Evaluating carbohydrate sources for dogs

Brazilian scientist conducted a digestibility study to determine the nutritional value of broken rice, high oil maize, millet, sorghum, maize germ, rice bran and wheat bran as ingredients for dog foods.

Eight adult dogs were housed in metabolic cages, and distributed into 8 × 8 Latin square experimental design, with eight diets and eight replicates per diet.

The difference or substitution method was used to estimate ingredient digestibility.

A reference diet was formulated based on nutritional requirements of dogs. For each test diet, 300 g/kg of the reference diet was replaced with the ingredient evaluated. All the diets were extruded.

Results are shown in the table below.

Total tract apparent nutrient digestibility

Ingredient	high oil maize	sorghum	millet	broken rice	maize germ	wheat bran	rice bran
Dry matter	0.893	0.905	0.859	0.905	0.654	0.593	0.550
Crude protein	0.884	0.884	0.803	0.753	0.656	0.682	0.729
Fat	0.855	0.786	0.821	0.668	0.482	0.538	0.852
Dietary fibre	0.503	0.741	0.668	0.744	0.232	0.209	0.129
Starch	0.986	0.987	0.991	0.992	0.955	0.896	0.904
Metabolizable energy (MJ/kg, as-fed basis)	14.4	13.1	13.5	13.1	9.1	9.0	12.0

Abstracted from Animal Feed Science and Technology, Volume 156, Issues 3-4, 30 March 2010, Pages 121-125. References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.

Dick Ziggers