Curious. Somebody else mentioned dog biscuits being salty, too. As I said earlier, I remember tasting the canned glop we were feeding the dog, and finding it awfully bland. It wasn’t one of those brands with visible chunks of meat in it - it was that stuff that sort of glopped out of the can in a homegenous chunk. I DO remember it seeming like it had sand in it, though, and “bone meal” was in the ingredients. The same “gritty” feature applied to the dried food, for the same reasons (for some reason, my parents take was that the dog was supposed to get 1/2 can mixed with water and the dried stuff, which meant when you opened a can you had to leave half of it in the fridge for the next day).
Did the pet food manufacturers decide to start adding extra salt at some point?
Doubtful. The logistics of having a vet pile up poisoned carcasses and sell them to a dog food plant are pretty bad.
Especially since they’re injected with DOG KILLING POISON !
I’d have to see a cite on that one.
Doubtful. I can’t imagine a little old lady at the backdoor of a dog food factory giving me a nickel a pound for roadkilled raccoons. They can buy meat byproducts for less and who the hell is gonna collect a trunkful of roadkill and sell it when aluminum cans pay much better.
There are a lot of people in this country that eat a lot of dog food when the run out of money. You can buy the cheap stuff for a quarter a can, open both ends of the can, and push it out in one piece. All you have to do is slice it and fry it like a burger. Dog food companies are in the business of keeping dogs alive and any company that regularly poisoned dogs or made them sick would go out of business. Its not too tasty but it won’t hurt you, at least in moderation.
Large amounts of salt, sugar, and/or molassas are commonly added to animal feed to get them to eat more. A cow will on eat som much corn, but if you cover it with molassas it will eat all day, and therefore make big steaks faster. Of course, the same principle applies to humans and potato chips.
I will regularly give my Chow the Ol’ Roy Jerky when she does something right. It doesn’t smell as bad as dog food, and I tried it once. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t great, but you could eat it if you were trapped in a desert. Of course, this didn’t make her very happy. Sometimes, people don’t believe I tried it, so I’ll eat a bit and give my dog the rest. Strangely enough, people don’t often stop by my house. Hmm… Maybe that’s the key for getting rid of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Answer the door eating dog food…
"spoiled meats from grocery stores and stacks of road kill. "
I have a source for this. In a book about rural towns in ARkansas the author interviews a man whos job is to collect roadkill to sell to the dog food canning company. The company name wasn’t mentioned. The book is LET US BUILD A CITY by harrington.
Sentinel, I sure would like to see a cite for that information. Can you tell me where you got it from? Most of the statements you made involve definite illegalities that would get any pet food manufacturer shut down in a heartbeat. If you can provide a source for your information, I would like to forward it to the president of the American Association of Food Control Officials (AAFCO), who are responsible for regulating the animal food industry.
I would especially like to see a source for this statement:
We have certainly noticed an increase in cancer in elderly dogs and cats at our clinic. However, my veterinarian has seen nothing in his literature that indicates that pet foods might be the problem. It would seem that in order for this to be true, we would all have to be feeding the exact same food to our pets, which is certainly not the case.
I’ve not had the time to research this properly (and I gladly will if anyone is seriously concerned about this), I believe I can address most of these statements through common sense and my education and experience from years of working in a vet clinic and attending vet tech school, and raising pedigreed cats.
Actually, Doctordec pretty much handled this one. Easier and cheaper to buy meat products directly from the slaughterhouse. Some off-brand companies that produce the ‘Kozy Kitten’ type foods might, but none of the reputable companies will. Actually, I believe a lot of the ‘leftover meat’ from grocery stores goes into hog and chicken feed. BTW, I went to school with a woman who worked in a slaughterhouse - if you knew the sort of things that went on in meat processing plants, you probably would never eat meat again in your life.
And road kill? Come on! How much ‘road kill’ do you think is laying out there for the taking? Do you think there would actually be enough money involved to make it worth scraping flat cats off of the pavement? Especially after the gas burned driving around all day to find it? Let’s see - at a penny a pound (which is probably too high), the average cat weighing 8 lbs., less 1 lb. minimum lost to ‘squashedness’, it would take 1000 cats to earn $70 bucks. How far would you have to drive to find 1000 squashed cats?
And, as far as both of those claims go, can you imagine what would happen to IAMS companies sales (now owned by Proctor & Gamble, BTW) if word leaked out that they were buying ‘spoiled’ meat and road kill? They’d be out of business overnight.
Illegal as hell, both for the food company and the veterinarian. Most vet clinics don’t euthanize that many animals, and of the ones they do, most are taken home by their owners. The others go into a landfill or an incinerator. If you had said animal shelters instead of veterinarians, I might have at least considered it possible considering the numbers involved. As a matter of fact, we had an incident here a couple of years ago involving the dumping of a large number of frozen dog and cat carcasses, complete with body bags, on a major highway. Apparently some animal shelter had a contract with a hauler who was supposed to dump the bodies in a landfill. But new county regulations had made it illegal, and the hauler found himself with a truck full of dead animals. So he dumped them on the side of the road. Heck, if this were true, we wouldn’t need ‘animal shelters’ - people would be picking up strays, knocking them on the head, and selling them directly to the pet food companies.
Just about gotta laugh on this one. One more reason why no one is going to fool with road kill! First of all, remove the word ‘often’ and replace it with ‘may’ - rabies is not exactly rampant in this country. Secondly, the cooked and processed food would be entirely safe. Thirdly, everyone who had contact with such an animal, from the time it was picked up off the road until it was thrown into the cooking vat would have risked exposure to rabies, a 100% deadly and incurable disease. I don’t think Workmen’s Comp is gonna cover that, do you? And the CDC tracks rabies cases in this country very closely - haven’t heard yet of a case contracted by a pet food company worker from handling dead animals. And believe me, it WOULD make headlines.
Well, this would make sense if you bought the ‘euthanized/treated pets’ story. Otherwise, a couple of things wrong with this: 1) most pet foods are manufactured from meat by-products - the parts that aren’t considered fit for human consumption like heads, legs, tails, intestines, etc. So the meat would contain the same chemicals as the meat we are eating; and 2) what veterinary chemicals? There has been controversy over the use of steroids and antibiotics in feedlot cattle meant for human consumption, and I have several medicines here that say that they can’t be given to animals intended for slaughter within 10 days or so. I don’t know if anyone is raising livestock solely to supply the pet food industry, but if they are, what other ‘veterinary chemicals’ are we talking about them using? People do not exactly lavish health care on animals intended for slaughter - slaughter cattle frequently have tumors, cysts, abscesses, hematomas, and broken bones. These conditions aren’t 'treated’in any way - if noticed, they just mean an earlier trip to the slaughterhouse.
Well, I won’t argue with you here, although I can’t find salt listed as an ingredient in my cat food. It’s true that the cheaper foods use a lot of corn, and that is a problem for some dogs and many cats. But, the OP was about human consumption, so I don’t see where the amount of corn makes any difference - I like corn and cornbread, and eat it quite often.
Point 1: I’ve never seen a cat leave ‘debris’ around its dish when eating a fish-based food. You must feed a different type of food from any around here.
Point 2: My cats love bones. When they eat a mouse, they eat the bones. Give them a chicken wing tip, and they will crunch the bone up and eat as much of it and the marrow as they can. Give them a goldfish and they will eat the bones, fins, heads, guts, and skins - what they don’t digest is in the litter box the next morning. Little tiny bits of ground up bone in their food? Good for them, and I doubt they ever notice it’s there.
Point 3: Ever eat ‘whole hog’ pork sausage? Guess what - it’s ‘whole hog’ because it contains ground up bone, among other things. As a matter of fact, a lot of your ‘processed’ meats contain bone - I’ve picked little bits of bone out of lunch meat, vienna sausages, hot dogs, bologna - all kinds of stuff.
Point 4: And this is different somehow from anchovies and sardines? At least the cat food is ground up!
Well, I don’t think there is any question about this - both for the pets and for human consumption. I wouldn’t eat 'Kozy Kitten’or ‘Old Roy’, but the Eukanuba Kitten Food, at $2.30 per lb., is starting to look pretty tasty.
Watch a cat eat a mouse. Or a fish. Or a rabbit. (Spunky brought in two baby rabbits last week. What a mess!) Get an eyeful of the crap they shove down their throats with nary a twinge!
At least they don’t drag up shit that’s been dead for 3 days, like the dogs do.
I love whole-hog sausage! I used to buy it all the time when I lived in West Virginia, but I can’t find it here in New England. But it’s not made with the whole hog (bones, viscera, etc.); they use all the muscle meat of the hogs. See Ember Farms. Whole-hog sausage is superior because ordinary sausage is made only with trimmings, cheap cuts of pork, and fat. whole-hog sausage includes the better cuts of meat as well.
Okay, this is ridiculous. Sentinel, I certainly hope you don’t actually believe this Urban Legend garbage that you just presented as “fact” in your post. I went to the link, http://www.fuzzyfaces.com/lfood2.html (BTW, the only reason the link didn’t “make” was because the “h” in “http” doesn’t want to be the first character in the document–it needs a space or a return in front of it to be happy). I found there a remarkable document, full of typical UL BS. Unsubstantiated assertions galore, loaded with highly-charged emotional buzzwords. All courtesy of someone with a gigantic axe to grind, namely holistic pet foods. See the last paragraph.
fuzzyfaces.com is just a website to sell cedar pet beds. This article was written by a woman named Carol Gravestock-Taylor, who, according to the article, raises French bulldogs outside Toronto. At the end, the website owners do thank her for giving her permission to reprint the article. And I’m going to assume that she would be pleased to have this “information” even more widely disseminated, so here it is, in all its glory. Sheesh.
(I’m copying the whole thing here so the website can’t count X number of additional hits from curious Dopers. Why reward them for posting this kind of thing on the Internet?)
Natural Pet Magazine, which is cited in Gravestock-Taylor’s article, does not appear in a Google search. I’m going to assume it’s some kind of in-house publication put out by a holistic pet food manufacturer. The various veterinarians that are cited, I don’t know whether they’re real people or not. Here are some excerpts. Warning to Coosa: watch out, babe, you’re gonna get really mad about halfway through this!
[note: copyrighted article removed by manhattan]
I’m going to kind of assume that Ms. Gravestock-Taylor also sells holistic pet food on the side. My computer is being exceptionally stupid today so I can’t go to her website and see if it includes ads for dog food.
At least now we know where Sentinel got his “facts”. Say, buddy, didn’t you hear? We’re here to fight ignorance, not spread it around. Double sheesh.
I worked for a dried food processor for a while, and one of things we mixed was dog/cat food. Interestingly, we started the room making hot chocolate mix, changed a couple of ingredients, and were making weight gainer, change a couple more ingredients, and it’s dog food, add a couple of chemicals and it becomes cat food. Made in the same room, with the same hygiene required and the same basic ingredients as your hot coco.
My former roommate would frequently taste whatever food he was trying out for his cats. He especially recommended “Sheba,” which he said he could serve at a party with toast points and nobody would be able to tell it wasn’t $20 a pound paté.
Also, if you think what goes into pet foods is disgusting, for god sakes don’t ever visit a slaughterhouse, packing/canning plant, grain depository, etc., which handles food for humans. Also don’t read *The Jungle[i/] - although I always make myself feel better by telling myself over and over that conditions surely have changed since Sinclair wrote his book.
This thread was very entertaining-it reminded me of the UL that Liberals were spreading in Reagan’s 1st Term as President-the story was that poor elederly peopl were forced by welfare cuts to eat canned dog food. The UL was totally ridiculous-there was NEVER a SHRED of evidence of this-but the liberal media had a field day with it! In Massachusetts, a democratic governor (Dukakis) even made speeches referring to “the poor elederly-forced to eat pet food”. First of all: at the time, you could buy a can of (human) tuna for less than the brand of petfood (ALPO), and second, they never produced a single “granny” that ever claimed to have eaten dog food. The truth is-pet food is probably more nutritionally balanced than most of the crap sold at MickyD’s-Ralston-Purina maintains a whole farm of dogs who are studied in order to discover the most nutritious mixture of foods.
Another example of liberal propaganda for the masses!
"The wide spread use of Lamb and Rice in so many foods has caused some canine dermatologists to worry. “It’s not meant to be eaten by the average dog” states Dr. Maxwell, DVM. “It was meant to be introduced as an alternative protein, but if dogs are eating it every day it is worthless to use as an alternative food. Owners of allergic pets will have to go to exotic protein/carbohydrate combinations like Ostrich and Millet, or Duck and Potato.”
Sounds good to me. I wonder where I can get some “Giraffe and Quinoa” pet food?
I recently read in Parents magazine that the FDA recently warned that dog chews made of pork or beef might have salmonella bacteria in them. I’m not sure what they meant by “pet chews”…it was just a short sidebar item w/out a lot of details.
My sister and I ate some of her dog’s “Pupcorn”. It didn’t taste bad (it didn’t taste good, either). It was really rather bland, although, Hudson (that’s the dog - not my sister :D) likes it. I imagine it was about the same as chewing on a packing peanut (not that I’ve ever done that - I am just assuming).
You should have seen the look on our Mother’s face when we told her we tried it
