My natural diet is crisps and ice cream

Then I am having a "natural" diet too!

If we were going completely back to nature then dogs as we have them now wouldn't exist therefore there would be no need for this discussion or forum infact .

I feed two of mine on raw and two on kibble. Even the kibble varies as I can get away with mixing one of my boys kibble with slightly less quality kibble but the other needs high quality stuff or he gets itchy. Dogs are so variable because of mans input there are suitable diets but not necessarily any specific diet that can be called natural.

I favour white wine and Double Deckers.

Swap the wine for ale and I'm with you there!

Precisley my point

Dogs generally aren't bred based on their ability to tolerate certain diets. Would be an interesting study in evolutionary genetics should one undertake one tho!

That would be a very interesting read if their were any articles or books on such a subject.

No, not at all. Genetically, we are exactly the same as our hunter gatherer forebears. Domestication does not change genetics, domestication changes lifestyle. We are still exactly the same animal as our hunter gatherer ancestor from 2,000 years ago or our ice age ancestor from 6,000 years ago. Dog is just a word, dog is wolf, or if you want to be technical, canis lupus. Dog genes are wolf genes, and genes are everything. Domestication is the icing on the cake, it changes nothing fundamentally. Fundamentally, we are exactly the same as our ancestors emerging from the ice age thousands of years ago. Our natural diet is exactly the same as that ancestor - an omniverous diet. And the natural diet of our domesticated dog aka wolf, is a primarily carnivorous diet of raw meat.

It's not a question of what is best, it is what is natural, what we are genetically designed to do that is everything. We have a particular type of tooth structure designed to eat an omniverous diet, which is why I personally believe that vegetarianism in homo sapiens is not healthy, because we have the teeth to tear raw meat.

Nature has to be "best" - otherwise we would not be here in the first place to be having this debate!

You seriously misunderstand basic genetics (and evolution for that matter) Gnasher.