Ask ten trainers what they feed their dogs and you will get ten separate recipes. Each trainer has widely differing (and frequently strong!) opinions on which ingredients are most important for their athletes. But most US trainers will agree that the basic components of a good diet are a high quality kibble and meat. There has been much controversy about the meat that racing greyhounds are fed. The USDA has strict rules guiding the grading of slaughtered animals- and the designation 4-D (dead, diseased, dying, or disabled) is given to meat not used for human consumption but appropriate for other uses. 4-D is a utility grade per the USDA and there are two grades still below it: cutter and canner. If you’ve eaten hot dogs or ground beef, you’ve ingested meat from these lower two grades. Denatured charcoal is added at the packing plant to the meat the greyhounds eat to make its taste unpalatable to humans; it is labelled clearly on the boxes that the meat blocks come in. Is there anything wrong with this meat? Not at all! It is quickly frozen into 30 pound blocks at the plant and when thawed looks exactly as red and smells as fresh as beef cubes you might use to make a stew at home. Bacterial contamination is rare secondary to the methods of rendering and packing.
Ranging between 7% (for racing dogs) and 15% (for brood mothers) fat content, 4-D beef forms a integral part of the diet that racing dogs typically eat- and they love it. It’s pretty much the same beef that raw diet aficionados feed at home and is a major component of all commercially-prepared dog foods in this country. If you might like to read more about this, please visit this link at the Greyhound Racing Association of America website or this essay by Dr. Randy Wysong. Each day at the kennel, the 68 dogs consume 90 pounds of meat. They all have bright shiny coats, excellent muscling, clean teeth, fresh breath, and small stools as their bodies use the food so well. Henry also purchases another by-product monthly: large very meaty bones with lots of cartilage points which the dogs love to chew down to tiny stumps; plenty of fun, good nutrition, and tartarless teeth are the results. The dogs never need dental cleanings when they enter retirement. Note to self: start giving more bones at home…
Tags: greyhounds, greyhound racing
