Dog Digestion

Dog digestion starts at the mouth. The teeth useful for ripping an animal apart and cutting the tissue off arelonger and sharper than the equivalent teeth in our mouths. Our backteeth (molars) are flatter and more useful for grinding foods into pow-der. Dogs' habits of eating consist of tearing their food apart, cuttingoff pieces with the back teeth, and gulping them with only sufficientchewing to make them small enough to swallow.

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The next difference is in the saliva. Dogs, on the other hand, have very little of that starch digesting enzyme, ptyalin. It was this discovery years ago that caused peoplestudying dogs' eating habits to say that they couldn't digest starch.Probably these people never saw a human wash down a huge mouthfulof a doughnut with a gulp of coffee - and stopped to think that thattoo is digested.