It was going to be a great day. I sat in bed at 6 a.m., waiting for Elly to bring me tea (I do it most mornings - before anyone reaches for the misogynist stick). I ran through the packing of our camping gear before we departed for seven days in the wilds of Exmoor.

Two and a half hours in the truck with Arthur swapping blues tracks was something to look forward to. Elly would take Ophelia and the two girls (Bluebell, WIG, aged 7, and Mouse, her half-sister, aged 5). We’d leave Jet because, as a young entire male, campsites, however small and remote, can be challenging. What could possibly go wrong?

The look on Elly’s face as the teacups clinked on the tray as she crossed the bedroom answered that one fairly rapidly.

‘Jet’s eaten all the grilled lamb satay (meat on skewers)’, she frowned.

I’d had some of them late the night before, after finishing work mid-evening. I’d left the remainder, mistakenly, on the hob. Jet is tall and a ‘thief dog’. You can guess the rest.

‘Oh shit,’ I thought, my mind registering that bamboo is invisible on X-ray. The sticks were sharp, and they had 13 feet of Jet-gut to traverse without penetrating his oesophagus, stomach, or small intestine, let alone his colon or rectum.

Images of him on his back on the operating table flashed before my eyes, and the thought of all the peritonitis cases I’d ever opened up suddenly loomed large in glorious technicolor. Being a vet’s great, but when one of your dogs does something stupid, it does lend itself to a dozen vivid images rather quickly.

‘Ok’, says I, ‘this is not good’. She reported that he was fine and had found just four half-sticks on the floor. I’d left about eight of the things (skewered with supremely delicious flame-grilled lamb, I hasten to add) the night before.

Eight sticks at midnight, four half sticks at 6 am. That means there were six in transit. Great. See the photo here for the four half sticks next to a whole one for comparison.

The Plan

Gathering our wits, we made a plan. Jet would have to come camping with us as we couldn’t leave him with Elly’s mum. Trying to explain peritonitis to her would be a) impossible and b) would have put her in a spin for a week.

The first thing we did was feed him, which was ironic, because all I wanted to do was kill him, the idiot.

I was praying he’d chewed the sticks sufficient to reduce the chance of them penetrating the gut wall.

The dogs normally get raw chicken wings in the morning after their walk. This morning he thought it was his birthday – we gave him a big bowl of 80:10:10 lamb (more lamb!) and beef tripe (for easy digestibility and probiotics). I wanted to chase the sticks through the gut.

It’s a risky strategy, but the alternative was general anaesthetic, endoscopy or emergency laparotomy, all of which bring along their own risks. Also, we didn’t know exactly how many shards of sharp bamboo were traveling through him, so if a brave surgeon removed several pieces, he might still have shards that could puncture the gut and cause problems. We’d missed the endoscopy window, which is about 2-4 hours post-ingestion.

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1. The criterion that lets a company call a food nutritionally complete without ever testing the food that comes off the line.

2. Thirteen and a half million tins, from a company that satisfies every quality control question on the sheet.

3. How many dogs were harmed by those cans, and why seven years later there is still no public figure.

4. Why publishing peer-reviewed research measures a company’s cash rather than its cooking.

5. The contaminant that extrusion creates, which nobody is required to measure, and which dogs take in at roughly four times the human rate.

6. The word at the foot of the page that rules out your butcher, your greengrocer and most of your own dinner.

The serious questions

The WSAVA Guidelines on Selecting Pet Foods is one sheet of A4 carrying eight questions, four about the company and four about the label. It is the most quoted document in pet food. It has not been revised since March 2021.

Part one took the first two questions, about nutritionists and formulators, and found both were about the organisation chart rather than the food.

Questions three and four look more promising. They ask what a company actually does: how it controls quality, and what research it publishes. These are the two your vet is most likely to cite.

They are also the two that sort companies by size more reliably than anything else on the page. And one of them, read closely, allows a company to call a food nutritionally complete without ever testing the food.

Minimums are worth having

Start with what is right about question three.

Diets formulated to meet AAFCO or FEDIAF nutrient profiles should meet those profiles. I hold that position without reservation, and I formulate to those standards for the companies I advise. Minimum nutrient standards exist because dogs used to go blind, break bones and die of things we now understand, and they largely stopped once somebody wrote the numbers down.

The objection is not that a floor exists. It is what a floor is for.

These profiles are set to prevent deficiency disease. They are not set to produce an optimally healthy dog and have never claimed to be. A food that meets them will not make your dog ill through the absence of a known nutrient over the period tested. That is a real achievement and a modest one.

Complete and balanced is a floor. It gets sold as a promise. The distance between those two is where most of this argument lives.

The audit and the throughput

Question three. What is the quality control process for ingredients and finished products?

The sheet wants ingredient and supplement validation, final diet nutrient analysis, toxicology, bacteriology, and packaging and shelf-life screening, before, during and after manufacture.

Every one of those is good practice. Every one of those costs money.

A company with fifty plants spreads that cost across millions of tonnes. A company making four tonnes a week in Somerset cannot, and the cost per bag of running the same panel is many times higher. The criterion measures throughput and presents the result as diligence.

This is not an argument for skipping the tests. It is an argument about what the answer tells you. “We run a full toxicology and shelf-life screening programme” is a statement about a company’s turnover at least as much as about its care.

A table of numbers, or a test

The sheet asks whether a diet meets the AAFCO or FEDIAF profile, and it offers two ways of establishing that: analysis using a nutrient database, or chemical analysis of the finished product.

Those are not the same thing.

The first means somebody looked the ingredients up in a table and added them together. The second means somebody tested the food that came off the line.

Either answer satisfies the criterion. A company can declare a food nutritionally complete on paper, having never tested the food itself.

It has gone wrong. The record is public.

Thirteen million cans

In January 2019, Hill’s Pet Nutrition recalled canned dog food for excess vitamin D. The recall began because one pet owner complained that their dog had vitamin D toxicity. Not because a test flagged it.

That first recall covered 25 products and around 13.5 million tins. It widened in March to 33 varieties, and widened again in May.

The FDA inspected the plant at Topeka and issued a warning letter in November 2019. Its finding on root cause: the company had accepted an ingredient without confirming that it contained vitamin levels within specification, as its own written procedures required.

The vitamin premix: the blend of synthetic vitamins and minerals added to kibble, the dry biscuit-like pellet in the bag, so that the numbers on the label add up after cooking. One premix feeds an entire production run. It is a single point of failure sitting upstream of every can, and this is what it looks like when it gives way.

Hill’s is not a cowboy operation. It employs board-certified nutritionists, owns its plants, funds research, and satisfies every criterion on this sheet more comfortably than almost any company on earth.

The criteria ask whether a process exists, not whether it was followed, and they will take a table of numbers in place of a test.

Nobody at Hill’s set out to harm a dog. This was not poisoning. It is what falls out of making food cheaply at industrial scale, where a single supplier error propagates into thirteen and a half million units before anybody notices. Scale is what question three rewards. Scale is also what turns a mistake into an event.

The toxicology line does catch things. Aflatoxin, a mould toxin that has killed dogs in more than one recall, carries a hard legal maximum in animal feed and is screened for routinely. Mycotoxins get a proper hearing in part four.

A screen finds what it is told to find.

How many dogs were harmed?

Below the line: the answer to that, and why seven years later nobody can give you one. The contaminant that extrusion creates, which one nutritionist went hunting for across a dozen compounds and could not find a single measurement of. Why publishing peer-reviewed research measures a company’s cash rather than its cooking. And the word at the foot of the sheet that rules out your butcher, your greengrocer and most of your own dinner.

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SUMMARY

1. Fewer than 200 people worldwide hold the qualification the WSAVA sheet asks for first.

2. Eight questions. Four on the brand, four on the label. Not one asks what the food is made from, where it came from, or how hot it was cooked.

3. The strongest argument for the sheet, given its full weight: 200 home-prepared recipes were tested, and nine met the standard.

4. Why ranking a staff nutritionist above a consultant may have it precisely backwards.

5. What WSAVA was updating in March 2026, and what it was not.

6. The software that decides what actually goes in the bag.

One sheet of A4

There is a single sheet of A4 that decides what a great many British dogs eat.

It is called Guidelines on Selecting Pet Foods; it was last updated on 10 March 2021, and it is published by the World Small Animal Veterinary Association. Eight questions: four about the company, four about the label. Answer them, the promise goes, and you will know whether a food is worth feeding.

It has become the most powerful piece of unofficial regulation in pet food, and it did so without WSAVA approving a single brand. The committee that wrote it is funded by Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Royal Canin and the Purina Institute. WSAVA publishes that on the same page, and part four is where it belongs.

Before anyone else points it out: WSAVA’s wider partner list also includes animal pharmaceutical firms and, since 2024, The Farmer’s Dog, which makes fresh, gently cooked, human-grade food for dogs. This is not a story about kibble buying a wall to keep fresh food out.

Nor is it a conspiracy. The careless version of that argument is the one that gets dismissed, so here is the accurate one: nobody had to be corrupted, and nothing had to be hidden. The criteria are the criteria, and the outcome falls out of the arithmetic.

Over four articles, I want to show you the arithmetic. This one takes the first two questions.

The case for the sheet

The strongest argument against people like me is a good one, and it belongs on the front page rather than in a footnote.

In 2013, researchers at UC Davis took 200 recipes for home-prepared dog food from 34 sources: veterinary textbooks, pet care books, websites. 129 had been written by vets. They ran the lot through diet formulation software against the published nutrient standards.

Nine met the AAFCO profile. Five met the stricter National Research Council allowances. Ninety-five per cent fell short on at least one essential nutrient, and roughly 84 per cent on several (Stockman et al., 2013).

The AAFCO profile is a floor rather than a target, and I will take that floor apart in part three. It makes the finding worse, not better. A hundred and ninety-one of those recipes could not clear even the floor.

Most were also vague about quantities, supplements and preparation, so two people following the same recipe end up feeding two different diets.

The work was done in software rather than by assay of the finished bowl, so it tests the recipe rather than the dinner. It still tells you something uncomfortable. Dogs are fed badly by well-meaning people, and copper, zinc, calcium, choline and vitamin E are not exotic worries.

One thing the headline number hides. These were published as maintenance recipes, meaning food for every day.

A recipe is a food. What harms a dog is a diet: that food, plus how much, how often and for how long. Feed a zinc-poor recipe on a Tuesday, and nothing happens. Feed it and nothing else for two years and something does. The deficiency sits in the recipe. The damage sits in the repetition.

I doubt the vets who wrote them intended a dog to eat one recipe and nothing else for life. I formulate complete and balanced diets for companies myself, on the basis that a food may end up being the only thing in the bowl and ought to survive that. Then I spend most of my time telling owners to feed variety anyway.

Both of those are true at once.

WSAVA is answering something real. The problem is not the motive. It is what the eight questions actually test.

Ninety nutritionists

Question one. Do they employ a nutritionist?

Not any nutritionist. The sheet is specific: a PhD in animal nutrition, or board certification by the American College of Veterinary Nutrition, or by the European College of Veterinary and Comparative Nutrition.

Start with the numbers.

When the ACVN wound itself up, it had 90 active diplomates, ten retired and ten honorary members. Its own leadership concluded there were not enough of them to run an organisation: no paid staff, a budget from member dues, everything done by volunteers. It merged into the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine on 1 October 2021, and nutrition became that college’s sixth speciality (VIN News, 2021).

Europe is smaller still, and cannot agree with itself on how much smaller. The European college’s own site says 41 active diplomates. The European Board of Veterinary Specialisation, the body that recognises it, gives 47 specialists and 69 diplomates across 13 countries on one page, and 55 specialists on another.

A board-certified nutritionist writing in 2023 put the American figure at nearly 100 and the European at nearly 50. Add it up as generously as you like, and you get under 200 people, worldwide, for a dog and cat population running into the hundreds of millions.

Now read the criterion again as an instruction. Every company that wants your vet’s confidence should employ one of fewer than 200 people.

That is not a quality standard. It is a moat. And it does not become a moat through anybody’s intention. It becomes one because there are ninety of them.

Below the line: what became of the American college named on this sheet, and what WSAVA was busy updating in March 2026 while the sheet sat where it was. Why ranking a staff nutritionist above a consultant may have it backwards. And the software that does most of the formulating, which question two never thinks to ask about.

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1. The powder never changes. The food underneath it does. A balancer is not filling a gap, it is filling a guess.

2. The only perfect balancer would be blended after the meal was analysed. Which tells you what the daily scoop is really doing.

3. Twenty-five ingredients means twenty-five ways in. In 2019 a supplier delivered a premix carrying vitamin D at roughly thirty times the target, and nothing about the food looked wrong.

4. Food composition tables track about 150 nutrients. Food contains 26,625 known compounds. A tub can only hold what somebody has already counted.

5. What is on the labels people actually buy in Britain and America, and why the British ones tell you more.

6. When a balancer genuinely is the right answer, and six questions to ask before you measure out another teaspoon.

Last time I argued that balance is something a diet has, not something a meal has, and that the industry’s own adequacy trial runs for 26 weeks rather than one dinner. A dog carries a larder, and its gut adjusts how much it absorbs depending on how full that larder is. Variety across a month is what the machinery was built to read.

Which leaves the tub itself.

This is the ingredient list of one of the best known balancers, in order: tricalcium phosphate, potassium citrate, magnesium gluconate, sodium bicarbonate, potassium chloride, choline chloride, monopotassium phosphate, L-tryptophan, zinc amino acid chelate, vitamin E supplement, iron amino acid chelate, potassium iodide, phylloquinone, copper amino acid chelate, thiamine mononitrate, manganese amino acid chelate, vitamin B12 supplement, vitamin A supplement, sodium selenite, niacin supplement, calcium pantothenate, vitamin D2 supplement, riboflavin supplement, folic acid, pyridoxine hydrochloride.

Twenty-five entries, each at a fixed dose. That list is the whole model: the gap, assumed in advance, and cast in powder.

One declaration first. I consult for raw food and supplement companies around the world. I have skin in this game. Read accordingly, then go and check the labels yourself.

Seven things that worry me

1. It cannot change shape. A scoop of balancer holds the same zinc on Monday as on Thursday. The mince underneath it does not.

Two beef minces from two farms carry different zinc. Liver from a grass-fed bullock and liver from a housed one differ in vitamin A enormously. Fat content varies, cuts vary, and the owner who weighed everything last week used a bigger liver this week.

So the powder is not filling a gap. It is filling an assumed gap, and the real one moves.

2. The only perfect balancer would be blended after dinner, not before. Follow the logic all the way down.

To truly complete a given meal, you would have to send that meal to a laboratory, wait for the analysis, then blend a supplement to fit exactly what came back. Tonight’s bowl, tonight’s powder. Tomorrow you start again. And that doesn’t even consider changes in the dog - stressy day, antibiotics, illness or fasting the previous day all change the food-dog relationship.

Nobody measures what’s in the bowl and balances accordingly. Which means every fixed premix, by definition, overshoots some nutrients and undershoots others in every single bowl. Not occasionally. Always.

Now the honest bit. Those errors probably cancel out over weeks, high one day and low the next, averaging to something reasonable.

But look at what that defence just conceded. If the balancer works because errors average out over time, then balance over time is real, and the argument for a scoop in every single bowl has become an argument for variety instead.

Behind the paywall: the premix that arrived at a factory carrying thirty times the intended vitamin D, why nobody has ever compared a chelate against the same mineral in meat, the label detail British buyers get to see and American buyers do not, and the seventh worry, which is the one that troubles me most.

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1. Balance is something a diet has. It is not something a meal has, and no laboratory has ever tested it as one.

2. To call a food complete and balanced, a company feeds it to a minimum of eight dogs for 26 weeks, and only six need to finish. The nutrient tables behind it are written per kilo of food.

3. The fear driving owners to buy a powder is earned. Of 200 home-cooked dog recipes checked in 2013, five met requirements for every essential nutrient. Most were written by vets.

4. Your dog carries a larder, and its gut changes how much it absorbs depending on how full that larder is. This is the machinery that makes variety work.

5. Where the larder does not help at all, and which dogs get no slack whatsoever.

6. One thing to do this week that will tell you more about your dog’s diet than any spreadsheet.

I have had this conversation perhaps a dozen times in the past couple of years, so what follows is a composite rather than anybody in particular.

An owner arrives with three dogs and a system. Fresh meat and vegetables, cooked at home, and every meal finished with a level teaspoon of synthetic vitamins and minerals, weighed out by software.

She is doing better by those dogs than most people manage. Fresh food, no extruder, every ingredient visible. I say so, and I mean it.

I also say it is not wrong, but it is not the point. That never goes down well.

So here is the longer answer, in two parts. A balancer sells reassurance. Variety of good food does the job the reassurance is standing in for. This part is about where the rule came from and what makes variety work. Next time I go through the tub itself, ingredient by ingredient.

One declaration first. I consult for raw food and supplement companies around the world. I have skin in this game. Read accordingly, then go and check the papers yourself.

A bowl is not a diet

Balance is something a diet has. It is not something a meal has.

That sounds like word games. It is the difference between the powder being necessary and the powder being a comfort blanket.

Think about how dog food is actually proven. To call a food complete and balanced, a company feeds it to a minimum of eight dogs (two can drop out if they refuse the food and it still passes!), and nothing else, for 26 weeks. The nutrient tables it is measured against are written per kilo of food, across a whole ration.

Nobody tests one bowl. Nobody has ever tested one bowl.

There is a great deal wrong with that trial. Eight dogs start it, but the protocol allows a quarter of them to be dropped for non-nutritional reasons or poor food intake, so only six need to finish. I will come back to that another day.

The point here is simpler. Even the industry’s own gold standard measures a diet, not a dinner.

Now think about what the powder is sold to do. One scoop, in this bowl, tonight, making this meal complete.

Every dog owner in Britain has been told that rule for fifty years. It worked, because no home kitchen can hit forty nutrient targets at every sitting. Set the bar there, and the only cook good enough is a factory.

Why owners are frightened

I reject the bar. The fear behind it did not come from nowhere.

In 2013, a group at UC Davis took 200 recipes for home-cooked adult dog diets and checked each against the National Research Council’s requirements. 129 had been written by vets. Five met the allowances for every essential nutrient (Stockman et al., 2013).

Five out of two hundred. That is not marketing. That is a real failure, and my side of this argument has been the slowest to admit it.

So when an owner reaches for a measured teaspoon of certainty, she is not being silly. She is responding sensibly to fifty years of being told that people like her harm dogs, backed by just enough evidence to sting.

Which leaves the question she actually deserves an answer to. If one bowl does not have to balance, what does?

Behind the paywall: the larder your dog has been carrying around all along, the way its gut changes how much it takes depending on how full that larder is, the two situations where none of this applies, and the one exercise this week that will tell you more than any recipe sheet.

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Looking at the list now makes me look like a fanatic. Perhaps I am, but this regime is frictionless and easy to maintain. If I had a Ferrari, it would be madness not to maintain it and put the best fuel and oil into it!

Note the below is an evolution of ideas over recent years. To go from nothing to this regime would challenge the most robust. I advise finding a gentle, simple routine that you enjoy, that works for you, and that you look forward to every day; if you don’t, you won’t stick to it! Each one of us has our peculiarities and likes/dislikes – make your regime your own.

1. Oral Supplements, and Why

These are my current supps. Ask me in six months, and it’ll be slightly different. In an ideal world, with excellent, regeneratively grown meat, fish, veg, fruit, nuts, herbs and spices, you wouldn’t need any of these. Roughly in order …

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SUMMARY

1. There is a proper scientific definition of ultraprocessed food. It sorts food by what was done to it, not just by what is in it.

2. It asks three questions. Kibble fails all three, and extrusion appears by name on the list of ultraprocessing techniques.

3. The only objection anyone raises is that kibble is complete and balanced. Fortification does not undo processing.

4. Tufts University, in 2021, scored Lucky Charms at 60 and a fried egg at 29, for exactly that reason. The same logic is now being used on pet food.

5. Complete means complete against roughly 150 compounds. Food contains about 26,000. That is under one per cent.

6. Food and drink firms spent 106 million dollars on lobbying in the United States in 2023, nearly twice what tobacco and alcohol spent together. Keeping this unclear is worth money to the peddlers of unhealthy food for you and your dog.

Part one of these articles on ultraprocessed food (UPF) described a keynote at Groundswell about what industrial food is doing to people, and how closely it matched the kibbled bag of dog food in your kitchen cupboard.

This article does the work properly: Is kibble ultraprocessed food, or not?

It is not a matter of opinion. There is a scientific definition, called the NOVA classification, published by Carlos Monteiro’s group in Brazil and used in thousands of studies since (Monteiro et al., 2019).

The important thing about NOVA is what it measures. It does not sort food by nutrients. It sorts food by what was done to it.

That was the whole point of building it. Fifty years of arguing about fat, then sugar, then salt, had produced a food supply worse than the one the arguing started with. Just counting nutrients was not explaining why people were getting ill.

So NOVA asks three questions instead. Let’s put canine kibble through them.

Question one: what is it made from?

NOVA asks whether a product is made from foods, or from substances extracted from foods – they term them ‘food-like’ substances.

Read the label on a bag of kibble. Meat meal. Maize gluten. Pea protein isolate. Beet pulp. Animal fat. Digest.

None of those is a food. Each one is a fraction: a part of something else, split off and sold separately by the tonne on a world market.

Nobody in that chain ever sees a chicken. They see a column marked protein, and a price.

Kibble immediately fails question one – it’s not made from ‘food’.

Question two: what was done to it?

NOVA asks whether making the product needs industrial machinery you could not have in a kitchen.

Kibble is extruded. A paste of powders is forced through a superheated barrel at 125 to 150 degrees, then out through a small hole called a die. It then goes into a drier at up to 180 degrees.

You cannot do that at home. There is no domestic extruder.

Extrusion also appears by name on Monteiro’s own list of ultraprocessing techniques. This is not a borderline case somebody has to judge. It is on the list.

What comes out is dry and dull, so fat, vitamins, minerals and palatants are sprayed onto the warm pellets afterwards (Le Guillas et al., 2024).

Kibble fails question two, and not narrowly.

Question three: why was it made that way?

NOVA asks about purpose. Was the product designed to be extremely tasty, convenient, highly profitable and heavily advertised?

This is the question people forget, especially in the pet food industry, and it is the one Monteiro cares about most. Marketing is written into the definition, not added afterwards.

The coating sprayed onto kibble exists to make a dull pellet irresistible. There is an entire palatant industry with its own laboratories. The advertising reaches you through television, social media, the supermarket aisle and the poster on the wall of your vet’s waiting room.

Kibble fails question three.

Three questions, three failures. Kibble is not similar to ultraprocessed food. It is ultraprocessed food, by the only definition science has.

There is one objection to that – not surprisingly, from Big Food. Below: what the objection is, the breakfast cereal that shows why it fails, the number that settles the phrase complete and balanced, and what to put in your dog’s bowl tonight.

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An idea worth getting excited about

For a hundred years we sorted microbes into two boxes. Helpful ones and harmful ones. Alive, either way.

Postbiotics ask a better question. What if the real prize was never the living bug at all? What if it was everything the bug leaves behind?

When you look at what that is, it turns out to be a treasure chest. And we are only starting to open it.

Wisdom our ancestors kept in a jar

People have fermented food for thousands of years, long before anyone could see a microbe. An ultra-sharp, well-researched, and charming American doctor, Cate Shanahan, spotted why it mattered.

In her book Deep Nutrition, she studied the healthiest, longest-living peoples on earth. She asked what their old diets had in common. She found four habits, and she calls them the Four Pillars.

They are: fresh food, meat on the bone, organ meats, and fermented and sprouted foods.

Look hard at that fourth one. Nearly every traditional culture fermented something.…

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SUMMARY

1. Chris van Tulleken keynoted Groundswell 2026, the largest regenerative farming festival in the world. His argument: diet-related disease is not a failure of willpower. It is what happens when food is designed to be overeaten.

2. British five-year-olds are among the shortest in Europe. Child height is a good measure of how well a child has been fed. That single fact should be a national emergency.

3. ‘Ultraprocessed’ does not mean unhealthy, technically. It means industrially formulated, engineered for palatability, and heavily marketed. Most ultra-processed products are also loaded with unhealthy fats, salt, or sugar, or all three. UPFs are generally unhealthy.

4. Every mechanism he described exists in the bag of kibble. In all kibbles, the flavour, fats, vitamins and minerals are sprayed on at the end!

5. He showed a twenty-six-storey pig farm in China and made a point I cannot shake: the less you can see the meat, the less anyone asks about it. A kibble pellet is the least visible ‘meat’ ever made.

6. One thing to put in your dog’s bowl tonight, and it takes about a minute. Then, in part two, the scientific definition of ultraprocessed food is run against the bag, line by line.

On 1 and 2 July, more than ten thousand people came to a Hertfordshire field for the tenth Groundswell conference, the largest regenerative agriculture gathering in the world.

It began in 2016 as a few hundred farmers arguing about ploughing and pesticides. This year, there were 500 speakers, 375 exhibitors, the Duchess of Edinburgh, two party leaders, and an Environment Secretary. The weather was glorious, and there was not a scrap of mud, which for a farming festival in England is close to a miracle.

The bar is called the Earthworm Arms. That tells you most of what you need to know about the crowd.

Among the speakers was Chris van Tulleken: professor of infection and global health at University College London, author of Ultra-Processed People, and the man who chaired the launch of The Lancet’s series on ultraprocessed food (Monteiro et al., 2025).

He came to talk about what industrial food is doing to human beings. He said nothing at all about dogs. He did not need to. Everything he mentioned about the horrors of UPF and humans applies to dogs.

The children are shorter

By the age of ten, roughly a quarter of British children already carry a diet-related disease.

And he told us that our five-year-olds are now among the shortest in Europe.

That figure is worth a moment of thought, because it is easy to hear and then move on.

Height is one of the cleanest signals we have of how well a child has been fed, because a growing body can only build itself out of what it is given. Populations that eat well grow taller. The Dutch and the Masai come to mind.

Britain is a wealthy country. Our children are not short because there is no food. They are short because of what they’re eating; less whole food, less health – dogs are the same.

What he actually argued

Here is where he parts company with every traditional diet book you have ever seen.

Population-level weight gain and disease, he said, are not a failure of self-control. They are the predictable result of a food environment built to be overeaten. Exercise is good, but you can’t outrun a bad diet.

His category is not dodgy fats, sugar or calories, although all three contribute to ill-health and obesity.

It is processing.

Ultraprocessed does not automatically mean unhealthy, though in practice most human ultraprocessed products are heavy in poor-quality fats, refined seed oils, salt or sugar, and usually some combination of all four. The term means something more precise.

An ultraprocessed food is an industrial formulation. It is built not from foods but from substances extracted from foods, plus additives. It is made using techniques you could not achieve in a normal kitchen. And it is deliberately designed to be convenient, extremely tasty, highly profitable, and heavily advertised (Monteiro et al., 2019).

That definition has a name. The NOVA classification. I wrote articles on it on 22^nd and 27^th February this year.

Companies do not stumble into this. Van Tulleken described the industry’s use of bliss points and brain scanning to find the exact recipe that makes you eat the most. They are blatant, creating adverts that treat losing control as a selling point, which is precisely what “once you pop, you can’t stop” is admitting out loud. The Crunch Nut Cornflake “Obsessed” campaign suggests that nothing matters more once you start.

Corporate self-regulation cannot fix it because the company that voluntarily makes its product less irresistible loses to the company that does not.

I wrote all of that down, and then I stopped writing because of what was looking back at me from the page.

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SUMMARY

1. No pet food manufacturer is required to test the finished bag for heavy metals. Bacteria yes. Metals no.

2. The ‘maximum tolerable levels’ used for dogs were largely derived from livestock: cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Animals with utterly different guts, diets and lifespans from a carnivore who lives fifteen years.

3. European feed law sets binding limits. America relies on guidance figures that are several times more generous. Same brown biscuit, different rulebook.

4. Meat and fish meals are traded globally as commodities, so a European label does not guarantee European meat. This is why country of origin is a question worth asking.

5. Raw and fresh feeding is structurally cleaner: shorter supply chains, deliberate sourcing, grass-fed, organic and regenerative options, and makers who can actually tell you where a batch came from.

6. Four questions to ask your supplier this week, and what a good answer sounds like.

In the last article, I laid out the four metals in your dog’s bowl, where they come from, and what the testing found when researchers finally looked. Kibble carries more lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury than fresh food. Dogs fed rice-based kibble carry more arsenic in their hair. In humans, these metals do measurable harm at doses once thought safe.

This part is about the system that allows it, which is stranger than the chemistry.

Because the striking thing is not that the metals are there. Metals are in the soil, the sea and the rain, and they always have been. The striking thing is that nobody is obliged to look.

Nobody has to test the bag

A pet food manufacturer must keep bacteria out of the product. They must declare a protein percentage, a fat percentage, an ash percentage. They must list ingredients.

They do not have to test the finished food for heavy metals. There is no requirement, in Britain, in Europe or in the United States, to run the bag through a mass spectrometer before it goes on the shelf.

Some good manufacturers do it anyway. Many do not. You cannot tell which from the packaging because there is nowhere on it for that information.

A Spanish team measuring 43 elements across pet foods put the gap plainly: pet feed has no legal maximum residue limits for these inorganic elements. Then they found something worth sitting with. Premium brands were no cleaner than budget ones (Macías-Montes et al., 2021).

Price bought you a nicer bag. It did not, on the evidence, buy you a cleaner food.

Your vet will not catch it either. Heavy metals do not appear on a routine blood panel. They are not in the standard geriatric screen. Most dogs will go from puppy to grave without a single measurement.

That silence is not evidence of safety. It is just silence.

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SUMMARY

1. Kibble is built from rendered meat, bone, fish and other ground, powdered ‘meals’. Rendering concentrates whatever was in the tissue, including cadmium, lead, arsenic and mercury.

2. In peer-reviewed testing of 100 commercial foods, every dog food crossed the safe limit for mercury and four in five crossed it for lead (Zafalon et al., 2021). All were kibble or tins. Raw was not in the sample.

3. Helsinki’s DogRisk group found dogs fed rice-based kibble had more arsenic in their hair than dogs whose food contained no rice (Rosendahl et al., 2020).

4. Every study that sorts food by processing finds the same pattern. More processing, more metal. Kibble highest, fresh and frozen lowest.

5. Nobody is doing this on purpose. These metals are a byproduct of making food cheaply at industrial scale, from the cheapest parts that still clear the label.

6. In humans, chronic low-dose lead and cadmium cause real harm below the levels once thought safe. They have no biological role and no upside.

This is an article about four metals in your dog’s bowl that appear on no label: arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. It is about what kibble is actually made from, why that process concentrates metals, what the testing found when somebody finally looked, and what the long human studies suggest about eating small amounts of this every day for a lifetime.

It is not an argument that anybody is poisoning your dog. Nobody is. These metals are the collateral of cheap food, and cheap food is what most of us have been sold as science.

Next week, in part two, I will look at the rules, or rather the startling absence of them, and what you can actually ask your supplier.

The oldest trick in poisoning

Start with the Borgias, around 1500. Columbus had just blundered into the Americas. Leonardo was painting The Last Supper. Henry VIII was a boy who had not yet met a single wife.

In Rome, the Borgia family were building a reputation for arsenic, later nicknamed the king of poisons. How much of that legend is history is still argued by historians. The method, though, is not in doubt.

The poisoners of that age worked with small, repeated doses. Sickness came on slowly and looked like any other illness of the day. There was no test, so there was no proof.

It took until 1836 to close that door. James Marsh, a British chemist at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, east London, and an assistant to Michael Faraday, devised a test sensitive enough to show a jury the metal itself. Three centuries of undetectable poisoning ended in a laboratory beside the Thames.

The Borgias, though, meant it. Nobody is lacing your dog’s dinner. The metals in a bag of kibble are not a plot, they are a byproduct. They are what falls out of making food cheaply, at industrial scale, from the cheapest parts available.

We buy kibble because it is convenient, and because of three reassuring, sciencey words on the bag: complete and balanced. It sounds like a promise of sufficiency. In practice it is closer to a floor, a legal minimum met by whatever inputs clear it most cheaply.

You tend to get what you pay for.

But the old lesson holds. Low, slow, repeated doses do their work unseen. A dog eats the same food twice a day for twelve to fifteen years. Whatever is in that food, the dog eats roughly ten thousand times.

What kibble actually is

Worth being plain about the word, because not everyone uses it. Kibble is the dry, biscuit-like pellet in the bag. Ultraprocessed dog food, extruded under heat and pressure, then dried.

It is built largely from rendered meals: meat meal, bone meal, fish meal, poultry meal. Rendering takes animal tissue, cooks it, drives off the water and fat, and grinds what remains into a concentrated brown powder.

That powder is efficient, shelf-stable and cheap. It is also, by design, a concentrating step. Take a hundred kilos of tissue, remove most of the water and fat, and everything left behind is present at higher concentration than it was in the animal.

Including the metals.

Where the metals come from

Each metal has a favourite hiding place, and rendering finds them all.

Cadmium collects in kidney and liver, so organ material carries it. Lead behaves chemically rather like calcium and settles into bone, so bone meal carries a lead signature. Fish absorb cadmium and mercury from the sea across their whole lives, so fish meal carries both.

Then there is the plant fraction. Rice draws arsenic out of soil and water more readily than most crops, and rice is a common, cheap filler in kibble.

This is where Helsinki comes in. DogRisk, at the University of Helsinki, is the only independent, university-based research group in the world studying how diet and environment drive chronic disease in dogs. They compared dogs eating rice-based kibble with dogs whose food contained no rice.

The rice-fed dogs had more arsenic in their hair (Rosendahl et al., 2020).

It was a small pilot study, and I will not oversell it. But it is one of the very few pieces of work that looks at the dog rather than the bag, and it found the exposure showing up in the animal.

The 2026 Clean Label Project testing of 79 dog foods pointed at three main sources in kibble: meat by-products such as organ and bone, the seafood and grain fraction with its marine mercury and rice arsenic, and, revealingly, the synthetic vitamin and mineral premix sprayed on after cooking to make the food ‘complete and balanced’ (Clean Label Project, 2026).

The very thing added to make kibble adequate may be adding to the load.

Each source contributes only a little. Combined in one bag, eaten twice a day for a decade and a half, they add up.

Which raises the question somebody finally went and answered. What is actually in the bag?

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SUMMARY

1. Why nearly half of every beef animal, and a third of every pig, never becomes human food, and where it actually ends up.

2. The “fifth quarter”: the historic butcher’s profit that Britain forgot how to eat.

3. The organ meats that turn a dog’s dinner from adequate to exceptional, and the nutrients they carry.

4. Why every regenerative farm is sitting on a goldmine of the best dog food on the planet, and mostly giving it away.

5. Why this is a rare win for three groups at once: dog owners, regenerative farmers, and ethical dog-food makers.

6. What a regenerative farming festival has to do with your dog’s bowl.

Last week I stood in a field in Hertfordshire, listening to farmers talk about soil, and found myself thinking about liver.

Not mine. My dogs’.

This piece is about the fifth quarter: the part of every farm animal we have stopped eating, why it is some of the finest food a dog can have, the one legal line you must never cross, and how to put it in the bowl this week for a fraction of the cost of premium mince.

A field in Hertfordshire, and a thought about dinner

The occasion was Groundswell, the regenerative agriculture festival held each summer on the Cherry family’s farm near Hitchin. This year it turned ten. Thousands of farmers, growers and assorted soil obsessives gathered in tents and fields to argue about cover crops, grazing and the stuff beneath our boots.

My friend and Raw Pet Medics co-host Dr Brendan Clarke was there to speak, and his subject was waste. Britain throws away a staggering quantity of good animal material every year. Bren’s argument was that regenerative farmers could turn that stream into a new income, one that helps pay for the shift to healthier land.

The movement he was speaking into has a bold number pinned to the wall: a billion acres farmed regeneratively worldwide, roughly a tenth of all farmland, the point at which the whole thing is meant to become self-sustaining.

Fanciful, until you look at the curve. Certified regenerative land went from under a million acres in 2021 to around twenty-five million by 2025, and looser counts that include farms in transition run higher still. Nobody quite agrees on how to measure it, but every measure points the same way: steeply up. A tenth of the world’s farmland begins to look less like a fantasy.

Big talk in a Hertfordshire field, then, but not idle talk. The first acre of anything has to start somewhere, and Bren’s somewhere was the bin.

There is a film of the same name, and if you do one thing after reading this, watch it. Groundswell is the final part of a trilogy that began with Kiss the Ground and Common Ground. It is streaming on Prime Video now, narrated by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson. It won the documentary prize at Cannes this spring, and it is rated for the whole family. Ninety minutes, gloriously filmed, and I am going to sit my own children down in front of it because their future is at stake.

But one number from Bren’s talk kept returning to me while he spoke, and it undoes a good deal of what people believe about feeding dogs well.

Nearly half of every beef animal in this country is, at some point, classed as something other than food for us.

Britain has largely forgotten how to eat it.

Our dogs have not.

The number nobody mentions

When a bullock is slaughtered, the carcass that hangs in the chiller, the bit that becomes your steak and my dogs’ mince, is only part of the animal.

The rest, the organs, blood, bone, fat, head, feet and trim, is known in the trade as the fifth quarter. An animal has four quarters. This is the impossible extra one, and butchers have prized it for centuries.

By weight, these by-products make up roughly 44 per cent of a beef animal’s live weight and about 30 per cent of a pig’s live weight, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

Read that again. Close to half of a cow, once you count everything that is not prime carcass, sits outside what most Britons will put on a plate.

The Italians call it the quinto quarto and build whole dishes around it. The Victorians ate it without a second thought. Offal itself just means “off-fall”, the parts that drop from the carcass as it is dressed.

For most of history, this was not waste. It was the butcher’s profit and the poor family’s protein.

So where does all of it go now?

That is where this stops being a history lesson and starts being about what is in your dog’s bowl tonight.

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SUMMARY

1. Two dogs I knew seemed to track their owners across oceans and down telephone lines, with no obvious way of knowing.

2. One biologist spent years filming a single terrier to find out whether any of this was real.

3. Three times in history, science dismissed a phenomenon as nonsense, and three times it turned out to be true.

4. Dogs can sense things we cannot, including, it seems, the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

5. The honest place to stand sits between two mistakes: laughing at the real, and believing the merely beautiful.

6. I still cannot tell you how Holly knew, and I have made a kind of peace with that.

Ask a room of dog owners whether their dog knows when they are coming home, and most hands go up. It is one of the most commonly reported experiences in all of pet ownership, and one of the least understood.

The stories pour out once you ask. They are warm, specific, and oddly consistent. And they sit in a strange no-man’s-land between hard science and pure mystery, where sensible people are not quite sure what to believe.

This is a ruminative piece, not a verdict. It is about two dogs I knew, one stubborn experiment, and the long history of science being caught out by things it swore were impossible.

Holly knew…

Holly spent her days at a dog sitter’s house while her owner worked. She was happy there. Calm, settled, curled up in a patch of sun for most of the morning.

The sitter’s phone rang all day long. Friends, family, deliveries, the usual. Holly did not so much as twitch an ear for any of it.

Except for one caller.

When Holly’s owner rang to say she was on her way, Holly was on her feet before the receiver was lifted. Up, alert, watching the door. The phone rang, nobody answered, and the dog already knew.

Not now and then. Often enough that her owner mentioned it to me, unprompted, as a small wonder she could not account for.

I want to be careful, because this is the kind of story that gets told and retold until it hardens into proof. It is not proof. It is one observation, remembered fondly by someone who loved the dog. We notice the hits and forget the misses. Hold that thought.

But I did not have a tidy answer then, and I do not have one now.

Then there was Thailand

Another client of mine flew to Thailand and left her dogs in the UK with a sitter. The dogs were fine. Eating, sleeping, playing, the lot.

Until the day she boarded her flight home.

From that day, she told me, the dogs were edgy. Unsettled, pacing, off their food, right up to the moment she walked back through the door, thousands of miles and several days later.

You can pick that apart, and we should. Routines shift when an owner travels. Sitters behave differently as a return approaches. Dogs read us with an accuracy that would embarrass most lie detectors. None of it needs anything spooky.

And yet. The timing, on the day of departure for home and not a day before, is the sort of detail that keeps a curious mind awake.

The man who filmed a terrier

I am not the first to lose sleep over this. In the 1990s, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake decided to stop wondering and start filming.

His subject was a terrier called Jaytee, owned by Pam Smart. Pam went out, travelled miles from home, and came back at random times, decided only after she had already left. Meanwhile, the spot where Jaytee waited was filmed without a break, and the tapes were scored blind.

The numbers, published with Pam Smart in 2000, are hard to ignore. Jaytee spent about 4 per cent of the time at the window during the main stretch of Pam’s absence, and around 55 per cent of the time when she was actually heading home (Sheldrake and Smart, 2000). He seemed to stir roughly when she set off, even at odd hours, even when she came back in an unfamiliar taxi he could not have recognised.

You can explain away pieces of it. The question that lingers is whether you can explain it all away.

And that is where the story gets properly interesting.

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SUMMARY

1. Dogs have no dietary requirement for carbohydrate, yet they are not the strict carnivores the internet claims. The truth is in their genes.

2. The number which reframes the whole debate: wild canids take roughly 1% of their energy from carbohydrate, while many dried foods are 40 to 60% starch, grain or grain-free.

3. My own position: no grain as a daily staple, and never the kibble-style starch load, grain-free included. The trace carbohydrate in greens and berries is a different thing entirely.

4. A plain guide to the plant foods worth feeding, and the short list which can cause kidney failure.

5. My league table of proteins, graded for value, allergy-friendliness and what each one brings to the bowl.

6. One change you can make at tonight’s meal, whatever you feed right now.

Most weeks, my inbox circles back to the same three worries: carbohydrates, plant foods, and which meats to choose. This week, Werner laid all three out at once and asked me to put it plainly. So here is the plain version, Werner, with everyone else welcome to read over your shoulder. Dogs do not need carbohydrates to live. They can handle a little, because somewhere on the long walk alongside us, they picked up the genetic tools to digest some starch. But can is not must, and my own bowls contain no grain and no high-glycaemic starch, bar one rare clinical exception I will come to.

The same lens, of quality, quantity and processing, answers the fruit and vegetable question and builds the protein league table Werner asked for.

New to raw feeding? My Raw Food: The Basics video lays the groundwork, plant foods and all, over at holisticvet.co.uk. Then come back for the details below.

Do dogs need carbohydrate? (No.)

Strictly, no. There is no minimum requirement for carbohydrate in the dog.

A healthy dog makes all the glucose its brain and body need from protein and fat, through a tidy internal process called gluconeogenesis (NRC, 2006). A dog could eat zero carbohydrate and thrive.

The National Research Council, the body that writes the nutrient standards, has said this in black and white for years. No requirement. None.

The makers of dried food have surely read it. They pour the starch in anyway, up to 60 per cent of the bag. We will get to why.

The proof keeps arriving. Pregnant bitches have long been told they need around 20% of their energy from carbohydrate or they will lose puppies.

Yet in a 2026 Helsinki case series, seven dams fed raw diets with almost no carbohydrate, 0 to 6% of energy, produced 41 puppies with 100% survival among the live-born (Anturaniemi et al., 2026).

If the most metabolically demanding dog of all, a pregnant one, does not need starch, the spaniel on your sofa certainly does not.

The same group has form here. When they fed Staffordshire Bull Terriers a raw, low-carbohydrate diet against a high-carbohydrate kibble, the raw-fed dogs showed clear shifts in blood chemistry within a few months, with most values in both groups still inside the normal range (Anturaniemi et al., 2020).

So why does the internet insist dogs are ‘obligate carnivores’? Because it has reached for the wrong animal. That is the cat.

When researchers compared dog and wolf genomes, they found dogs carry extra copies of the genes for digesting starch, including the one for pancreatic amylase (Axelsson et al., 2013). Scavenging round our settlements, dogs adapted to handle more starch than their wolf ancestors.

The catch is that the number of those gene copies varies hugely from dog to dog, so it is an average adaptation, not a uniform licence. Dogs are meat-and-fat animals with a modest, inherited ability to cope with some plant food. Not strict carnivores. Not starch-burners either.

And capacity is not a menu. I can metabolise cake and vodka perfectly well. That does not mean I should have them for breakfast every day for the rest of my life.

The amylase genes tell us a dog can handle some starch. They do not tell us a dog should live on it.

The number, and where I stand

Here is the figure that frames the whole thing. When researchers pooled fifty studies of what wild wolves actually eat, the average came out at roughly 54% of energy from protein, 45% from fat, and about 1% from carbohydrate (Bosch et al., 2015).

Now look at a bag of kibble. Carbohydrate often runs to 40 to 60 per cent, because starch is the glue that holds a biscuit together. You cannot extrude a pellet without it.

And before anyone reaches for the grain-free bag: it is the same trick with a smarter sticker. Take out the wheat and rice, and the starch walks straight back in as potato, sweet potato, tapioca or pea.

Grain-free is not starch-free. Often it is not even lower in carbohydrate. It just reads better on the front of the pack.

This is the distinction that clears the fog. When I object to carbohydrate, I do not mean the trace of sugar in a blueberry or the fibre in a steamed floret of broccoli.

Those arrive in tiny amounts, wrapped in water, fibre, vitamins and plant compounds. I mean the concentrated, high-glycaemic starch, grain or grain-free, that forms the base of a dry diet.

A handful of greens and a starch-built biscuit are both ‘carbs’ on a label. In the body, they could hardly be more different.

That gap is the whole argument, and it is why I feed zero grain by default. A stolen chip will not poison a dog, and grain is not poison.

But fed daily, as the base of the bowl, the way kibble does it, it is very suboptimal, for two reasons.

First, fed like that for a decade, refined starch drives a steady glucose load and feeds the wrong gut bacteria.

Second, starch has to be cooked hot to be digestible at all, which is the very process that generates advanced glycation end products, the browning compounds linked to inflammation and ageing. I have written about both at length, so I will spare you the repeat.

One honest exception, because I treat dogs, not theories.

Feed a dog kibble for years and its gut adapts to the job in front of it. The microbiome shifts so far towards fermenting starch that, when the poor dog is finally moved to raw, it can lack the microbial machinery to handle the very food it evolved on.

These are the dogs that cannot hold weight on raw alone. For them I concede a little starch: cooked oats or porridge, or one of the starchy non-grains, amaranth, buckwheat or quinoa. I would sooner have a thriving dog with a spoon of porridge than a thin one without.

That is the only time starch enters my advice by design. Once a day, every day, for a decade, as the base of the bowl, is a different beast. That is kibble, and that is the ultraprocessed pattern I object to.

What I do use, routinely, is a little plant matter as a garnish, never as fuel: lightly steamed greens for fibre and phytonutrients, and a spoon of dog-safe fermented veg for the gut. That is the carbohydrate question, settled in my house.

Which brings us to what Werner really wanted: what to actually put in the bowl. The plant foods worth bothering with, the short list which can land a dog on a drip, and my full protein league table, are next.

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1. The last of four today: where I find myself, after all that theory.

2. Choose your success: pianist or parent or a steady, balanced life, but every choice has a price, paid in the burners you dim.

3. Frankl found the one thing that outlasts every burner. Meaning is what makes the price bearable.

4. My dogs manage all four burners without trying. We, self-important humans, struggle.

5. Every day is, indeed, a school day.

This is the final part. After all the theory, here is what I am left pondering.

We began with a cooker and four burners: family, friends, health and work. The material success idea says you cannot keep all four high at once. To do well, you turn one down. To be exceptional, you ‘extinguish’ two.

So, you choose your success. The world-class pianist. The eminent surgeon. The devoted parent. Any of them may be yours for the taking, but each one carries a price, paid in the burners you dim, and nobody escapes the bill.

Choose freely off the menu but know the prices.

Then,…

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SUMMARY

1. Part 2 ended on the one act survival cannot explain: a starving prisoner giving away their last crust.

2. The doctor who watched it, Viktor Frankl, came home from the camps with an idea which turns this whole series on its head.

3. Meaning began as biology’s cleverest trick, a drive which served the species even when it cost the individual.

4. But once it existed it slipped its leash, and learned to act against the very survival which built it.

5. This is the one fire the dog will never tend. Dogs live meaning. They cannot author it.

6. And the gap between living meaning and knowing it is the whole of what makes us human.

We left a starving prisoner holding out the last of their bread to a stranger, in the worst place human beings have ever built. By every rule of the last two parts, that bread belonged in their own mouth. It did not go there.

The doctor who watched scenes like it, again and again, came home with an idea which takes a wrecking ball to everything I have argued so fa…

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SUMMARY

1. Last time the four burner sum began to wobble. Here is why it falls over completely: the burners were never four.

2. Strip off the costumes and there is one drive underneath, the oldest one we have, survival.

3. Health, family, friends and work turn out to be survival wearing four different coats.

4. Which finally explains why we wreck ourselves chasing things which once kept us alive and now do us harm.

5. It is the same ancient mismatch which makes a dog ill on the wrong food.

6. And most of the time, it turns out, you are not the one turning the dials at all.

Last time, the cruel little sum began to wobble. If the fuel running our four burners is energy rather than time, and if some of those flames feed one another rather than starving one another, the tidy picture of four separate burners stops adding up.

This time I want to push the whole cooker over. Because I no longer think there are four burners. I think there is one. And once you spot the…

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SUMMARY

1. The four burner idea says your life runs on four flames, family, friends, health and work, and you cannot keep them all turned up at once.

2. To do well, it claims, you turn one down. To become exceptional, you put two of them out.

3. The idea has spread for years because it feels true, and most things which spread do.

4. But the metaphor hides one quiet assumption about what the burners actually burn.

5. Get that wrong, and the whole grim sum begins to fall apart.

6. And a dog asleep at my feet shows exactly where the crack runs.

There is an old idea about success which runs like this. Picture your life as a cooker with four burners. One is your family. One is your friends. One is your health. One is your work. The idea says you cannot keep all four turned up at once. To do well in life, you have to turn one of them down. And to become truly exceptional, you have to put two of them out.

It is a bleak little sum, and people have passed it round kitchens and boardrooms for years, be…

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SUMMARY

1. Dogs greet face-first, going for the mouth and muzzle before anything else.

2. Breath is a chemical broadcast. It is how medical detection dogs spot cancer, low blood sugar and seizures in people.

3. New research shows dogs can smell another dog’s mood, telling joy from stress, and shift their own behaviour in response.

4. Illness rewrites a dog’s entire odour signature, demonstrated in dogs carrying a parasite.

5. The famous oestrus “pheromone” turns out to rest on far shakier ground than the textbooks suggest.

6. Nobody has tested breath as a channel in its own right. That gap is the most interesting part of the story.

A greeting we have all watched and never questioned

Watch two dogs say hello and you will see a small ritual play out in seconds. They circle. They stiffen or soften. And almost always, before they get anywhere near the rear end the cartoons promised us, they go for the face. Nose to muzzle. Nose to mouth.

We have a decent map of how dogs read one another. Anal glands, urine, the scent left by their feet, the chemicals that ride on a frightened dog’s body. What we do not have is a single study asking whether breath, the air a dog pushes out every few seconds, is part of that conversation. This piece pulls together what the evidence does say, where it stops, and why the missing study is worth running.

The short version: breath is a credible channel, dogs plainly read each other’s insides by smell, and the specific claim about breath is a good hypothesis sitting on solid neighbouring ground rather than a proven fact. The honest gap turns out to be the best bit.

Breath is not nothing

Start with the part that is beyond argument. Breath is a chemical report card.

Every exhalation carries volatile organic compounds, tiny airborne molecules produced by what is happening inside the body. When something changes in the lungs, the blood or the metabolism, the mix of those molecules changes too. This is not a fringe idea. It is the entire basis of medical detection dogs, the animals trained to flag cancers, drops in blood sugar and oncoming seizures from a person’s breath alone.

If a trained spaniel can smell the difference between healthy and cancerous breath in a human, then breath is unambiguously carrying health information into the air. The only open question is whether dogs bother to read it off each other when they have richer sources at the other end.

And here is the cliffhanger. Recent work suggests they are reading far more from one another than we assumed, and the findings change how that greeting at the mouth should look to us.

What dogs can already read off each other

In early 2026, a team at Barnard College in New York ran a neat experiment. They collected odour from an unfamiliar dog after three kinds of events: a joyful one, a stressful one, and a relaxed baseline. Then they presented those smells to forty-three other dogs and watched.

The dogs told the samples apart. More strikingly, they behaved differently depending on what they smelled. After sniffing the odour of a stressed dog, they moved closer to their owners and kept their distance from strangers, the kind of response you would expect if one dog had caught a whiff of another’s worry. The authors referred to it as possible emotional contagion (Wang and Horowitz 2026).

Worth being precise here, because the detail matters for our question: that odour was collected from the body, not specifically the breath. So it proves that dogs read emotional state by smell. It does not yet prove they read it from breath. Hold that thought.

There is more. Italian researchers have shown that dogs use the right nostril, and therefore the right side of the brain, when sniffing the smell of a stressed dog (Siniscalchi and colleagues 2016). The brain is not treating these signals as background noise. It is filing them under emotion. A 2025 study from the same broad group found that male dogs changed their marking behaviour, and even their own stress hormone and neurotransmitter levels, depending on whether they smelled the urine of a female in heat or an aggressive rival (Quaranta and colleagues 2025). Dogs also recognise the scent left by another dog’s feet (McClanahan and Rosell 2020).

So the back end and the lamppost are documented. The dog is reading mood, sex and identity from at least four routes. Breath would simply be a fifth, and the most overlooked.

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