PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. “We need to know,” says McCarthy. “‘Are you down because you don’t like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?’” Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. “So that’s cutting into Porkchop’s appetite.” And probably yours.
In addition to calculating how much of each food the dogs ate, PARC techs tally the first-choice percentage: the percentage of dogs who stuck their snout in the new food first. This is important to a pet-food company because with dogs, as Moeller said earlier, “if you can draw them to the bowl, they’ll eat, most of the time.” Once the eating begins, though, the dog may move to the other food and wind up consuming more of it. Since most people don’t present their dog with two choices, they don’t know the extent to which their pet’s initial, slavering, scent-driven enthusiasm may have dimmed as the meal went on.
The challenge is to find an aroma that drives dogs wild without making their owners, to use an Amy McCarthy verb, yack. “Cadaverine is a really exciting thing for dogs,” says Rawson. “Or putrescine.” But not for humans. These are odoriferous compounds given off by decomposing protein. I was surprised to learn that dogs lose interest when meat decays past a certain point. It is a myth that dogs will eat anything. “People think, Dogs love things that are old, nasty, drug around in the dirt,” Moeller told me earlier. But only to a point, he says. And for a reason. “Something that’s just starting to decay still has full nutritional value. Whereas something where the bacteria have really broken it down, it’s lost a lot of its nutritional value and they would only eat it if they had no choice.” Either way, a pet owner doesn’t want to smell it.
Some dog-food designers go too far in the other direction, tailoring the smell to be pleasing to humans* without taking the dog’s experience of it into account. The problem is that the average dog’s nose is about a thousand times more sensitive than the average human’s. A flavor that to you or me is reminiscent of grilling steak may be overpowering and unappealing to a dog.
Earlier in the day, I watched a test of a mint-flavored treat marketed as a tooth-cleaning aid. Chemically speaking, mint, like jalape?o, is less a flavor than an irritant. It’s an uncommon choice for a dog treat.* The manufacturers are clearly courting the owners, counting on the association of mint with good oral hygiene. The competition courts the same dental hygiene association but visually: the biscuit is shaped like a toothbrush. Only Rover preferred the minty treats. Which maybe explains the vomiting.
A dog named Winston is nosing through his bowl for the occasional white chunk among the brown. Many of the dogs picked these out first. They’re like the M&M’s in trail mix. McCarthy is impressed. “That’s a really, really palatable piece in there.” One of the techs mentions that she tried some earlier, and that the white morsels are chicken. Or rather, “chickeny.”
I must have registered surprise at the disclosure, because Theresa jumps in. “If you open up a bag and it smells really good—”
The tech shrugs. “And you’re hungry . . .”
IN 1973 THE nutritional watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published a booklet titled Food Scorecard, which made the claim that one-third of the canned dog food purchased in housing projects was consumed by people. Not because they’d developed a taste for it, but because they couldn’t afford a more expensive meat product. (When a reporter asked where the figure had come from, CSPI founder Michael Jacobson couldn’t recall, and to this day the organization has no idea.)
To my mind, the shocker was in the scores themselves. Thirty-six common American protein products were ranked by overall nutritional value. Points were awarded for vitamins, calcium, and trace minerals, and subtracted for added corn syrup and saturated fats. Jacobson—believing that poor people were eating significant amounts of pet food, and/or exercising his talent for publicity—included Alpo in the rankings. It scored 30 points, besting salami and pork sausage, fried chicken, shrimp, ham, sirloin steak, McDonald’s hamburgers, peanut butter, pure-beef hotdogs, Spam, bacon, and bologna.
I mention the CSPI rankings to Nancy Rawson. We are back at AFB headquarters, with Moeller again, in a different conference room. (There are five: Dalmatian, Burmese, Greyhound, Calico, and Akita. The staff refer to them by breed, as in, “Do you want to go into Greyhound?” “Is Dalmatian free at noon?”) It would seem that in terms of nutrition, there was no difference between the cheap meatball sub I ate for lunch and the SmartBlend the dogs were enjoying earlier. Rawson disagrees. “Your sandwich was probably less complete, nutritionally.”
The top slot on the CSPI scorecard, with 172 points, is beef liver. Chicken liver and liver sausage took second and third place. A serving of liver provides half the RDA for vitamin C, three times the RDA for riboflavin, nine times the vitamin A in the average carrot, plus good amounts of vitamins B12, B6, and D, folic acid, and potassium.