Feeding puppies adult food.
In the 1940s and 1950s there was an economic value to growing an animal as fast as you possibly could. In fact, at fairs, they would give awards to cows and pigs that grew faster and bigger than all the other cows and pigs.
So, when the animal feed manufacturers came out to produce a dog food that people could produce from a bag instead of scraps off the table, they manufactured foods that would cause the dogs to grow quickly, and healthy. Robust and vital. And everything was good.
Over time, animal started showing up with some problems though. Especially some “genetic” bone and joint disorders. Lots of breeders started having problems with bone and cartilage growth disorders.
They try to breed that out of the lines by stopping breeding parents of dogs that had those joint problems.
Veterinarians tried to help, with research that showed (one year) that if you reduce the vitamin C in the diet it would lower the incidence of these joint problems.
A year or two later they decided that cutting out some of the excess calcium would help.
But these problems continued on abated. Year after year they would cut out a different ingredient to figure out which item in the food was causing these joint problems to be worse
Finally somebody decided to try to feed puppies a diet that provided them with moderate growth rate and most of these joint problems stopped!
Veterinarians who had long asserted that it was poor breeding, and had annually strode forward with the solution to the problem by a limiting *one* or another ingredient were suddenly revealed as not knowing everything. And if you think about it, it should have been evident:
When a puppy is born, it gets an extremely high plane of nutrition for four weeks while it is drinking milk, but then for the remainder of its growth phase it’s getting the *same nutrition the parents are*. The same chipmunk or sparrow except it’s usually pre-chewed by the mom.
It was the philosophy spawned back in the early 40s at farm fairs that said these animals needed to grow faster and have more nutrition.
But puppy food was selling well and it’s what people reach for when they go to the grocery store; the market was made! … so what it was a manufacturer to do?
If you stopped selling puppy food, you would lose an enormous marketshare because most people do not know that puppy food is no longer really necessary.
They put adult food in a bag and said that it was “puppy food for large breed dogs”.
Still, the trickle-down of knowledge and facts has not fully gripped the breeder community, far be it for science or facts to interfere with the processes that they agree upon in their various forums online.
So it may be a while before they begin to feed their puppies appropriately.
In fairness, they are not hurting anything by feeding over-rich diets, and diets with excessive amounts of protein and phosphorus and mineral and balances. How could breeders possibly know what to feed, since they are smarter than actual scientists?
If you want to know whether or not a breeder is feeding inappropriately, look at the toenails of the puppies, if the puppies have white flecks in their toenails that you can see, (that would be the case in puppies with white or pink nails), if you see the little white flecks in their toenails it is an indicator that there are significant defects in the formulation of the diets with regard to minerals such as calcium and phosphorus also protein levels.
You should also be aware that one of the reasons that breeders feed certain foods is because manufacturers *give* them the food for free. One food in particular, (and I consider this brilliant on their part), gave every registered breeder in the United States all of their food for the kennels. For free. I’m sure it was a losing proposition for a while, but eventually the marketing that: “Every breeder in America is feeding our food” and “Our food is the top breeders choice”, and “breeders wouldn’t accept anything less” etc. all paid off, and the diet became preeminent and remains that way.
Popularity having nothing to do with politics or the fact that It is cheap, artificially popular, and extremely inexpensive to the breeder, and now that it is popular they are making a ton of money selling it to people who buy their puppies.