Of course, normally I wouldn’t want to eat cat food, as it’s some kind of foul-smelling gelatinous goop not readily identifiable as food, but some of the premium stuff in those tiny cans looks pretty damn good with flavours like “country lamb and vegetables” and “turkey and pumpkin seed risotto”. That’s fancier than what I normally have! Are cats even supposed to eat vegetables/pumpkin/risotto? One could probably argue the stuff is better suited for humans than cats. I was recently surprised to find the food also looks quite palatable out of the tin and doesn’t smell too bad either. For cat food, I mean.
Now I know pet food isn’t held to the same standards as human food, but what does that actually mean? I assume it can’t contain anything immediately dangerous or we’d have pets dropping dead all over the place. What about chemical contaminants? Heavy metals? Prions? What kind of horrible consequences could I expect to suffer if I sampled Paws’ tuna and whiting casserole? Please tell me, for science.
When I worked in the industry about (oh dear…) 15 or so years ago, the standard was;
No infected meat, no heavily infested meat.
When I say heavily infested, that would mean (from memory) less than five parasitic cysts in an entire sheep carcass would be acceptable for pet food, five or more would condemn the whole carcass (it would be ground down and processed for fertilizer).
Infections could be cut out if they were localized, but anything that had become systemic would again condemn the whole animal. There may have been a middle ground for petfood, but I can’t remember it right now. Perhaps it was chronic conditions, like arthritis, obvious scar tissue and the like.
Contamination from urine, dirt and feces was the most common reason for meat to become petfood. The contaminant was always washed off before processing, but just the fact that it had been unable to be removed safely from the meat would make that meat unfit for human consumption.
I’d stick with the biscuits or the dried fish, if I were you.
Pet food is a staple diet among poor old age pensioners in Sweden (as the saying goes). True or not, I don’t think it is harmful to humans, had it been it would probably be harmful to animals as well. A friend of mine once tried some cat food with red beet and she said it didn’t taste all that bad. I have also read about a man who was a professional pet food taster on the reason that a human would be better at expressing his opinion about the stuff vocally than a cat or a dog would be.
Also, a Norwegian adventurer (<a href=“Lars Monsen - Wikipedia”>Lars Monsen</a>) lived exclusively on pelleted dog food for about a week to test if he could survive on that before he went on one of his expeditions (yeah, the guy is a little weird…)
<totally unrelated trivia>
In Norway, there’s also a bunch of “Lars Monsen jokes”, very much along the same lines as the international Chuck Norris jokes (Lars Monsen actually uses Chuck Norris jokes as chat up lines)
</totally unrelated trivia>
There’s no doubting that but it relies on the assumption that his preferences on taste match those of your average cat or dog. He might find something delicious that cats find distasteful.
Does it really matter? The higher priced canned pet food is, IMNSHO, not marketed for the pets’ well-being. It’s marketed for the pet owners’ well-being. “Premium ingredients”, “Give your cat/dog/whatever the best” etcetera.
I used to take a pack of premium most cat food with me backpacking. I figured if I ever got to the point that I was willing to eat it, I’d be damn glad to have it, and that I would not ever eat it prior to that point.
True. But if a cat will eat and enjoy both “gelatinized meat by-product” and “country lamb with vegetables” I think you know which one the pet owner is going to buy.
My GF works for large fish wholesaler that supplies restaurants and hotels (v. high quality stuff). As you can imagine, fish is highly perishable and they have a constant battle to avoid waste. Anything not good enough to sell as fresh to restaurants or through their retail shops goes to canned food (yep, all the tuna and salmon you all like to wolf down). Anything too ‘off’ for human canned food goes to pet food. And that includes the buckets of fish crap they scrape of the floor of the filleting rooms.
Not too long ago, I tried a speck of my cats’ wet food. It tasted okay at first, but the aftertaste was unpleasant. It was Beef and Liver flavor Nine Lives, I think. I’m regretting it a bit more after maggenpye’s post!
When my lad was younger we ended up having to lock away the cat biscuits because he’d liberate a box from the cupboards and munch them in front of the TV. Being the responsible parent that I am… err… pretend to be… I tried some myself – they tasted rather a lot like instant soup powder… you know how if you make instant soup sometimes there are lumps left in the bottom of the cup? Like those.
A while later we were trying our cat on some Purina One cat biscuits – supposedly better for her teeth – and I foolishly tried one of those… spiky evilness that lacerated my gums and made me want to wash out my mouth with soap! :eek:
On a related note, I remember hearing once that humans could survive fine on cat food, but dog food didn’t have sufficient protein or some other essential ingredient for long-term survival. Anyone know if that’s true? Maybe it was just my mom trying to keep me from eating the dog food as a kid.
Sounds like a Mom-story to me. I’d think it’s the other way around, in fact: cats are obligate carnivores and very specialized dietary requirements. Dogs are slightly more omnivorous, so their requirements are a teeny bit more similar to ours.
Can’t speak for cat food, since I was four when I sampled Friskies. However, Pupperoni tastes like a livery, less salty Slim Jim. Regular Milk Bones are really tasteless. My friend and I used to eat those just to freak people out.
To me, some brands of canned dog food look and smell just as good or better than a good canned stew or soup.
As a kid I had to feed the dog dry food most nights (not Attackdog, one of his predecessors). I would sometimes sample a nugget. I quit because I started noticing the large coarse cow hairs I would sometimes find.
At least I think they can’t.