Hi everyone - bet you all thought that I’d crapped out and gone home, huh? Actually, I’ve been doing research - I thought that if I were going to contradict Sentinel I had better be sure of my facts. I’m not finished - I’m learning an awful lot about pet food - but thought I would post what I’ve learned so far. I can’t really post links because I gathered all of this from over 100 websites, some of them very large with the relevant information buried in the midst of a bunch of other stuff. However, a couple of links that might be helpful and/or interesting:
Good Dog Magazine
AnimalNet Archives Scroll down to the article “Information For Consumers Food and Drug Administration For Veterinary Medicine: Interpreting Pet Food Labels” and the following article below it “Interpreting Pet Food Labels - special use foods.”
It has been extremely difficult to find information that did not come from a biased source and was therefore suspect. I’ve been doing my best to discern what truth there is mixed in with the propaganda and double-talk from all sides of the pet food issue - there doesn’t seem to be anyone involved who doesn’t have a personal agenda.
So far, the focus of my research has been the claim that commercial pet food contains dead cats and dogs. The sad news is that yes, some pet foods can, and possibly do, contain dead pets. (My own veterinarian is appalled - he thought the claim was ridiculous also.)
First of all, Canada apparently has a much bigger problem than the United States, unless new laws have been passed since the material I read was posted (some of it was several years old and mentioned that there was pressure on to make some changes). The U.S. has the AAFCO to make regulations and provide guidelines, and the AAFCO works in conjuction with the FDA and the USDA to write, recommend, and enforce laws and guidelines. From what I’ve read, pretty much ‘anything goes’ as far as pet food manufacturing is concerned in Canada and much of the rest of the world.
Okay, there is no federal law against using dead dogs and cats in pet food. The AAFCO does require accurate labeling - if the label says ‘chicken by-products’ then it had better be chicken in that vat if the government inspectors test it. However, there is a category called ‘meat by-products’ or ‘meat meal’ that satisfies the labeling requirement and still includes just about anything that used to live and breath.
Many states and/or local governments prohibit the sale of dead/euthanized dogs and cats from veterinary clinics and animal shelters to rendering plants (more on that later). However, some places DO allow this because it is otherwise almost impossible to dispose of the bodies - apparently Los Angeles ships thousands of euthanized animals to an out-of-state rendering plant, and San Francisco also apparently sells their ‘pound produce’ to rendering plants.
Rendering plants reduce meat, meat by-products, and various and assorted dead animals to a homogenous ‘glop’ by cooking it down in huge vats, separating off the fat, etc., grinding the remains, and usually drying this into a grainy powder similar to boullion powder. The result is sold for use in livestock and pet food, fertilizer, etc.
Many rendering plants will not accept dogs and cats; most of the ones that do render the ‘acceptable’ meat - beef, chicken, etc. - separately from the ‘roadkill/pound produce’ meat and produce separate products. The acceptable meat is sold to pet and livestock food manufacturers, while the ‘unacceptable’ meat is used to produce bone meal and meat meal that is used for fertilizers or to make fish food, earthworm food, and such. Some rendering plants mix the whole kit and kaboodle together and sell it to whoever wants to buy it - there is no law against the sell of, or use of, either this ‘mixed’ product or the ‘unacceptable’ product in pet or livestock food.
(And now I’m going to really disgust everyone.)
Most pet food manufacturers make at least SOME effort to make sure that there product doesn’t contain dogs and cats. Livestock food manufacturers generally don’t care - most of the beef, chicken, pork, and mutton on the supermarket shelves came from animals that were fed high-protein feeds containing ‘meat meal’ - made from cattle, chicken, hogs, sheep, cats, dogs, deer, raccoons, horses, circus elephants - you name it, if it’s meat and it’s dead, it’s probably in there. (I think the proper, legal description is “mammalian food source” - at least that excludes lizards and snakes, although it does include rats!)
And I think I mentioned something earlier about separating the fat from the rest of the ‘glop’? Guess what a major market for this is?
Cosmetics.
Okay, back to the pet food manufacturers. Some of the high quality, premium brand foods obtain their meat products directly from the slaughter houses and render it themselves, or buy them from a reliable, premium supplier. For example, Tyson’s just built a new chicken-rendering plant a few miles from my house. The chicken parts considered ‘unfit’ for human consumption - feet, heads, necks, guts, etc. - from Tyson plants in this and the surrounding states is shipped here, where it is rendered and sold to pet food companies. Because of concerns that lamb products could possibly infect pets with scrapie (a viral encephalitis of sheep), IAMS has ranches in New Zealand and Australia where they raise their own scrapie-free sheep to provide the lamb for their lamb-and-rice products.
When high-quality pet food companies DO buy from rendering plants, they patronize reliable, respectable companies. They also require affidavits from the owners/officers of these companies stating that none of the product supplied to the pet food company contains dogs and cats. Both the pet food companies and the rendering plants have a lot to lose by violating this agreement - one employee with a big mouth or a grudge could put everyone out of business.
However, the president of a rendering plant in California stated that Ralston-Purina did, unknowingly, include cat and dog meat in their pet food because the rendering plant, for various reasons, shipped them the ‘mixed’ product instead of the ‘acceptable’ product that was supposedly shipped. Another rendering plant in, I think, New Jersey, said that a pet food manufacturer had bought their ‘mixed’ product from them on several occasions.
The price of the food and the reputation of the company should tell you a lot about their source for meat products. No company comparable with IAMS, Eukanuba, or Science Diet is going to risk using an ‘unacceptable’ product - “Kozy Kitten” and “Happy Pet” don’t have a reputation to worry about. A can of Science Diet food may cost $2.00 because they use a high-quality (more expensive) meat source, conduct feeding trials, do laboratory testing of random food samples from each batch, and employ strict sanitation methods. How do you think “Kozy Kitten” manages to sell the same size can of food for $0.33?
I’ll stop this here and post some more later about comparisons between human and pet food, reading labels, nutrition, etc.
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