JeanKC said:
I'm 46 years old. When I was growing up, you fed a dog Purina Dog Chow. If you had money, and a spoiled dog, you gave it Alpo canned...or Mighty Dog if it was little.KC
i'm about 10 years older than you and when i got my first dog in the late 50s, there was only one brand of dog food at the store, Dr Ross dog food. It was horsemeat. It smelled awful (to me) and had a sticky stiff texture, like the Hills ID Diet, very hard to get it off the fork or spoon, so as a 9 or 10 year old kid trying to feed my dog, i didnt have a good experience, i hated feeding my dog, because it smelled foul, it wouldn't come off the fork, it got on my hands and really grossed me out, and it took longer than it otherwise would because it wouldn't come off the fork, thus requiring extra long exposure to foul smell.
Then, a couple of years later, a new kind of canned food came out, Kal Kan. I liked it so much better. It was more like a stew, it smelled OK, and you didn't even need a fork, you could just turn the can upside down and it slid out, and i could use the empty can to chop it up, no fork to wash, it was moist and juicy and appetizing (relatively) by human standards, although it was still gross, i didn't want to touch it or smell it, but it did smell better than Dr Ross, way better. i don't think it was horse meat.
those were the only two dog foods on the shelf at the supermarket. There was only one or two kinds of kibble, i wish i could remember the brand name, something Fives, it came in a kibble and in a dog biscuit and i really loved the dog biscuits, they came in five different colors, different shades of brown and tan and charcoal gray and one was green, and each color had a different shape, so they seemed fun. like the dog would enjoy the variety, as if each kind had a different flavor, i thikn that was the idea of the design, the marketing idea. And the kibble was the same five colors but it was kibble instead of dog biscuits. They were called Fives because there were 5 colors, i wonder what the brand name was.
I googled for more info just now but couldn't find anything about Dr Ross. Kal Kan apparently still exists in some form.
Some people say that dogs were healthier back then to the extent vets were not seeing dogs with cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, allergies, and arthritis in their practices, which are quite common now. I read an essay by a vet or a vet tech who had been in practice since the 70s and said in those days, vets just saw injuries, broken legs, and foreign body ingestion, and didn't see all these chronic debilitating diseases they see now--even though there were only two kinds of dog food, and then as you say, Purina came along and Alpo, those were the new generation in those days, dog foods which would be rated as crap today.