A Dutch company called
Energique claims to have developed a type of dog food that has the pleasant side effect of drastically reducing what comes out the other end. Basically, the company claims that if you feed your dog this stuff, your dog will barely poop at all:
Energique has also been working on the many complaints about dog excrement. With the body absorbing almost 90% of the food intake, only 10% is excreted. On the entire dog population, that saves 55 million kilograms of dog excrement in the Netherlands alone.
An
Ananova article gives some more details: "They claim remaining 10% comes out the other end as a smell-free dry pellet that can be picked up by hand in a tissue. According to research by the University of Utrecht, a dog will normally need to go three times a day, but with Energique it only needs to go once a week."
This strikes me as a very odd claim. If true, could it possibly be healthy for the dog? I would imagine that the total surface area of a food has a lot to do with how much of it can get digested. For instance, a powder would probably get digested more fully than a chunk of meat. But is the one necessarily healthier than the other, just because more of it is getting digested?
The amount of poop a dog produces would almost seem to be a function of
how much it eats. Surely if you feed your dog tons of this Energique food, it's still going to excrete most of it.
Comments
Zero fiber (zero ash) food is plausible, but no, it would not be healthy, and a big part of what is excreted is not "used food" in any case but true excretion in the form of bile acids, for instance. It's a hoax or just a scam.
The only people I could see feeding dogs this stuff would be cat lovers 😉
Spend some time on that site over the course of a few days and you'll see a LOT of stories that are extremely non-credible.
Not necessarily good for the dog (unless you're one of the many people who overfeed their pets), but it would produce a lot less feces.
For the sake of Dutch dogs, though, it hope this whole thing is a hoax. Like almost all other vertebrates, dogs need fiber in their diet, and, as Carl says, excrement is necessary to get rid of normal waste products, not just undigested food.
But nevertheless,I suppose both humans and dog needs to crap,we need the fibres and cellulose to clean out the intestines.
It was gross. When I got rid of her later...I let the new family know she HAD to eat THIS food, and only this food. They didn't believe me at first either.
Whereas a food with easily digestible food will often result in less poop.