Difference Between Dog Food And Dog Treats
The first step towards making smart decisions about dog treats is to understand what makes them different from dog food. What this mostly boils down to is what a manufacturer was going for when they made the treat and what they ended up putting on the label.
The Federal Drug Administration, or FDA, is responsible for regulating pet food in the United States. The FDA holds pet food manufacturers to many of the same standards that they hold manufacturers of human products to.
Some of these overlapping rules are ensuring that all pet foods, including treats, are:
The FDA establishes the standards and it is up to states and the federal government to ensure that producers are following the necessary food safety guidelines.
However, the FDA’s regulations are the bare minimum of acceptable. That’s not just my opinion, most states agree.
Most states have modeled their rules on dog food safety based on a model provided by the Association of American Feed Control Officials, or AAFCO.
AAFCO is not a regulatory body like the FDA. It is a voluntary membership association of various agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. Its members, among other responsibilities, have produced an official publication that offers more detailed and strict guidance has regulating the production of dog foods and treats.
In order to be sold as “dog food,” AAFCO must deem that the food is “complete and balanced.”
If the product does not meet all of their standards to be labeled a “complete and balanced” dog food, then it cannot be marketed as “food.”
If it’s still an acceptable product for your dog to eat but simply doesn’t contain all of the necessary ingredients to make up 100% of your dog’s diet, then it will be labeled as “Intended for intermittent or supplemental feeding only” – which is what most dog treats are.
The distinction between “complete and balanced” and “intermittent/supplemental” is what separates dog “food” from dog “treats,” and is what allows the manufacturers of dog treats to make products that are so much tastier than food.
On the back of your dog’s bag of food, you should see the words “complete and balanced” printed there. In order for your dog’s food to receive that label, it must have met the standards outlined by AAFCO to be dog “food.”
Earning this label is a very big deal. What they are saying is that the product has the correct chemical makeup to account for 100% of your dog’s diet. Every day, every meal, forever, your dog could eat this food and live a long, healthy life.
AAFCO has two basic profiles, each profile with a different set of standards manufacturers have to meet in order to be called complete and balanced. These two profiles are:
These two groups have specific nutritional needs and as such, they have two different profiles regulating the standards for each one.
These standards are granular. Not only are all minerals, vitamins, proteins, and carbohydrates accounted for but also moisture content acid levels.
Basically, every aspect of the food is scrutinized to ensure that it is healthy and everything is accounted for and in the correct amount to make up 100% of your dog’s diet.
On the back of a bag of dog treats, you may see this label: The product is intended for intermittent or supplemental use only.
Or something else to that effect.
This label indicates that the product you’re feeding your dog is safe to eat as determined by the FDA, but is not sufficient to make up 100% of your dog’s diet.
Products with this label are still considered safe but they do not have all of the necessary vitamins and minerals present to sustain her dog 100%.
You may also see this label on some products still sold as dog food.
Some raw foods are labeled this way because they are not processed in a way that AAFCO has teamed safe or wholly nutritional.
Or some dogs have medical conditions that require them to eat certain diets that may not be deemed complete and balanced by AAFCO. For example, some low-protein dog food formulas exist to help prevent the buildup of kidney and bladder stones in dogs.
This food is often prescribed by a veterinarian, but it is labeled as a supplement because it does not have the recommended amount of protein as determined by AAFCO.
If your food has this intermittent or supplementary label on it, you should consult with your vet before you continue allowing it to make up 100% of your dog’s food.
But in general, this label is what separates dog food from dog treats.
Why Do Dog Treats Taste Better Than Dog Food?
The simple fact that dog treats are not required to cram in every single vitamin and mineral that your dog needs to survive allows manufacturers a lot more freedom to make more interesting, tasty flavored, and textured snacks.
Treats come in a huge variety of flavors, shapes, sizes, textures, smells, and ingredients. In general, store-bought dog treats have more fat, carbohydrates, and oils than their regular dog food counterparts.
This makes them more flavorful and satisfying than the normally very healthy dog foods that your dog is used to.
The variety itself may be enough to get your dog excited. After all, if you ate the exact same food for every meal every day, you’d probably go crazy for a carrot every now and then too.
#2: The dog food you give doesn’t contain enough nutrition
Some dog foods consist of byproducts and a lot of filler. Examples of byproducts and fillers are:
That’s why dogs who eat such food, can get easily excited at the sight of a treat. Foods like that are also the reason why some dog parents opt for home-made dog food. They give their beloved dog children food such as:
Dog parents who do this report that their dogs aren’t keen on treats. Simple because they get all the nourishment they need from the variety of food they receive regularly.
The Science of DOGS
You want your dog to love you the best, so you sneak her the occasional scrap under the table (when no one else is looking).
Sure she loves it, but new research suggests theres something Fifi craves even more. According to a new study conducted in Sweden, dogs get more excited when they work to earn their treats.Advertisement
For the study, researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala trained 12 beagles to perform a variety of tasks, which included pressing levers, pushing objects, and playing a key on a toy piano.
A week later, each dog was brought to a testing room and was presented with one of these tasks again. If a dog performed a task successfully within five minutes, she was given one of three rewards: food, human contact, or contact with another dog.
Then a “control dog,” who had not been trained to perform the task, was brought into the testing room and rewarded after a certain amount of time regardless of what she did in the room.
What did the researchers find? The dogs who were rewarded for performing tasks were more active and wagged their tails more than the dogs who received rewards at random, the researchers said. Hardly surprising, the dogs were most excited for food.Advertisement
“The experimental animals in our study were excited not only by the expectation of a reward, but also about realizing that they themselves could control their access to the reward,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing the study, published in the journal Animal Cognition.
The dogs who had no control over when they would get a treat chewed more on the devices in the testing room, which the researchers interpreted as “signs of frustration… in response to the unpredictability of the situation.”
What explains the effect? The researchers theorize that dogs enjoy learning new things because evolution favored that tendency — previous research showed that emotional arousal boosts learning and memory, and thus survival.
“These results support the idea that opportunities to solve problems, make decisions, and exercise cognitive skills are important to an animal’s emotional experiences and ultimately, its welfare,” the researchers wrote.
So next time you want to sneak Fifi that scrap, make her work a little for it first.