dog nutrition in the "olden" days

Where did they get the horsemeat?  I remember a dogfood called "Red Heart" that my dad suspected was horsemeat.  It made our dog puke.

From what I could tell, it was horsemeat from the butcher. I'll have to pull that book out and see if I can find that part. As I recall, Henry's mom told him to feed the dog so he got a package of horsemeat from the refrigerator and cut it up to feed Ribsy. (He hated this chore). Henry was mad at Ribsy for not eating the fancy canned food that dogs were supposed to love. He had to talk his mother into purchasing this "extravagance"

Almost the same thing.  I fed our cat Pippi lots of fresh caught, baked fish and she scarfed it down.  But let me put some canned or dry that was suppose to fish and she wouldn't touch it.  She would eat canned tuna, salmon or mackeral (human, not cat food) just not the cat food 'canned fish formula's.'  It made me wonder just how much fish was really in it.

The only good thing about the "good old days"  for dogs, is that Mom was usually home during the day and kids were not all wrapped up in soccer, gymnastics and play dates so that they would interact with the family dog. 

However, if the dog had mammery tumors, hit by a car, pyrometria (infection from not being spayed),etc., it was by by pooch.  Not very many people would bother putting their money into treatment for a dog.

Scary to think that you could get horse meat from a butcher [&:].

Sorry, folks - I can't buy that dogs from the "good old days" had it so good.  For that matter, people either. 

I could go back to the meat and potatoe days before doritos and soda, but I wouldn't want anything else about the "good old days"

and I couldn't give up my easy access to chocolate and ice cream either. Even eating kibble, I'm pretty sure my dogs eat 10 times healtheir than I do, so therefore feeding them from MY table would be step backwards.

I just thought it was interesting, with the popularity of raw feeding, that is was commonplace 50 years ago. Now, we talk about how healthy and natural it is, but back then it was just a way to cheaply fill their tummy.

Scary to think that you could get horse meat from a butcher .

Personally, I hate to see horses slaughtered, but you can't easily have them cremated or easily have them buried in the backyard. All I ask is that the slaughter be done humanely. My sister's horse was hit by a car when she walked across the fence after the snow drifted and froze over it. She couldn't really dig a grave large enough bury a horse in February. She had to PAY the rendering truck to pick her up. She was heartbroken, but improperly disposing of a dead animal is illegal. There are some big problems in areas where horse slaughter is limited. Like what do you do with all of the lame or unwanted horses? I saw a bit of a news show where they banned horse slaughter in an area. There were old & lame horses just being let loose into the countryside because the owners couldn't afford to feed them and nobody would buy them. The last option is euthanasia by a vet, but how you do you dispose of a dead horse when you live in a county that says it's illegal to bury livestock and rendering plants refuse to take them? And zoos would have a harder time, too. Horse meat is a staple for their big cats.

The dogs that were getting raw meat, whether it was horse meat or not,  were lucky. I would think that most country dogs were luckier than city dogs.   Most household dogs were being fed table scraps and stuff that usually would go into the garbage.  The canned stuff was horrible, too.  The breeders and the sport dog people were consciously trying to feed their dogs nutriciously, but most people looked upon their efforts as extreme.