Did You Know? Dogs Ferment Their Own Food.
Huh? The image of a pet literally making kombucha in the kitchen made us chuckle. Let us give you another image: your dog burying his toy under your pillow. Or burying their bone in the backyard. Did you ever ask your pet why on earth are they hiding their treasure? It’s biological, instinctual. It’s built in their DNA. Ancestral dogs hid their preyin the dirt for a number of reasons.
It’s Instinctual
Using their survival skills, wild dogs used the earth to hide, store, preserve, and break down their food. Buried food served as protection against scavengers. By burying carcasses and bones, dogs were essentially creating natural refrigerators for these foodstuffs, a place where they could return to after there wasn’t a risk of theft, or if they were in need of a second meal.
Natural Fermentation, Easier Digestion
Most important to note, however, is the fact that dogs will break down their food naturally for better digestibility. Dogs have a short digestive tract, which means that nutrients in harder-to-digest processed foods don’t remain in their bodies long enough for the nutrients to be fully absorbed. Bacteria created by fermentation predigest certain components of raw prey making it much more bioavailable, or easier to digest and be absorbed by the body more so than any other food. So, bones that are buried naturally are being broken down by this process and easier to gnaw and eat.
The next time your pet is rummaging through the garbage or burying their bone, while it may seem as though their habits are certainly strange, they instinctively know that they need raw food that is broken down for ease of digestion and obtaining healthy bacteria something that fermentation (and Kure) provides.