I’ve eaten dry dog food (bland), and dry cat food (very salty), but never tried the canned stuff.
I wouldn’t want to subsist on cat food, nor could I, really. Dog food is OK, but can be really high in cereal grains. Apparently they used to use more bonemeal before 1980 or thereabouts. I don’t know which is healthier for the dog, really. But neither bonemeal nor cornmeal is toxic to humans. The rest is pretty much meat & vegetable matter for dog food, same stuff we eat. Meat and maybe some blood in the cat food, as far I know.
Never tried dog food…but it is probably safe for humans. One thing puzzles me: every dog I have ever had has LOVED plain white rice! They go crazy over it-yet it has no flavor.
For carnivores, dogs are pretty strange.
Interesting point on the rice. Dog forums are full of questions from people so badly over feeding their dogs, that they won’t eat. Frequently people suggest rice and chicken. It is a standard remedy for upset canine digestions too. I guess the dogs usually go ahead and eat the rice when offered. I usually send people with dogs that don’t eat to How To Tell if Your Dog is at a Healthy Weight – Long Live Your Dog
Getting back to people eating dog food, or at least expanding what is in it. What is in it varies widely. The lower priced foods start with corn or corn meal. The FDA has 2 classes. Depending on what you call it, a dog food must have at 35% of the first ingredient and in some cases a lot more. Moving up many of the foods have chicken meal or chicken as the first ingredient. Chicken is just that, chicken with whatever moisture content chicken is allowed. Chicken meal is dried, so a chicken meal and rice food may have more chicken than a chicken and rice food.
No matter what ingredients are used, all the dog foods are formulated to contain minimum amounts of the nutrients dogs are known to need. They are spelled out at AAFCO http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/ResourcesforYou/ucm047120.htm That doesn’t mean
they don’t contain a lot more of some or that the same balance is maintained. The over all percentage is 17% protein. 28% protein dog foods are common and some foods are even higher. Excess protein is burned for energy or excreted. I have no idea how the list of nutrients compares for people and dogs. I doubt you can count on dog food being the complete and balanced diet you need. Cat food should be higher in protein.
There are other occasional discussions of people eating dog foods. I doubt it is wide spread. My reasoning is that a few years ago when the Chinese spiked their wheat gluten with melamine and killed a bunch of dogs, I don’t remember any human victims. Of course both man and beast were safe if they stuck to dry kibble. The problems were nearly all with canned.
Iams thread? I can’t find it, could somebody give me a link? I have little luck with the search fuunction here.
One time? At band camp? All of us were really hungry but nobody had any money. So one dude stirred up a stew…made of Veg-All, peaches and dog food. It looked like it had a pretty decent gravy. But I wouldn’t touch it. So I don’t know.
I’ve been hungry, but I’ve never been THAT hongry.
People trying dry dog food, or dog biscuits, and shrugging their shoulders and saying, “What?”
People trying canned dog food, and pronouncing it “not as bad as I thought it would be.”
People saying that canned cat food is the WORST.
WHY are these animals so picky? A dog is used to find explosives, dead people, locate escaped prisoners and patients. These dog activities are possible because of the extremely sensitive sense of smell that dogs possess.
These same animals eat disgusting food, they dig up decaying “things” and chew on them and roll in them, they lick their butts, they sniff each others’ butts, and some of them are so gross, they eat either their own excrement or their vomit.
Does anyone else see a MAJOR disconnect here?
I mean, listen to the dog handlers. You’d think the dogs would be ordering Chateaubriand, beurre rouge, truffles, and a top of the line Merlot.
~VOW
Yes. You’re using your opinions about what is disgusting as a basis for how a dog should behave, based on the dog having a better sense of smell than you, in a thread about whether or not humans can safely eat dog food.
When my daughter was around 1, she just LOVED to eat the guinea pig’s food. At first I was a bit alarmed, but when I checked the ingredients, it’s mostly ground vegetables and a bit of molasses. I figured it was probably a lot healthier than a lot of things she was eating, so I let her nibble away on it as she pleased. Like most things, it was a phase she outgrew, but I tasted it too out of curiosity. Crunchy and a little sweet, pretty good actually.
I remember there once being a special on “What’s My Line” or one of those other panel shows where the secret guest took dog food and made it into palatable dishes The panelists were blindfolded and given the food to eat while they asked the guy questions.
I’ve always wondered if they were just trying to imply the food was dogfood when it wasn’t.
There are human foods I enjoy today that taste a lot like the pet foods I sampled when I was young. For instance, the first time I tried sushi, it reminded me a little of flake fish food. Pad Thai tastes a little like Purina Cat Chow. It’s a way to enjoy those flavors without the social stigma :).
My cousin’s oldest son developed cancer at 18 months and had to undergo chemo. They had a really hard time getting him to eat, and he was losing a lot of weight. Cousin came in the kitchen one day to find him sitting by the bowl of dry cat food, snacking away. Hysterical, she called his doctor to meet her at the ER. She reported the following conversation:
Dr.: “He’s eating dry cat food?”
Cousin: “Yes, he’s eaten at least a quarter of a cup, can you meet me at (hospital)?”
Dr.: “He’s really eating it, he’s not just playing in it?”
Cousin: “Yes, he’s eating it.”
Dr.: “Well, hell, it can’t hurt him and he won’t eat anything else. Put some more in the bowl.”
Kid lived on dry cat food for about 6 weeks, although of course they never gave up trying to get him to eat other things. He’s now about 6’2. I meow at him every time I see him. He’s trying really hard to make us promise not to tell that story to his son!
From a listserv archive, at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0507B&L=ADS-L&P=R4058, of a post I wrote in 2005:
I was just thinking about the dead wagon of my youth, and I
noticed that there are few attestations of this usage. A dead wagon, as
we used the term in south-central Kentucky, was a truck (I suppose once
it must have been a wagon), owned by a dog food company, that would
remove freshly dead farm animals in exchange for their meat and hides.
I believe that dead wagons may still be in use.
I can recall one occasion in the mid-1970s when the dead wagon
came. One of our mules had fallen, one winter, and could not get back
up. My father called the Lee Dog Food Co.; I had heard of the dead
wagon before then, but had not previously known that it was owned by a
dog food company. The dead wagon turned out to be a flatbed truck with
a rack on it, of the type ordinarily used for transporting live animals.
The truck already had a number of dead and dying animals on it. The
driver walked over to the fallen mule and shot her in the head. He then
used a winch to pull her on the truck. She was still alive and looking
at us, though I suppose that death was imminent.
The dead wagon serves a need in a farming community. There is
no market for, say, a mule that cannot get up. Once we had two cows
struck by lightning, making them unfit even for dog food, and we had to
pay to have them buried. I will say this, though: Things would have to
get pretty tough before I would eat any dog food.
The most?!? You must have either a very limited exposure to SDMB topics, a very short memory, or a near-pathological aversion to meat byproducts.
The idea of somebody eating a dish prepared with commercially processed non-toxic human-edible canned dog food isn’t even close to the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read on the SDMB.
