My puppy has a sensitive stomach.  We’ve tried a few different kinds of food and gone through a lot of trial and error trying to select the perfect dog food.  The food has to be something that she will both eat and will not upset her stomach.  She is clearly  allergic to something in these foods, but it is difficult to isolate the particular ingredient bothering her.  (The fact that she eats grass and dirt does not help!)

The prevailing wisdom is that one must perform trial and error feedings with the puppy.  You pick a brand, feed it to her, and see if she will eat.  Then you wait a few weeks as the dog’s stomach adjusts to the food to determine if she can digest it properly.  In other words, you become deeply invested in studying the amount and composition of the dog’s poop.  Seriously.  Squishy?  Oh, my poor doggy’s belly is upset.  It would be easier if she spoke English and could tell me how she is feeling, but alas, she has proven stubborn so far in my attempts to teach it to her.

Anyway, what we need is a piece of software that will automate the process of narrowing down what ingredient makes my dog’s poop nasty.  One could put together a database of popular dog foods that contained a list of all the ingredients by weight in each food.  Then the user could check off which of the foods their dog has tried and whether or not each made them sick.  The software could use a  very simple machine learning construct, a decision tree, and determine which ingredient is most likely making the doggy sick.  The system would simply look at the common ingredients among all the food that make the dog sick, and determine the commonality between them.  This will allow the user to strategically choose new foods to try that avoid the ingredient that the program thinks is the culprit.

Of course, the potential for humor in this program is there.  One could be asked to rank the “disgustiness” of the poop when poor puppy can’t digest a given food.  As the user base grew, one could implement a top ten list of the dog food brands most likely to cause disgusting poop.  I’m not sure how that would help the software attract advertisers, but it would at least be entertaining

Yeah, I’m half kidding with this whole idea, although if such a thing had existed when I started trying to figure out what was upsetting my puppy’s tummy, I sure would have used it.  There apparently is no scientific method for finding a food that your dog will both enjoy eating and be able to digest well.  Everything I’ve read says that high quality food will increase a dog’s energy and lengthen its lifespan.  All puppies should have a chance at a high quality life!