Random thought of the day: what did pets get fed in those halcyon days before pet stores (and pet foods) existed?
I spend an ungodly amount of money on high quality, nutritionally balanced diets for my dogs and cats. I’m pretty sure that they eat better, if more boringly, than I do. I do know that homecooking your pet food is a recent fad. I haven’t researched it, but my understanding is that those are also fairly carefully calculated, to make sure that the pets get all of the essential nutrients needed.
I’m pretty sure that these options weren’t available in, say, Louis XVI’s court, though pampered lapdogs did. (Well, homecooking did, but the nutritional knowledge didn’t.) People living from hand to mouth in the Dark Ages still kept working dogs and mousers, but they probably didn’t have a lot of food to spare.
Prepared dog food wasn’t something that we could afford in my early youth. The dogs got fed table scraps, the large bones from meats and anything they could scrounge or catch.
Sheep farmers would keep a mob of killers handy for dog food. Killers are old sheep, too rank tasting for most people to eat, but do dogs have taste? Anyway, as required, a sheep would be killed and cooked up (law requires sheep meat to be cooked for dog food). As much as he enjoyed slitting a sheep’s throat, Dad couldn’t be bothered with this, so it was dog biscuits for our flea farm. They’d get two families worth of food scraps too. The mutts looked so happy trotting away with the choicest bits. A favourite was stale loaves of bread.
A neighbour would collect a dead cow and place it next to his kennels as a buffet. I gather the dogs would hollow it out. Once the carcass was finished, it was back to dog food for them.
Dogs love milk in any form. One of Dad’s would drink until he couldn’t move. Both of mine weren’t quite so greedy. We’d try to limit their access, but at times a bucket would be left at ground level and it’ll be lapped dry. It’s freaky hearing a dog slosh as it runs. I ought to of experimented by leaving a bucket of milk in the sun and seeing if there was a point where a dog wouldn’t enjoy it.
Some dairy farmers had shed cats. Most seemed to be trained to receive milk squirted straight from the tit.
For the house cats, they were outdoor so they’d hunt. Ours would get either some of our meat Mum put aside for them, or she’d have some cheap cuts or mince for them. I’m not sure when she started buying cat food.
We used to go to the local butchers or meat shop and ask for cat food. The butcher would give us a motley selection of offcuts and meat too old for humans. Of course nowdays it would be made into sausages or burger meat.