Like KarlGrenze said, it was a common tainted ingredient. They added Melamine to some wheat to increase the nitrogen content. Nitrogen content is a measure of protein content. Wheat with higher amounts of protein garners a higher selling price. Turns out, melamine also kills kidneys.
I’ve recently switched from that swill Good Life Recipe to** Pet Promise**. Good Life smelled like rot, gave my dogs horrible gas and made them so incredibly thirsty. Not to mention they pooped all the time and it smelled atrocious.
**Pet Promise ** is about $40 for a 25lb bag, not cheap I tells ya but they like it and they don’t consume as much water and the horrific flatulence has ebbed.
The makers claim that it has no byproducts, nor dyes and that the animals that it comes from are not factory farmed. So far I have been unable to fine one negative article or comment about it online.
So yeah, it costs an arm and a leg but if it ends up being healthier in the long run then it’s worth it.
What I heard is that the first three ingredients of the dog food should be meat, meat, and meat. Compare the labels Omega Glory posted above and you’ll see what I mean. I follow that rule but am not at all loyal to one brand or another. My dogs usually get Iams or Science Diet, lamb formula in either brand, dry. (Lamb formula because of the “first 3 ingredients are meat” rule). And dry treats, and very little people food. My experience with grocery store dog food (Purina, etc.) is that I can’t find any that follow the “3 meat” rule and so I don’t buy them. And yes, inevitably, dog foods made with meat instead of grain are more expensive.
Why shouldn’t they have people food?
I’m seriously curious, since, as **NajaNivea ** noted, they’re oppurtunists, with a preference for meat.
I had my boxer on a diet of raw herring, raw chicken wings, cottage cheese with some oats mixed in. He crapped less and was generally healthier than now. The turds also dried up and turned to dust, whereas the dry stuff results in poop that gets kinda mouldy after a few days.
Moving to an apartment without a freezer and no place to put one unfortunately put a stop to that.
Many reasons, some more valid than others, in no particular order:
Raw food and meat may expose animals (and humans) to bacteria that they would not otherwise get with cooked food (yes, the dry food has been cooked during processing). Example: Salmonella, Toxoplasma, Campylobacter, E. coli.
Cost and time consuming- Good raw food diet can be expensive and time consuming, especially if you want to make sure it is as nutritionally balanced and you’re not missing out anything major (more on that later). Not all owners have the resources and commitment to do that.
Nutritional deficiencies- Like it was pointed earlier, all commercial diets for dogs and cats must be approved by the AAFCO. The dogs that eat them may not have the shiniest coat, but they’re not supposed to develop any major nutritional deficiency if they eat that as their only food source. That’s the goal, anyways. Raw food does not follow those feed trials. It is easier to overlook a major nutrient when following a raw food diet.
When I hear the term just “people food”, I don’t think necessarily of raw diets, but of table scraps. Look at the owners, they may not even be getting healthy human table scraps (chicken wings, fried food, gravy, etc.)! That does not contribute to their general health.
What you’re talking about, a pet raw-food diet, is different from what I (and most other people) mean when we talk about “people food,” which is the leftovers of whatever crap we humans happen to be feeding ourselves. That diet is generally not high enough in protein for dogs and can cause stomach upset or flatulence due to the variety of stuff we eat, not all of which is easily digestible by dogs. From personal experience, for example: I eat a fair amount of pasta with tomato-based sauces. Tomato-based sauces do not agree with my dogs.
Pet raw-food diets are usually held to be amazingly good for dogs; it’s just not a lot of people have the time or energy to put a good one together.
As my vet explained it to me, modern domestic dogs are not the wild dogs they descended from. A wolf or fox can gorge on a nest of quail one day, go hungry two days, chase down a bunny and some mice the fourth day, and tear apart rotting roadkill the fifth. He’ll barf up the rotten stuff, but who cares in the wild? Some wild canines will die of disease or starvation, too. Domestic dogs are happier with a routine diet. Your dog will eagerly scarf up the scraps and fat from your dinner, but his innards will freak out, with bloating, flatulence, and surprises in the bowel schedule.
Some dog owners who feed dinner scraps to the dog find the pooch snubbing his dog food to make room for supper scraps. Fuzbo won’t tell you when he’s had enough to eat, especially when the food is covered in butter or gravy. Later on, when you can’t feel his ribs, you’ll know.
That’s why they shouldn’t have people food.
Find me a dog food (or a human food for that matter) that doesn’t contain chemicals, and I will be really impressed.
I just stumbled upon a course on dog nutrition in the Seattle area. I think I’ll take it one day to see what it’s about: Canine Nutrition
Edit: I see it’s for students only. Dang. I wonder if they’d make exceptions for those of us who don’t wish to massage animals for a living.
Raw fish can contain enzymes that destroy thiamin, making your dog deficient in this important enzyme. Bad stuff. Dogs can also get salmonella from raw chicken just like people.
Also, as you yourself and others have pointed out, raw food diets take discipline and knowledge on the part of the owner. Major drawback.
We had a client once who decided to feed their dog on nothing but fruit. If they were just lazy instead of idiots, we could have pressed cruelty charges.
Just gotta ask: what the hell is poultry digest? :dubious: Please don’t tell me it’s the spew of bulimic chickens.
Maybe but I do not completely believe it. Repackaging the same crap to increase profits.
In those commercial diets, I cannot tell. Some of the recalled products, though, were “prescription diets”.
These foods HAVE to follow different recipes than regular commercial diets, since they are used to help manage certain diseases. Similar to when humans with cardiac, kidney, or other disease are told to follow a certain diet and have guidelines of what they can and cannot eat, prescription diets are similar. They act like diets, giving animals with those conditions the extra nutrients they may need, while minimizing those ingredients that can exacerbate the problem.
Many of these prescriptions are backed up by research, feeding trials, experiments, publications in peer-reviewed journals, etc, not just the AAFCO’s feeding trials required for commercial diets.
But, wheat gluten is a common ingredient, and sadly, like Pullet mentioned, it was tainted with melamine to increase the nitrogen conent and make it more desirable for manufacturers.
As a very general rule of thumb, the more corn= the worse the dog food.
Cat food should contain even less grain of any sort.
http://www.dogfoodproject.com/index.php?page=myths
Heres a little info on dog foods.
I think it’s mostly from fresh water fish, which herring is not. Thankfully, salmonella is rare in Sweden.
Buster do get leftovers as treats, mainly because at almost five, he hasn’t put on any extra weight at all.
Thanks all for responding. My major concern with commercial pet food is the amount of grains. I don’t see foxes or wolves roaming wheat fields for food, but OTOH, dogs have been with us a long time and many more generations of dogs than human generations during that time span, so maybe they are well adjusted to grains.
Some poeple in the BARF crowd seems to wear tinfoil hats (no examples in the link, I think), but they helped me put together a very good diet for my doggie.
I was about to call BS on this claim, when I found this article Waddaya know, Sweden is making extreme efforts to eliminate salmonella in poultry. Ignorance fought.
WTF is the dessert pictures in the ad on that page? It looks like curdled cream and blood chunks.
Sorry for the bump, but I just wanted to answer this.
“Digest” is all the leftover stuff–everything that couldn’t be used as blood meal, bone meal, meat or meat meal, mechanically separated meat or byproducts–chemically dissolved into a sludge used as flavorant and scent enhancer. You’ll tend to find digests used in foods with a high grain content, to increase the attraction of the food.
As far as dogs’ susceptibility to salmonella, it’s a far greater concern for immune-comprimised dogs than for your average pooch. Healthy dogs properly introduced to raw foods do not, as a general rule, need to be concerned about salmonella from human-grade meats. Their digestive systems are very short and highly acidic, there simply isn’t the time or the environment for most bugs to grow.