Dog biscuit

(1828)[11] In the south of England it is much the fashion to give sporting-dogs a food called dog-biscuit instead of barley-meal, and the consequences resulting from this simple aliment are most gratifying.

Barley-meal, indeed, is an unnatural food, unless it be varied with bones, for a dog delights to gnaw, and thus to exercise those potent teeth with which nature has furnished him ; his stomach, too, is.

If no other good effect resulted from it than the sleekness of his coat and clearness of his skin, these benefits ought to the procured for him; but when his health and comfort are to be also ensured, who, that has a grain of benevolence in his disposition, would hesitate to perform so simple and gratifying an act of duty?

Dog-biscuit is a hard and well-baked mass of coarse, yet clean and wholesome flour, of an inferior kind to that known as sailors' biscuit; and this latter substance, indeed, would be the best substitute for the former with which we are acquainted.

A bag of dog-biscuit of five shillings' value, will be an ample supply for a yard-dog during the year: it should be soaked in water, or " pot liquor," for an hour or two ; and if no meat be at hand, a little dripping or lard may be added to it while softening, which will make a relishing meal at a trifling cost.

According to industry lore, he had a quayside epiphany in London when he saw a group of dogs eating discarded hardtack, the cheap, tough biscuits carried on ships and known to sailors as "molar breakers."

The market was untouched, and in those early days, Spratt's Patent secured a bull-dog grip on it that it has never relinquished, despite the fact that in the past seventy years many competitors have tried to wrest the leadership from them.

Spratt's Patent Company claimed an injunction against a Mr. Warnett, a general dealer at St. Albans, who, they alleged, was selling as theirs certain meat biscuits for dogs not of their manufacture.

"[17] Spratt dominated the American market until 1907, when F. H. Bennett, whose own dog biscuits were faring poorly against those of the larger company, had the idea of making them in the shape of a bone.

The world's largest dog biscuit weighs 279.87 kg and was baked to be 2,000 times larger than average by Hampshire Pet Products from Joplin, Missouri, US.