The Invention of Dog Biscuits

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.

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 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.

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, 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, 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, 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, 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.

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.

something like that. But ultimately the roots go far deeper.

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 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 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.

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

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 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 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.

They are a gift given out of love to show the bond between the human and the animal and to make the animal happy.

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 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. It's kind of like hard tack that you'd give to an army on the road.

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.

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 only fair.

But dog treats, instead of taking human form, taking the 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 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 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, 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?

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 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 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.

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 I guess it was all right.

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.

a biscuit a dog biscuit in the modern sense. Again, we're talking about a dry, hard, generally flower based biscuit, 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

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. 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 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.

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 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, 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.

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. 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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.

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.

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, hard tack like product, high quality breads, breads with clay added and also bread for dogs.

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 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.

a quote from another work. This is from Marcus Tarentius 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 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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

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.

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,

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 the dogs, and then there's what is maybe the reality just throughout dog owning culture at the time in the area.

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 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 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

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.

like he was traveling around presenting this. At the eighteen 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 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 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 a big square cookie type thing.

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 was also involved in the creation of both margarine and polyester.

on said waste. The problem dogs didn't really want to 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.

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 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.

then it is shaped like this natural thing. I mean, 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 to eat and not something that you would just like, you know, pelt other children with.

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.

But the best we can do is we can make it look like bacon, and we can make it kind 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.