popularity of that that also seems to have a specific
origin story, or at least there's one that's the moment
that's fairly popular. And I was reading about this in
an article by Michael Waters, an Atlas Obscura article titled
how an organic chemist invented the bone shaped dog treat
from twenty seventeen and it takes us to nineteen oh
seven and organic chemist Carlton ellis an American inventor who
(43:44):
was also involved in the creation of both margarine and polyester.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Two of my favorite things.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Yeah yeah, this one isn't I guess mentioned as much,
but like I think margarine and polyester his contributions. They
are a little more famous. But he was supposedly called
in to help a local slaughterhouse with its waist milk
problem and came up with a dog biscuit byproduct based
on said waste. The problem dogs didn't really want to
(44:12):
eat them when they started producing these things prototypes presenting
them to the dogs, and the story goes that on
a whim they tried shaping them like a bone, and well,
suddenly the dogs love them. The milk bone was born
and was purchased by Nibisco in nineteen thirty one, promoted
as a dessert for dogs.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
I'm skeptical at several levels. Mean, the dogs didn't want them.
As I've said before, in my experience, most dogs are
not very picky. I mean, they'll eat almost anything, and
so I don't know what would have to be wrong
with it for them not to want to eat it.
But then also so they didn't change the taste, they
just changed the shape, and then the dogs wanted them.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
That is the story.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Now, color me skeptically.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, yeah, I think they're or maybe a few things
going on here. First of all, if this were an
embellishment of the origin of a particular invention, it would
not be the first. I mean, sometimes invention stories are
tweaked a little bit to give it a little more
of a story shape. Suddenly something that is just the
you know, the byproduct of just trying different things, becomes
(45:18):
inspiration from a dream and so forth. So it's possible
that this is just a more fun version of what
actually happened. It's also been pointed out that it could
be the novelty factor they have. You know, who knows
how many There may be more data on this out there,
and I just didn't run across it, you know, however
(45:38):
many dogs we had. They're being presented with different examples
of the biscuit, and then here's one that's shaped like
a bone. It could just be that it's a novel shape.
Dogs are curious and intelligent. They were like, what is this?
It looks different from the others, and then they were like, wow,
he loves it. He loves the dog shape. We're going
with that.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
You mean the bone shape?
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, I'm sorry. Not the dogs that would be though,
that would also make sense. That's the kind of thing
that that humans would go for as well. He knew
that it was shaped like himself, and so he ate it.
He knew it was for him that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
But because you are what you eat, it meant he
wanted to become, come into himself and become the dog
he always dreamed.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
He could be. Yeah, canine philosophy one on one. But
but no, I think we could all acknowledge that, like
the true genius of this is that it appealed to
the humans. Like the treat is shaped like a bone.
Dogs need a bone, dogs want to bone, And this
is something that is this is an industrial product, but
then it is shaped like this natural thing. I mean,
(46:39):
the same thing works on us, right, I mean there
are products where we take the mag that's an example,
or I don't know, like even things that don't make
a lot of sense, like a little you know, sort
of like cheese snack shape it like a goldfish. Suddenly
it's exciting suddenly it has this natural world component and
it feel like something that you would of course want
(47:02):
to eat and not something that you would just like,
you know, pelt other children with.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
I remember vividly when I was a young child getting
really excited for a super Mario shaped ice cream treat. Yeah,
like Mario head, And I think, can this be true?
Like his nose was a gumball. I don't know, did
that come from a dream? That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
You don't follow gum Maybe so I mean they I mean, yeah,
I mean I loved there were some ice pops when
I was a kid that were shaped like the different
They weren't like it wasn't a universal monster's official product,
but they was like they were shaped like a mummy
and a vampire and so forth, And of course I
loved that. Now, like even today, it's like you you know,
you see a SpongeBob SquarePants ice ice cream pop. You know,
(47:51):
the taste does not I'm assuming the taste profile is
not something I would dig. But you can tell my
children go crazy for it because we have taken this
you know, highly processed thing and made it look like
a beloved character.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Yeah, my daughter can absolutely taste that this cracker is
shaped like mickey. Yeah, it's just mickey. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
So so again, any way you cut it, though, I think
it comes down to a brilliant marketing on the part
of the milk bone architects here, and it's one that's
still with us. It just, I don't know, it just
feels right. As a non dog owner, there's just I
can say that it just feels right that a dog
should have a treat that is shaped like a bone.
(48:30):
It's almost like, on some level we realize that maybe,
you know, maybe in a way, the dog shouldn't be
eating a highly industrial bread product.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Yeah, we feel guilty about their level of domestication, the
fact that we're feeding them something that doesn't seem like
part of their natural diet. They should be running down
an elk and you know process you're just chewing through
its corpse. But we can leave he ate some of
that feeling of guilt by giving them this highly processed
(49:04):
grain based or milk protein product that is, you know,
shaped like a like the part of a dead animal
that they really desire.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
I think we should lean into this more that we
should go beyond the bone. We should have it shaped
like elk skulls, you know, you know, big chunks of
rib and so forth. Someone has probably already done this.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
Guts like freets that are shaped like guts and organs.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Three day old rotting guts, you know, something the dog
would really want to get into.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
You know, really, the milk bone makes a lot more
sense than the micrib, because dogs, given the opportunity, a
lot of dogs will eat bones. They'll crack them open,
and you know they'll get the swallow pieces of them.
Humans don't usually eat bones, I think. Is so I
don't know, the mic rib is actually more mysterious.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
M Yeah, now, you know, I have to have to
acknowledge here. I am. I'm a vegetarian, so I eat
a lot of faux meats, and a lot of the
faux meat experience is take plant, make plant feel and
taste and look like meat. So I mean it's like
I'm I'm doing the same thing to myself.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
As someone in a weird middle category who I do
actually eat meat, but I also sometimes eat you know,
imitation meats, and I find that the visual appearance actually
makes a significant difference in the eating experience. Yeah, yeah,
it's you know, you hear people talk about in food
science that that that site is, you know, a really
(50:34):
important part of the eating experience, and sometimes you're inclined
to doubt that, but I don't know, it's it's true.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Like sometimes it's the only way you can go after it.
Take imitation bacon for example, Listeners, perhaps I'm wrong, Perhaps
there is a really good imitation bacon non the meat
bacon bacon option. In my experience, however, no such thing exists.
But the best we can do is we can make
it look like bacon, and we can make it kind
(51:02):
of like crisp like bacon in the same way, like
we can go after the tactile experience and the visual
experience of the bacon and at least try and get
that part, even if the flavor profile is not quite
there yet.
Speaker 3 (51:15):
How that compares to the bacon strips unclear.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Now, if you're just discovering stuff to blow your mind,
we just want to remind you that we've been an
audio podcast for a long time at this point, and
you can find a full archive of the episodes we've
done over the years wherever you get your podcasts. Just
look for stuff to blow your mind, and once you've
found us, whatever your favorite platform is just rate review,
subscribe all of that. It really helps us out.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Yeah, most of all. Please obviously you know, do what
you want to do, but if you feel like subscribing,
that would be great. It would mean a lot to us.
We would love it, you know, so huge, thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
(52:04):
for the future, or just to say hello let us
know how you found out about the show, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, I guess if
everything is going according to plan. This is our first
video episode publishing simultaneously to Netflix, though I think some
of the episodes we recorded in the past few weeks
are also being uploaded there. So if you are just
listening to us in audio format right now, you can
(00:35):
now find us in video podcast format on Netflix. This
is brand new for us, so we kind of don't
know what we're doing yet. We hope it's okay.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, we're in three D to understand they had three dimensions.
Smell vision has also been deployed. Really, all the bells
and whistles.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
If only we could arrange the tingler to come into
all of your home.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I was told the tingler option was available. Check your
Netflix settings, I guess. But yeah, it's exciting here we
are recording from our respective abodes.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
This is my dank basement.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And I'm attending to you from the limitless dark void.
That's where I am.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Aka the guest room.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Sometimes it's a guest room. Sometimes it's a limitless dark void.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yes, but hey, so we were trying to think what
would be the most amazingly compelling subject matter to talk
about for our first ever video format episode, and we
decided to talk about dog biscuits.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah. I originally brought the idea up as a joke
because we were like, well, can we do that's a
single episode? Well, we could do an invention episode. We've
done a lot of invention style episodes over the years,
and we used to do an invention podcast. You can
find all that wherever you get your audio podcasts. And
so I was like, okay, we could do an invention
and I don't know, off the cuff, I was like
(01:52):
dog biscuits because the term is inherently funny. The actual
item is, of course thoroughly mundane. But then I kept
thinking about it, and then I dug into it just
a tiny bit and instantly became convinced, No, this is
no joke. We absolutely need to talk about dog biscuits.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
There is something to talk about, and hey, if you're
new to our show, I guess kind of part of
what we do is try to figure out what's interesting
about everything, and that would everything does include dog biscuits.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, we may talk about black holes one week, we
may talk about you know, psychological concept or philosophical concept
another week, and then it could be dog biscuits. It
could be something that if you take for granted, but
then when you apply a little bit of scrutiny and
you dig into it, it's fascinating and is indeed mind blowing.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
So you're not a dog owner, but you are a
cat owner. And what I've been curious about is are
there cat biscuits?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I mean, not so much in my experience and my experience,
you have the little cat treats, which they love, and
that's the I guess, the equivalent the dessert for cats.
It is hard, whereas my cat's normal food is soft
and wet and or absolute liquid. She's old, she gets
many different types of foods at this point, but she
still loves the little hard treats. But they are they're
(03:10):
not the big like bone shaped biscuit that the big
you know, the Scooby snack, the treat that we associate
with dogs. That there may be products like that on
the market for cats, and I'm just not aware of them.
But when you go through certainly when you go through
the pet store checkout line. What I'm used to seeing
is that kind of cafeteria style selection of dog treats
(03:32):
where it's like all sorts of shapes, some of them
bone shaped and so forth, but others look like an
oreo cookie or some sort of you know, cookies, snacks,
some sort of human dessert treat, which can be very
confusing if you're going through there with like a toddler
and they're like, I want some of the obvious human
foods here, and you're like, no, no, no, those are
just for canines.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
This is funny because I was thinking before we started
recording about how dog treats. I mean, I guess pet
treats in general, but you know, dog treats are sort
of the big one that people think about. They're weird
because they're marketed as if they're designed to appeal to dogs.
So you see the commercial for them on TV or
(04:13):
I remember the ones when I was a kid, at least,
for like, do you remember the commercials for bacon strips
that are dogs. Don't no, it's not bacon, it's bacon,
you remember, Yeah, Yeah, So the whole thing in the
commercial is they're showing you how much dogs want this
treat and how good they feel when they get it.
But dogs can't buy treats. They don't have credit cards,
(04:35):
they don't have money, so they can't go get treats
for themselves. Humans do all of the buying and selling
of dog treats, so dog treats are actually marketed to
appeal not to dogs, but to humans. So the seller
has to appeal to something you might call preference by proxy.
It's kind of like advertising toys to kids, you know,
(04:56):
because kids don't usually have money to spend. I mean,
you know, things been their allowance or whatever. But usually
if you're trying to sell a toy to a kid,
you have to find a way to get the parents
or caregivers to buy the toy for the kid. Except
there's a difference between kids and dogs. At least with kids.
After a certain age, they can tell adults what they want,
(05:17):
So there is an added layer of complexity because the
purchase is gatelocked behind a secondary decision maker. You have
to appeal to the kid and then also get past
the approval of the money spender. So dogs are kind
of like that, except you kind of skip the primary
preference holder entirely because the commercial is not for the dog.
Your appeal goes straight to the buyer, and it's like, human,
(05:41):
imagine what kind of treat you would want if you
were a dog. You will almost certainly not be tasting
this yourself, So you're never gonna know. You know, you
just think, like, wow, my dog really liked that. But
in my experience, dogs like all food that you give them,
So how can you really tell.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, yeah, a kid and a dog may have an
actual desire for something, especially something to eat that is
actually kind of gross or rather gross sometimes in the
case of dogs, you know. But yeah, like you're saying
it's marketed towards the human beings, and you said that
humans will probably not taste it. But on the other hand,
humans will generally almost taste it because humans will smell
(06:22):
the dog food. And that's a whole point. Yeah, that's
a whole important aspect of dog food design. I'm to
understand is that humans do have to on some level
want to eat the dog food or the cat food,
or whatever the child may be. I guess it breaks
down a bit when you get into lizard food and
so forth, but with cats and dogs, it's certainly the case.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Well in the same way that the toy that is
most viscerally appealing to a child may not actually pass
the adult buyer test because like a lot of such
toys would be extremely dangerous or detrimental to a child's
health or something, you know, like the child wants the
bebe gun or whatever, so like you can't do that.
(06:59):
In the same I think, what is most viscerally appealing
to a dog may well not pass the human smell test.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
That's right, But again the humans have to buy it. Yeah,
so this will all be important stuff to keep in
mind as we take this journey through ultimately the deep
history of dog snacks. I'd say that this was the
big surprise for me, not knowing anything about the history
of dog treats dog biscuits, is that I really just
(07:28):
assumed that it was a fairly recent invention. Like if
you were to just quiz me on the street, I
would say like, oh, I don't know, nineteen forties, nineteen fifties,
something like that. But ultimately the roots go far deeper.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Goes way back. Are you ready for me to talk
a little bit about this paper I looked up about
the science of dog snacks.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, let's get into it, so I dug up a.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Paper that was published in twenty twenty four in Frontiers
and Animal Science called the Science of Snacks a Review
of Dog Treats to review. The authors are Bogden, Alexandru Callencia,
Sarana Diina, and Adrian Makri. And in this paper, the
authors are doing kind of a general overview of research
(08:13):
on the market for dog treats and associated trends in
pet ownership. So they cover things like nutrition and safety
in the treat sector, but also more relevant to me,
they talk a bit about changes in dog owner's psychology
and how that relates to the history of treat giving behavior.
So just to mention a few interesting things. In their
(08:34):
background section, they talk about how the population of companion animals,
including dogs, is increasing worldwide and treats account for about
fifteen percent of the total value of the US pet
food market. The pet food market has grown in recent years,
and the greatest sector of growth within it has been
snacks and treats. So pet treats are on the come
(08:56):
up and this reflects, they say, an evolving relationship between
humans and dogs in recent decades, where dog owners of
today are more likely than dog owners of previous generations
to report having deep bonds and emotional relationships with their animals.
(09:18):
And this isn't to say that you know, nobody ever
had a deep feeling of companionship with the dog before today,
but that more people report those kinds of feelings as
time goes on, and people also reflect differences across the
span of their lives, like adults now talk about their
dog being a part of the family or feeling closer
to their dogs now than they remember from when they
(09:39):
were children. So it seems to be like an increasing
cultural trend to have these deeper attachments to our companion animals.
And this deeper attachment manifests in feeding behavior, where dog
owners express their love by giving food and especially by
giving treats, because food, you know that might be viewed
(10:00):
as functional or nutritional, treats are more like a gift.
That's how you just really show your love that the
dog's love language is, you know, bagan strips or whatever.
And the authors mention one study that found that dog
owners tended to believe that not giving their dogs treats
was similar to not giving their children toys and believed
(10:21):
that dog owners believed the giving of treats to be
a necessary part of the human's relationship with a dog. Also,
you can just notice that dog owners describe taking care
of their dogs today in many of the same terms
that parents use to describe caring for their kids.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Now, you'll have to speak to this more since you
have been a dog owner in your adult life and
I have not. But treats are also an important part
of just the behavior of the dog, right, and training
to some extent the dog, right.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I mean, I think this is a shift somewhat that
treats used to be seen more as as functional rewards,
as something that you would use to to you know,
provide a motive or incentive to the dog to pay
attention and you know, repeat good behaviors during training, and
(11:14):
probably in past you know years, they would they would
use more negative incentives as well, but more and more
all the time, it seems like treats are for bonding.
They are a gift given out of love to show
the bond between the human and the animal and to
make the animal happy.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Gotcha.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
So the authors of this paper, they list they or
they at least cite another paper that mentioned six major
categories of dog treats. I love. Somebody's made the taxonomy here,
so you got biscuit, bone, chew, dental meat product, and
raw hide. And of biscuits specifically, they had a few notes.
They say, usually made from wheat flour, baked and dried
(11:55):
slowly in an oven, and it creates this crunchy texture.
A lot of dog treats on the market today advertise
dental health benefits, you know, they say, like the crunching
will you know? It is of such a texture that
it may help clean the dog's teeth, or at least
it's advertised to do that. And as of a twenty
sixteen study by White at All biscuits were the most
(12:17):
popular type of treats given to dogs in the US,
accounting for seventy seven percent of all treats. So it's
biscuits by a mile, and that they actually have multiple benefits,
not just in what people think their dogs might want
to eat, probably also in affordability compared to some other
types of treats, but also dog biscuits tend to have
a long shelf life because of their low moisture content.
(12:40):
It's kind of like hard tack that you'd give to
an army on the road.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Have you, in fact, ever in your life attempted to
take a little nibble off of a dog treat.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
No, I never have, because I did as a child.
Really we did, even without a dog.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
No. No, we had a dog when I was a kid.
But we were a kid. Okay, yeah, what is that?
A different era of dog ownership? You know, this is
the dog that lived outdoors and we lived in the country.
But I at some point just had to sort of like,
you know, at least stick my tongue to it and see, like,
is this something that a human could eat? No, they
could not, but I think you could. You can understand
(13:14):
why someone might be tempted. In part, I blame Scooby
Doo because Shaggy would eat Scooby snacks as well for
some reason, right, but also.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
For some reason, And what was that reason.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Because I don't know he liked he just liked him.
I don't know it was their incentive for solving crimes.
But I think the thing to drive home here, and
you touched on this already talking about the composition of
the dog treats is that they are bread. They are
a bread product, and bread is for humans. So like
we can't help but think we recognize it on some
(13:49):
level as being human food, even though it is so
incredibly hard that it is not, among other reasons inadvisable
that we attempt to consume it.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah, not suited to human taste. So I have never
tried a dog treat or dog food. But I was
actually just talking to my wife Rachel before we recorded today,
and it came up. We're like, did you ever try
a dog treat? And she has. She did it actually
when she was a kid. She proposed to her little sister.
(14:22):
She said, hey, will you give me fifty cents if
I eat this? Actually I don't remember. She said it
was a piece of dog kibble or a dog treat.
It was one or the other. And her sister was like, okay,
I guess I will. And so she started to eat it,
but it was so disgusting she couldn't finish it. But
she ate half of it. So she made her little
sister pay her twenty five cents. Oh wow, it seems
(14:43):
only fair.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
That one could have. Really, that could have become tied
up in legal proceedings there, like it technically didn't eat
the whole treat or the whole kibble. But no, okay,
everyone left happy.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
This is why you get everything in writing before do
deals like this, you know. So thinking about these changes
in dog treats and pet treats generally, it brought me
(15:15):
to another thing. So I was reading more generally about
how there is research on growing trends in the pet
food market that point out this increasing trend toward anthropomorphization
in dog treats. Or maybe that's not the right word.
That might imply the dog treats are taking human form.
But dog treats, instead of taking human form, taking the
(15:37):
form of human food. So you would have treats with
visual design, naming, and supposedly flavor. But who's going to know,
I guess unless you try it yourself. You know, supposedly
flavor that is said to mimic human foods, so you
can think of little doggy pizza bites. I was looking
(15:57):
some of these up before we started. You know, it's
not gonna be like human pizza. Instead, it's some kind
of biscuit like thing that looks like human pizza. I
found one that was advertising something called a Margurrita flavor,
and you know, little doggy tacos and little doggy hamburgers
and all that kind of stuff. And then so that's
(16:19):
like dog treats made out of normal dog treat stuff
shaped and made to look like human foods. And then
you can also think about these dog friendly versions of
human treats, like dog ice cream. Obviously it's a different
formula here. You know, dogs do not need that much sugar.
I mean, I guess humans don't either, but you know,
(16:40):
dogs really shouldn't need that much sugar, so you know,
you don't give them human ice cream. There's like a
special dog ice cream. And then the pop cup phenomenon.
Have you heard about this?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
No, what's a pop cup?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
I think it's like I've never gotten one of these,
but I've heard of them. It's like certain places do
drive throughs. I think maybe Starbucks would do this where
they will create it's like a whip cream type treat
in a cup that you get for your dog that's
riding in the car with you, and you give it
to them and they lick up all the cream. And
even the best thing I came across while doing this
(17:12):
was dog beer. All right, people don't feed your dog's
real beer. It's not good for dogs. They shouldn't have alcohol.
But there are fully marketed dog beers sold in cans
that look like beer cans. For example, Bush Dog Brew.
It's not beer, there's no alcohol in it. Instead, it's
(17:33):
like a meat broth thing with such you know, this
is like turkey broth with sweet potatoes in it or something.
And I think stuff like this appeals to people because
it allows you to bring the dog in. You know,
these are not just like things we consume for nutrition.
You're not going out for ice cream or drinking beer
(17:54):
for nutritional value. It's like a social ritual that you
do with friends or that you do with family. And
because people increasingly see their dogs as a friend or
as part of the family, you feel like you need
to include them in these, you know, consume consumptive social rituals.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah. Absolutely. Another big one I'm to understand is if
you have a birthday party for a dog, you want
a dog birthday cake. Like, just a mile and a
half from me, there is a dedicated dog bakery. I've
driven past it a million times, but I had to
look at their website for the first time, and sure enough,
you can just straight up birthday cakes for dogs. Dog
friendly birthday cakes, as you pointed out, but still like
(18:34):
full blown birthday cakes. And as I was researching this episode,
I was just seeing like dog biscuits and fancy dog
treats everywhere. Like I went into a coffee shop and
I was like, oh, man, there are as many dog
treats in here as there are human treats. Yeah, I
mean I assume they were human treats. Maybe those are
dog treats too, Maybe I was in the wrong establishment.
But my espresso did not taste of turkey broths, so
(18:57):
I guess it was all right.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Before our dog passed away a few years ago, you know,
he was like many dogs and that he would eat
basically anything, so it was sometimes hard to distinguish, like
what the really highly desired foods are, because it's all
highly desired unless it's I remember, I guess one time
I dropped a klipino pepper on the floor and he
picked it up in his mouth and took a bite
(19:20):
and then just kind of dropped it. So he never
wanted that. But you eat almost anything else, I mean,
whatever he found out on a walk, you know, to
discarded chicken bones, that's delicious, of course, But he really
loved carrots.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well we'll get into the really
fascinating history of the changing dietary habits of the domesticated dog.
But I guess we should again point out what is
a biscuit a dog biscuit in the modern sense. Again,
we're talking about a dry, hard, generally flower based biscuit,
(19:55):
and we should point out that we're, of course, when
we say biscuit, we're really lean more towards the the
British use of the term biscuit, which is like a cookie,
as opposed to biscuits in the US and parts of Canada,
where it is like a fluffier quick bread. Though if
you ask dogs they'll be like, give me the fluffy
(20:16):
quick bread. I will also eat that. Now, as we've
been pointing out, the dog biscuit is generally not considered
the primary food source. It's an extra, it's the dessert,
like to your point, part of the bonding process between
a contemporary dog person and their dog. It's not altogether necessary.
(20:37):
The domestic dog is a meat leaning, opportunistic omnivore. They
lean meat eater and meat scavenger. But due to their
long association with human beings, the human beings that domesticated them,
they've acquired the genes necessary for increased starch consumption. So
in other words, they've adapted to eat human scraps, human
(20:58):
table scraps, they've come to cast off bits of vegetables,
especially things like lagoons, grains, and of course that towering
human food technology bread. A reminder here, we've talked about
bread plenty of times on the show before. In the
invention of bread, if you will, bread actually predates human agriculture.
(21:19):
One hundred gatherers made bread in the neighborhood of like
fourteen thousand years ago. Dog domestication is even older than this,
dating back depending on how you're crunching the numbers, what
twenty thousand to forty thousand years. And of course this
is another reason that the idea of the invention of
the dog biscuit, or really any dedicated dog chow might
(21:39):
seem like something without anything besides twentieth century roots, right,
because these are creatures that have adapted over time to
just eat what we are eating, or eat what we
didn't eat. But along the way these treats emerge for
different reasons. But also I think it's worth acknowledging throughout
this history you can still identify some of the same reasons,
(22:02):
or you can easily imagine some version of that same
bond that a contemporary dog person has that you could
you know, you can compare to someone in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Even yeah, even if these ancient peoples had a much
more working relationship with their dogs than most modern people
do with companion dogs, I think you can still kind
of see the beginnings of this long road that ends
up with pup cups and dog beer if you look
at some of the early evidence.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, yeah, so again, domesticated dogs have had the chance
to munch down on some bread of some sort for
a very long time. But the question that really underlines
the topic here today is how long have humans been
making bread for dogs, perhaps exclusively for dogs. And we
have a few different avenues to take here. So first
(22:54):
of all, what do we have in the way of
physical evidence of domesticated dogs that had a based diet.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
That's a great question, and of course it is important
to separate the question of whend were domestic dogs consuming
a grain based diet versus looking at specifically engineered dog
bread products, because sometimes you can't tell from the evidence
exactly what the product would have been, but you can
(23:23):
infer some things about it. So I was reading about
this in a twenty twenty one article in the Journal
of World Prehistory called Dogs that ate plants Changes in
the canine diet during the Late Bronze Age and First
Iron Age in the Northeast Iberian Peninsula. This was by
a number of authors. The lead author is Sylvia Albizouri.
(23:46):
At least some of the authors here are affiliated with
the University of Barcelona. So this study looked at skeletal
remains of several dozen domestic dogs found buried at a
site in northeastern Spain called con Roquetta, which is near
the modern city of Barcelona. The konrachetasite has been inhabited
(24:07):
by different human groups since prehistoric times, and by studying
the different layers of deposition there we can learn a
lot about changes in human life in the Iberian Peninsula
over the centuries. So the bones the authors studied here
were from different time periods, ranging from the Late Bronze
Age to the First Iron Age, and this would be
(24:30):
roughly the period from thirteen hundred to five point fifty BCE.
And then by using isotopic analysis of the bones, the
authors were able to learn about what the dogs were
primarily eating, and then compare that data to other remains
found in the same strata. And this type of analysis
(24:53):
works because different food sources result in different concentrations of
stable isotopes in the bone, c isotopes like carbon thirteen
and nitrogen fifteen. And then so you look at that
and you find the ratios of different atomic nuclei in
the bones, and that can tell you what fed the
growth of the animal's body hundreds or even thousands of
(25:14):
years ago. So it's cool technique. So what they found was,
despite the fact that dogs evolved from carnivorous predators, you know,
they're evolved from mostly carnivorous wolves, these dogs living alongside
humans from the Bronze Age to the First Iron Age,
with a few exceptions, were already getting a large proportion
(25:37):
of their dietary protein from vegetarian sources, specifically grains. So,
for example, the Bronze Age dogs were eating mostly what
are called C three cereals that include cereals like wheat
and barley, so they're probably eating a lot of barley.
The later dogs seem to have been getting a greater
(25:58):
proportion of what are called seaf four grains like millet.
Now there were a few exceptions. This finding does not
mean the dogs ate zero animal protein. Later dogs tended
to show more diversity in diet than the earlier Bronze
Age dogs, which may be a result of more social
(26:18):
and labor based diversification within the human cultures there. So,
for example, there's one cluster of dogs they identified that
the authors call Group three. I think that seem to
have eaten significantly more meat than all of the other groups,
and the authors speculate that this could be because these
dogs were involved in different types of human labor assistance
(26:42):
or lifestyle. So we don't know exactly what caused this difference.
This is just me extrapolating, but imagine you've got most
of the dogs in a culture living nearby the human
settlement and eating these grain based foods. I'll talk more
about that in a second. But then you have the
other subset of dogs who are involved in helping humans
(27:04):
with hunting or with long distance travel. So this could
be part of a sort of military class, or as
companions to people involved in trade long distance travel for
trade or for gathering materials of some kind. So these
dogs would travel around and exist more maybe on hunting
and foraging, or maybe just they would be fed what
(27:25):
the humans were eating while traveling, and humans while traveling
might be subsisting more on you know, freshly hunted game
or something. So, whatever the reason, these dogs have a
more diverse diet or they're eating more meats, whereas most
dogs at can Rokatta over the ages stay close to
the human settlement and eat grain based foods. So this
(27:45):
dog you know, almost vegetarianism or semi vegetarianism appears to
be not a result of dogs foraging for human scraps
and all that's left over as grains, but instead, the
authors argue it's evidence of a deliberate feeding regime controlled
by humans. And as evidence of this, the authors point
(28:09):
to consistency in the values of these nutritional inputs, which
they interpret to mean that humans were preparing their dog's food. So,
when we think about the evolution of domestic dogs from
their wild ancestors, sometimes this dietary adaptation of dogs, you
(28:30):
know that coming from a carnivorous evolutionary heritage and moving
into a more flexible omnivorous diet. Sometimes this is presented
as a pure accident of evolution that nobody planned, you know,
like proto dog. The story often goes that proto dogs
ate scraps leftover from human hunter gatherers, and the ones
(28:53):
that were behaviorally more compatible with proximity to humans and
metabolically more coll a rent of human food, these would
have a survival advantage, and they began to branch off
from their wild ancestors. But at least within the prehistoric
Bronze Age Iberian setting. Here, the exposure to an omnivorous
(29:15):
diet is no longer an accident. At this point. It's
not just that the dogs are eating whatever's around and
that's forcing them to adapt to a more omnivorous diet,
because the dogs don't seem to be just getting leftovers
of whatever the humans happened to be eating. The humans
seem to have been fully feeding the dogs a deliberate
grain heavy diet even when the humans were eating other things.
(29:39):
And now that's interesting, why would they do that? While
the authors talk about how, you know, these were not pets,
obviously they were working dogs, so they'd be involved in
all kinds of tasks like animal herding would be a
big thing, or you know, sometimes they were used for
moving loads, you know, moving loads across the ground on
sledges of some kind, whatever the they're doing. You don't
(30:01):
want your working dogs to be distracted from their work
trying to run off and forage for food because they're hungry.
So it kind of makes sense to stuff them with
calorie dense, abundant, grain based foods so they have plenty
of energy and they're not tempted to stray from tasks
to go get a bite to eat.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, especially if that bite to eat might be the
animals they're hurting.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, even worse. Yeah, So I don't know. Interesting in
this context that you go back three thousand years ago
in the Iberian Peninsula and people are feeding their dogs.
It's not necessarily going to be milk bones, but they're
feeding them some kind of grain based food as a
core staple of their diet and doing so deliberately.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah. Yeah, really fascinating. Again, the roots here digging far
deeper into the past than I anticipated. Now at this point,
we're going to fast forward a bit and we're going
(31:08):
to we're going to move to the ancient Romans. Generally,
we're gonna be looking at the imperial era here. First,
I thought we might consider this line from the Roman
poet Juvenile from his second century CE work Satire five.
I shall read it here for you is a dinner
worth all the insults with which you have to pay
(31:30):
for It is your hunger so importunate. That means troublesomely urgent,
when it might, with greater dignity be shivering where you
are and munching dirty scraps of dog's bread.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
So juvenile? Is Chriswell? Am I getting that right?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah? Chriswell predicts, Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Here's predicting in
a way, right, talking about dog bread a Pannis Canarius.
So what is he talking about here? Will? I had
to dig into this a little bit more. And what
he's to here is at once actually bread for dogs,
but also maybe not quite bread cooked just for dogs.
(32:08):
According to Consuelo Manetta in Our Daily Bread in Italy,
it's meaning in the Roman period and today this is
a material culture of twenty sixteen. Bread making technologies reached
a high point of production during the Roman Imperial period,
so there were a great many different bread products, including
different breads for soldiers and sailors, such as you know,
(32:28):
hard tack like product, high quality breads, breads with clay
added and also bread for dogs.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I love the bread with clay added.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't. I didn't have time to follow
that tangent. But I mean, you know, things have been
added to bread throughout history to sort of bulk it up,
to make up for lack of ingredients and so forth.
So the general idea, though here alluded to by Juvenal,
is that there were different types of due to where
(33:01):
they stood in the bread making process and then what
social classes were given to dine on them. Dog bread
was the lowest quality bread possible made as a byproduct,
you know, from the scraps that were left over from
the milling process, so namely brand and husks, and was
generally considered suitable only for dogs and was apparently fed
(33:24):
to dogs. Like it's not just a situation where it's like, oh,
only a dog could eat that, but humans do. Like
this was also bread that was given expressly to dogs.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
That sounds like health food now, right, wouldn't this be
high fiber?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah? Yeah, and that that is that's where we're going
with this. Yeah, really, this is where we come back
to this idea of like working dogs deserving a working
dog's meal. But then also it gets into very there
are various class attributes to it as well. So here's
a quote from another work. This is from Marcus Tarentius
(33:57):
Varro's on Agriculture, and the author writes a lot about
the upkeep of a farm and all the stuff that
goes into it, talks a good bit about dogs working dogs,
and at one point writes quote, the food of dogs
is more like that of man than that of sheep.
They eat scraps of meat and bones, not grass and leaves.
But then he later says you should also feed them
(34:20):
barley bread, but not without soaking it in milk, for
when they have become accustomed to eating that kind of food,
they will not soon stray from the flock.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
M Okay, So you give the dog good food to eat,
yummy food, bread soaked in milk, it's not gonna run away.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Right right, And it's not going to bite your flock
and so forth. And the bread he's advising to be
soaked in milk would be the aforementioned dog bread. Now
another take on bread and dogs in the Roman world.
I was reading in Around the Roman Table, Food and
Feasting in Ancient Rome. This is by Patrick Fass. He
points out that when you were having like a fancy,
(34:59):
upper class theatrical Roman dinner. After the main course, like
before dessert, bread is passed around for guests to wipe
their mouths and hands, and then given to the dogs
quote who were dedicated to Hecate, the goddess of night
and witchcraft. So bread here used just as like a
(35:20):
precursor to the napkin or a napkin substitute, and then
given to the dogs, who will gladly eat it because
it is bread, and it also maybe has a little
extra fun flavoring based on whatever was on your hands
and on your mouth.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
This is interesting because the use of bread as napkins here,
which I don't think I was aware of this before,
but it reminds me of the widespread use of bread
products as essentially plates or other you know what we
would use plates for today. You know the idea of
the trencher that you'd eat food out of a big
piece of stale bread, and then afterwards you might throw
that bread to the dogs or maybe to the poor
(35:55):
in some contexts.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, yeah, And in this case especially the bread that
you're using is of course maybe not ideal for human consumption,
but the dogs are game. I was reading Bread and
Bones Feeding Roman Dogs published in Classical World twenty twenty
one by Sarah M. Harvey, and she gets into a
good bit of this, and some of her key points
are that, first of all, providing a plan diet to
(36:19):
your dog, generally like a working dog, a hunting dog,
a guard dog, a sheep dog was a status symbol.
Like here, I am an elite owner of an elite dog,
and it's an extension of my place in society that
I give my dog what is considered a proper diet,
the kind of diet that is written about. It works
(36:40):
like on agriculture, so my dog is where well cared for,
well fed, and fed on a regular schedule. That's something
that she stresses as well. Meanwhile, that doesn't mean every
dog in the Roman Imperial Roman world is eating like
this common dogs. They're going to maybe be fed more
on table scraps. But dog bread was thought to be ideal,
(37:04):
especially again for working dogs, dogs that need a lot
of energy to do whatever they're doing. Dogs that you
want to look very healthy and robust in the case
of a guard dog, but also but not like fat
and lazy. You want the dog to be a little
bit intimidating. I guess, so the ideal was a grain
heavy diet, but she points out that evidence suggests that
(37:25):
dog diets at the time had a high level of
animal protein, and this might have been due in part
to availability, so you know, you would still have meat
on hand post hunt, post butchery activities, but also it
might have been just the place where experience and tradition
meet literary ideals. So there's there's what was recommended and
(37:47):
what was you know, the ideal dog meal. But then
in reality there's still going to be a certain amount
of feeding the scraps to the dogs, and it's going
to be different depending on, you know, what level of society. Now,
another source that I looked at was a melting pot
of Roman dogs north of the Alps with high phenotypic
and genetic diversity and similar diets by Granado at All.
(38:10):
This was in scientific reports from twenty twenty three and
it indicates that there are quote numerous archaeological, epigraphic and
literary evidence for dog food in the Roman Empire that
show a large proportion of vegetable components cereals, bread made
of barley, wheat or spelt, and a minor component of meat, bones, milk,
(38:32):
and whey. But they also point out it is known
that the Romans were feeding their dogs differently according to
a number of factors, including function and age, but most
likely the majority of Roman dogs were relying primarily on
table scraps. So again, there's the ideal, and there's like
sort of the high class, you know, elite diet for
(38:53):
the dogs, and then there's what is maybe the reality
just throughout dog owning culture at the time in the area.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
But it sounds to me like you're saying that even
in the Roman context, while we did have these prescriptions
for certain ways to prepare grain based or bread products
for dogs that were thought of as ideal, these would
not be mass produced dog biscuits like we think of today.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
This would be just a byproduct of the breadmaking industry
that was at large in the area at the time. Yeah,
to really find the origin of like the modern industrial
specified dog biscuit, we have a very specific origin story,
which is always nice, especially for covering on a show,
(39:39):
and it's a Victorian innovation. Generally, most sources point to
a singular Victorian innovator, and that is James Spratt. He
was a British born American inventor and entrepreneur, and generally,
from what I was reading, just a great salesman, great marketer.
And he was at the time he was traveling a
(40:00):
back and forth between America and England at the time,
selling his own patented lightning rods. And the story goes
that he was in he was in England, he was,
you know, at the docks, and he saw some dogs
eating some hardtack. I guess some sailors gave them some
of this, you know, the hard bits of bread that
(40:23):
are meant for rations. The dogs were loving it, and
he had this epiphany, I should make bread just for
dogs and market it as such, And in eighteen sixty
he started doing it. The product Sprats Meat fibrine dog Cake,
with the target audience being English sporting dogs, or rather
(40:44):
the owners of fine English sporting dogs. So already it's
fascinating how that lines up with so many different things
we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, so appealing to the owners who think that their
dog is special and that this product will cater to
the specialness of their animal.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yes, absolutely, yeah, it is an elite, an elite and
specialized diet for special dogs. And there's prestige tied up
into it and everything. So I was reading an article
about this from the Hagley Museum and Library, and they
point out that that Spratt was just a masterful marketer
on this, successfully selling a product that, to be clear,
(41:23):
people didn't actually need, like the dogs, the dogs.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
That people weren't like, what am I going to feed
my dog?
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Right? Like, yeah, we'd figured. I'm not saying that dogs
necessarily had the best diet in all cases, but a
certain equilibrium had been attained, and so the dogs at
the time, they say, were probably eating mostly take table scraps.
It seemed to work out. But he pushed this really hard,
like he was traveling around presenting this. At the eighteen
(41:50):
seventy six Centennial Exhibition in the US, he presented that
he sold it to the American Kennel Club and reportedly
introduced the idea there were appropriate foods for different dog
life stages. Now, I think maybe the Romans had some
version of this as well, And I think in general,
if you were feeding a very old dog as opposed
(42:11):
to a young dog, you might at some point realize, well,
maybe they do need something different, at least structurally. But yeah,
the idea is that he like just really dug into this,
and it was like, Yeah, there's a market for this,
and then I can expand that market and I can
go after different sorts of clientele. Now you can look
up there's all there. You know, this is an age
(42:33):
from which we have a number of surviving advertisements. You
can find images of what these biscuits looked like. I
recommend them. I mean, I recommend checking out the advertisements. Again,
I cannot speak for the dog cakes, the historic dog cakes,
but you can look up images of them, and they
did not look like bones. They looked more like a biscuit,
you know, like an English biscuit, like some sort of
(42:54):
a big square cookie type thing.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I bet the dogs didn't mind.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
No, no, they present Probably they love them. But more
to the point, the humans that had the dogs loved them. Now,
when it comes to the dog bone shape, like the
(43:20):
popularity of that that also seems to have a specific
origin story, or at least there's one that's the moment
that's fairly popular. And I was reading about this in
an article by Michael Waters, an Atlas Obscura article titled
how an organic chemist invented the bone shaped dog treat
from twenty seventeen and it takes us to nineteen oh
seven and organic chemist Carlton ellis an American inventor who
(43:44):
was also involved in the creation of both margarine and polyester.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Two of my favorite things.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Yeah yeah, this one isn't I guess mentioned as much,
but like I think margarine and polyester his contributions. They
are a little more famous. But he was supposedly called
in to help a local slaughterhouse with its waist milk
problem and came up with a dog biscuit byproduct based
on said waste. The problem dogs didn't really want to
(44:12):
eat them when they started producing these things prototypes presenting
them to the dogs, and the story goes that on
a whim they tried shaping them like a bone, and well,
suddenly the dogs love them. The milk bone was born
and was purchased by Nibisco in nineteen thirty one, promoted
as a dessert for dogs.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
I'm skeptical at several levels. Mean, the dogs didn't want them.
As I've said before, in my experience, most dogs are
not very picky. I mean, they'll eat almost anything, and
so I don't know what would have to be wrong
with it for them not to want to eat it.
But then also so they didn't change the taste, they
just changed the shape, and then the dogs wanted them.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
That is the story.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Now, color me skeptically.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, yeah, I think they're or maybe a few things
going on here. First of all, if this were an
embellishment of the origin of a particular invention, it would
not be the first. I mean, sometimes invention stories are
tweaked a little bit to give it a little more
of a story shape. Suddenly something that is just the
you know, the byproduct of just trying different things, becomes
(45:18):
inspiration from a dream and so forth. So it's possible
that this is just a more fun version of what
actually happened. It's also been pointed out that it could
be the novelty factor they have. You know, who knows
how many There may be more data on this out there,
and I just didn't run across it, you know, however
(45:38):
many dogs we had. They're being presented with different examples
of the biscuit, and then here's one that's shaped like
a bone. It could just be that it's a novel shape.
Dogs are curious and intelligent. They were like, what is this?
It looks different from the others, and then they were like, wow,
he loves it. He loves the dog shape. We're going
with that.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
You mean the bone shape?
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, I'm sorry. Not the dogs that would be though,
that would also make sense. That's the kind of thing
that that humans would go for as well. He knew
that it was shaped like himself, and so he ate it.
He knew it was for him that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
But because you are what you eat, it meant he
wanted to become, come into himself and become the dog
he always dreamed.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
He could be. Yeah, canine philosophy one on one. But
but no, I think we could all acknowledge that, like
the true genius of this is that it appealed to
the humans. Like the treat is shaped like a bone.
Dogs need a bone, dogs want to bone, And this
is something that is this is an industrial product, but
then it is shaped like this natural thing. I mean,
(46:39):
the same thing works on us, right, I mean there
are products where we take the mag that's an example,
or I don't know, like even things that don't make
a lot of sense, like a little you know, sort
of like cheese snack shape it like a goldfish. Suddenly
it's exciting suddenly it has this natural world component and
it feel like something that you would of course want
(47:02):
to eat and not something that you would just like,
you know, pelt other children with.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
I remember vividly when I was a young child getting
really excited for a super Mario shaped ice cream treat. Yeah,
like Mario head, And I think, can this be true?
Like his nose was a gumball. I don't know, did
that come from a dream? That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
You don't follow gum Maybe so I mean they I mean, yeah,
I mean I loved there were some ice pops when
I was a kid that were shaped like the different
They weren't like it wasn't a universal monster's official product,
but they was like they were shaped like a mummy
and a vampire and so forth, And of course I
loved that. Now, like even today, it's like you you know,
you see a SpongeBob SquarePants ice ice cream pop. You know,
(47:51):
the taste does not I'm assuming the taste profile is
not something I would dig. But you can tell my
children go crazy for it because we have taken this
you know, highly processed thing and made it look like
a beloved character.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Yeah, my daughter can absolutely taste that this cracker is
shaped like mickey. Yeah, it's just mickey. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
So so again, any way you cut it, though, I think
it comes down to a brilliant marketing on the part
of the milk bone architects here, and it's one that's
still with us. It just, I don't know, it just
feels right. As a non dog owner, there's just I
can say that it just feels right that a dog
should have a treat that is shaped like a bone.
(48:30):
It's almost like, on some level we realize that maybe,
you know, maybe in a way, the dog shouldn't be
eating a highly industrial bread product.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Yeah, we feel guilty about their level of domestication, the
fact that we're feeding them something that doesn't seem like
part of their natural diet. They should be running down
an elk and you know process you're just chewing through
its corpse. But we can leave he ate some of
that feeling of guilt by giving them this highly processed
(49:04):
grain based or milk protein product that is, you know,
shaped like a like the part of a dead animal
that they really desire.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
I think we should lean into this more that we
should go beyond the bone. We should have it shaped
like elk skulls, you know, you know, big chunks of
rib and so forth. Someone has probably already done this.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
Guts like freets that are shaped like guts and organs.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Three day old rotting guts, you know, something the dog
would really want to get into.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
You know, really, the milk bone makes a lot more
sense than the micrib, because dogs, given the opportunity, a
lot of dogs will eat bones. They'll crack them open,
and you know they'll get the swallow pieces of them.
Humans don't usually eat bones, I think. Is so I
don't know, the mic rib is actually more mysterious.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
M Yeah, now, you know, I have to have to
acknowledge here. I am. I'm a vegetarian, so I eat
a lot of faux meats, and a lot of the
faux meat experience is take plant, make plant feel and
taste and look like meat. So I mean it's like
I'm I'm doing the same thing to myself.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
As someone in a weird middle category who I do
actually eat meat, but I also sometimes eat you know,
imitation meats, and I find that the visual appearance actually
makes a significant difference in the eating experience. Yeah, yeah,
it's you know, you hear people talk about in food
science that that that site is, you know, a really
(50:34):
important part of the eating experience, and sometimes you're inclined
to doubt that, but I don't know, it's it's true.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Like sometimes it's the only way you can go after it.
Take imitation bacon for example, Listeners, perhaps I'm wrong, Perhaps
there is a really good imitation bacon non the meat
bacon bacon option. In my experience, however, no such thing exists.
But the best we can do is we can make
it look like bacon, and we can make it kind
(51:02):
of like crisp like bacon in the same way, like
we can go after the tactile experience and the visual
experience of the bacon and at least try and get
that part, even if the flavor profile is not quite
there yet.
Speaker 3 (51:15):
How that compares to the bacon strips unclear.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Now, if you're just discovering stuff to blow your mind,
we just want to remind you that we've been an
audio podcast for a long time at this point, and
you can find a full archive of the episodes we've
done over the years wherever you get your podcasts. Just
look for stuff to blow your mind, and once you've
found us, whatever your favorite platform is just rate review,
subscribe all of that. It really helps us out.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Yeah, most of all. Please obviously you know, do what
you want to do, but if you feel like subscribing,
that would be great. It would mean a lot to us.
We would love it, you know, so huge, thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
(52:04):
for the future, or just to say hello let us
know how you found out about the show, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.