Dogs, Cats, and….Vegetables?
Video Courtesy of Aleks Mikic
We humans love to theorize this, and we love to project our own wants and needs onto our animals. Both of these propensities are a disservice to nature, to the other species, and to our own intelligence. There will be no theory in this video, I will not attempt to convince you one way or the other.
Instead, I will show you what it’s like to be in their skin, or, more precisely, in their mouth. I would like you to take a bite of a vegetable, such as a carrot, a celery, a cucumber, something you plan to give to your dog or a cat, and observe your mouth as you’re chewing it. You will notice a small, but distinct rounded motion of your lower jaw. You will notice how easily your tongue can position the food in between your molars so it can be pressed, grounded, juice is extracted because your molars are flat, remember?
Notice how it feels.
Now you’re going to do it the carnivore way, well almost, because you do get to keep your flat molars.
Take another bite, but this time, do not allow any extra motion over your lower jaw. It can only open and close, nothing more. Your tongue has also lost its dexterity. It can protrude and retreat, but it cannot reposition the food. Have you noticed dogs tossing their head while eating, including this beautiful wolf in the video? Now you know why – there is no other way to reposition the food.
Add your imagination and picture your molars as sharp. So now, even if you got lucky to have that bite in between them, you still couldn’t chew it.
Now do you understand?
Do you understand?
It is not possible that any species would be intended to eat any kind of food for which it is not equipped. A cow is meant to eat vegetation, so her jaw moves side to side, and her teeth are flat. A squirrel is meant to cut through the tough shells, so her jaw moves back and forth, and her incisors continually grow.
A human can handle all sorts of food with a fully mobile lower jaw, but a carnivore is only meant to bite, rip, crush, and swallow many times.
What is healthy for one species is a poison for another. It is our duty as animal owners to respect and nurture the given nature of the animals we choose to live with.
So now, anytime someone tells you the dogs and cats have changed their nature because they have lived with us for so long, you can respond with, “So now their jaw moves side to side?” That is really all you need to know.