Do you know what's in Fluffy's food?

What's lurking in your pet food?

Our lives are so busy and it seems there are never enough hours in the day, so it is understandable that the majority of us confidently feed our furry kids food from bags and cans. I still do, but until my beloved Rottweiler, T-Bone, became ill, I didn’t give too much thought to the source of his food. Dog food was dog food as far as I was concerned. But in 1997, after reading an eye-opening little book by Ann Martin called Food Pets Die For, I got motivated to make drastic changes.

 Though I highly recommend you read this informative and very well researched book (the newest and third edition is copyrighted in 2008), I want to share some basic information you need to know when purchasing food for your pets – including the food you purchase from your vet!

So let’s begin by taking the main ingredients and see how the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) defines each one.

Meat. That sounds straight-forward enough – I mean what else could meat be except meat (or poultry and fish)? Well, if you’ve got a juicy sirloin steak in mind, think again. Meat is the “clean, un-rendered flesh from mammals killed in slaughterhouses and includes blood vessels and sinew.” Getting a bit queasy?

How about meat meal? This is meat that has been rendered. And you should know that the term “meat meal” carries no guarantee that the finished pet food product does not contain euthanized dogs and cats.

I heard that gasp! I did it too the first time I read those words.

Take a moment because below is a list of protein sources that are legally allowed in your pet’s food:

• Euthanized carcasses of dogs and cats (which includes their collars and tags and the sodium pentobarbital used to euthanize them)
• Diseased cattle, horses and other livestock
• Road kill
• Dead zoo animals
• Meat not fit for human consumption
• Hydrolyzed hair
• Spray-dried animal blood
• Dehydrated food waste (garbage from hospitals, restaurants, and grocery stores)
• Dehydrated paunch products (rumen from slaughtered cattle)
• Dried poultry and swine waste
• Un-dried animal waste

Hungry yet? Keep reading. Next is a list of acceptable bulking or filler ingredients:

• Beet pulp (residue from sugar beets)
• Peanut and almond hulls
• Sawdust sweepings from the floors of rendering plants
• Soybean meal
• Powdered cellulose

And the hits just keep on coming.

What about the grains found in Spot’s dinner chow?

Corn and wheat are the most common (and the most allergenic) but it’s not in the form of the sweet yellow kernels from a cob or the nutty taste from the artisan bread we love. No – neither the corn nor the wheat in pet food contains any of the bran or germ which makes it so healthy. There is usually a lot more grain in pet food than appears to be the case on the label too. In order for us to believe our furry kids are getting plenty of protein, pet food manufacturers are allowed to “split” the grain listing into two categories so that the protein source will appear to be the number one ingredient.

Case in point – here is an example from Food Pets Die For listing ingredients on a bag of cat food.

“Poultry by product meal, ground yellow corn, wheat, corn gluten meal,
soybean meal, brewers rice, etc.”

The assumption would be that there was more poultry in the bag than anything else, but that would NOT be correct. In fact, corn is the primary ingredient – add ground yellow corn and corn meal gluten together and you’ve got the number one ingredient. Misleading? Yes. Allowable – unfortunately yes.

How about fat? Fats give off that pungent odor you smell when you open the bag. It’s used to entice your furry kid to eat the food…even if it is garbage. Most of these fats are rancid and come from restaurant grease traps or rendering plants.

So exactly what is rendering? Like catfish or buzzards, rendering disposes of undesirable waste. The rendering plants do this by grinding, cooking, and centrifuging animal tissues into meat meal and meat and bone meal, which is sold to pet and livestock food companies.

Ready for dinner? Wait, there’s more!

There is strong evidence to suggest that rendered dogs and cats are entering the human food chain too.

Though this focus’ on a grain, do you remember back in September of 2000 when Kraft Foods voluntarily recalled Taco Bell brand taco shells because they were believed to contain a protein from an insect-resistant corn called Starlink? It had been approved for animal feed, but not for human consumption. The news came and went, but I wondered if anyone considered the fact that when the cow eats the controlled corn, it becomes part of the meat we’re about to eat?

The same applies to consuming animals fed commercially prepared food with material from rendering plants. Whether it’s tainted corn or euthanized dogs and cats – what the animal we are about to eat has ingested, we ingest too when we eat their flesh. Kinda creepy, eh?

Also consider dry tankage which is rendered, ground, heated, percolated, and pressed materials in the final form of food meal that is shipped to China and fed to farmed fish and seafood. That fish then returns to the United States. Beware, because that scrumptious looking shrimp or fish in your neighborhood supermarket could contain Spot or Fluffy too, because the fish ate the meal rendered from the euthanized animals.

Exhale!

It’s ALL very overwhelming – and there ARE exceptions. Just know this - Most pet foods contain the same hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics that are found in commercial meat products for humans, along with the surprise gift of euthanized companion animals, so if you’ve been feeding your furry kids commercial pet foods, you may be jeopardizing their health.

I believe changing T-bone’s food added another 4 years to his short life. And my foster turned family member, Ben’s coat went from wire brush to shiny and silky in a matter of days, and his biting and scratching ended after a week.

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