OK, I have a friend. I love her dearly. To death in fact…well, I touch her boobs a lot. That’s not important. What’s important is that she’s a member of PETA…an issue we simply can’t seem to get past with each other. I am all for being nice to animals, not abusing animals, I love animals, blah blah blah. But I’m going to be honest here, PETA frightens me.
Anyway, recently, my friend is on a campaign to get all of us in the friend group to stop feed our dogs and cats commercial dog food because…and I can’t believe I’m typing it…PETA told her that the major dog food chains take euthanized pets and abandoned pets from shelters and grind them into pet food. Instead, she spends a good three hours a week chopping up carrots and celery and makes rice and heats it up and seasons it for her cats. Meanwhile, her cats always have diahrea and are ALWAYS at the vet.
This sounds like such ultra-mega-bullshit, and yet online I can only find proof SUPPORTING it. I want so badly to provide my friend with the facts, or actually throw them in her face. Wouldn’t this just be…horribly unhealthy and illegal? WOULDN’T my healthy, six year old beagle have mad cow disease from eating a cannibalistic diet?
I don’t have any evidence, but she’s really putting her cats at risk here. They are carnivores. As much as that might hurt her to know, they can NOT lead a healthy life without meat. It just isn’t going to happen. Humans can, but cats and dogs can NOT. You’re not going to be able to talk much sense into her most likely. If this truly bothers you, and it would bother me, get out now, before you get so angry and frustrated that you can’t even speak to each other.
Seems to me that your friend would be a kinder pet owner if she would kill her cats and grind them up rather than letting them slowly die from the inappropriate diet she is forcing on them. Also, if her cats had the chance, I’m sure they’d be happy to kill and eat someone else’s pet even without the convenience of grinding and packaging.
It is true that euthanized shelter pets are sold to “renderers”, who melt them down for animal protein which gets included in cosmetics, commercial dog and cat food, and other stuff that requires animal fats.
Your friend is doing a very wrong thing by feeding her cats a vegetarian diet. There are brands of dog and cat food that don’t use this stuff in their food - your friend should check out the Wysong brand if she is really concerned about it - they use chicken protein. Cats are carnivores, they can’t adapt to a vegetarian diet. Your friend is being er…unethical to animals. Call PETA and report her.
So yeah, it’s true. And it’s highly unpalatable. But is it so wrong? The shelter can’t afford to dispose of the corpses, they get money that goes to feed and house the animals they can take care of, and industries in need of animal products get what they need. It’s sort of like when we learned in school that the Indians used ALL the parts of the bison and wasted nothing.
As Jman said, cats are carnivores, and must eat meat to be healthy. Your friend will wind up killing her cats if she maintains a vegetarian diet for them. Keep in mind that cats require nutrients such as taurine, which is only naturally found in meat. I would hope she is at least supplementing the diet with vitamins.
I personally can’t see a responsible pet food manufacturer using euthanized animals simply because of the risk involved with trace remains of the chemicals used for euthanization. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if manufacturers of cheap pet food used questionable sources for their ingredients.
However, of bigger concern to me as a pet owner is all the other crap that goes into the cheaper-end foods, like by-products and excess fillers. I’ve found that overall, it’s worth the extra money to spend on a premium pet food. Cereal fillers do nothing more than make for bigger piles of crap to clean up. With a premium food, you can actually feed less, and also avoid unnecessary chemical additives.
Well cripes! PETA’s right! But magdalene…wouldn’t we have suffered a rash of small pet Mad Cow disease by now? Isn’t the whole problem that cows are eating cows? Dogs eating dogs can’t be right? And what about euthanized dogs? They obviously had some illness, and now we’re feeding that illness to our dogs? Why is my dog so healthy eating Pedigree? Her vet says she’s one of the healthiest dogs she’s ever seen! Strong and well muscled, shiny coat, clean ears, bright eyes…
By the way, I think my friend also feeds her cats some chicken once in a while, although it ‘makes her sick’ to do so.
I find this claim dubious, but it wouldn’t be the first claim by PETA that has proven to be grossly inaccurate or downright incorrect. (And heck, I’m a vegetarian!). Let’s also remember that PETA is not about protecting animals - it’s about enforcing vegetarianism. But, that’s a topic for GD.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it is true - that animal shelters sell the euthanized animals to rendering plants for inclusion in pet food. Animal shelters cannot care for all of the animals they receive. Some are sick or injured beyond saving. Why should the remains of these animals be discarded or incinerated, and essentially wasted when they can serve some useful prupose? Let’s look at the benefits: The shelters receive a modest fee to help recoup the cost of caring for a doomed animal and fewer farm animals need to be sacrificed to manufacture pet food. That seems to be right in line with PETA’s goals, if they were really about protecting animals. The only con here is that it makes some people queasy. To them, I say - grow up.
By the way, I studied anatomy and physiology using a euthanized cat that had been acquired from an animal shelter and prepared for the purpose. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from it.
In HS Zoology, we disected a cat that came from some lab supply place. It was never clear if the cats were shelter cats that were euthanized, feral cats that were collected, or “ranch” cats that were raised to be lab bodies.
Then in our next quarter of Zo, we ourselves had to acquire a vertibrate animal to de-flesh, then reconstruct the skeleton. I myself got a cat from the shelter.
A couple of girls, too squeamish to do that or find a roadkill (not recommended since often lots of bones were broken), went to a pet store and bought rats. They then brought them to class live, then suffocated them using CCl[sub]4[/sub], which we used in our insect kill jars. As they were committing rodenticide, I looked through their bags and found a pamphlet on the care and feeding of pet rats. I told them that suffocation was not recommended for their new pets. :D:D
Your friend is really doing damage to her cats. Even the vegetarian society says that cats cannot live well on a vegetarian diet. However, if she INSISTS on putting her cats on a vegetarian diet she needs to give supplements. Here is a site that explains why, and from where she can acquire supplements.
As for as rendered animals being added to pet food, when you see the words “animal by-products” on the label, it means that there are animal parts that are not fit for human consumption included. That said, even the sites that do not have too many good things to say about commercial pet foods, don’t mention that rendered pets being used.
It makes sense to me that premium pet food companies with reputations to protect would not risk the PR nightmare that would ensue if their brand names were associated with cat meat and dog meat.
Since everybody’s answered everything except the Mad Cow thing (and the touching boobs thing, but I can skip that)…
Mad Cow Disease isn’t caused by cannibalism. Cows don’t get MCD because they ate rendered cow parts. MCD (and Krutzfield-Jacobs, the human manifestation) is believed to be caused by a prion, a misfolded protein that collects in nervous tissue (including the brain) and basically pokes hole in it. MCD is the physical symptom of this brain damage.
People can catch MCD (really, K-J, see above) from eating diseased beef, because there is no way to sterilize the meat. The disease isn’t caused by an actual organism, but by a mutated nutrient. This mutated protein will attack any nervous tissue it comes in contact with…it’s not picky. Sheep get MCD. Pigs get MCD. People get MCD.
The average dog or cat is probably more likely to get MCD from an all-beef dog or cat food than it is from one that uses rendered euthanizations. It’s worth noting that elk and deer in the West and Midwest are starting to show signs of MCD, because they’re feeding during the off-season on game ranches which use contaminated cattle feed.
And I have to agree with the general opinion on this woman’s vegetarian cats…if she finds the ingestion of meat so sickening, she should really have a hamster or gerbil or something instead of a carnivore. I’ve found that PETA’s principles often bring about the kind of outcome that they would, if they were capable of any sort of logic, decry.
sigh To clarify this statement, which by itself is obviously wrong, cows don’t get MCD just because they ate rendered cow parts. The feed has to be contaminated with the prion or else there will be no incidence of MCD. Cows had been given feed made from rendered cattle for years before MCD showed up. It’s the presence of the mutated protein that made everything go wonky.
I really need to start previewing for formatting and content…
I used to work for a veterinarian. We euthanized animals there, and we had a rendering plant come & pick up the bodies. I can’t remember where I heard this, but I was told that after the critters are ‘rendered’ the stuff is put into a number of things including pet food and lawn fertilizer (to which I said “Now that’s recycling!”). I can’t remember if my boss told me about that, or if the guy from the rendering place did, or what. I almost want to call them & ask if anyone remembers where we heard about it!
With regards to your friend’s cats, I’m with everyone else. Cats are carnivores- forcing them to eat a vegetarian diet is a kind of abuse in my book. It’s best to buy your pets a good, brand name food. The generic brands from the grocery store & even from pet stores have a lot of filler & tends to have “parts” in it like chicken beaks & feet & stuff instead of the actual meat. Dry food is better for their teeth, also in my experience I’ve found that canned food tends to make their poop softer & more stinky. (Altho I have a geriatric cat who eats canned food cos she has trouble chewing dry)
My sister, mom and I feed our cats home cooked cat food. Even though we are vegetarians, we buy ground turkey and cans of tuna (human food) and cook “kitty meatloafs”. They’ve been on this diet for over a year. One of my sister’s cats, that is very elderly, with tumors, and at the end (weeks away from death, we thought) improved dramatically with this diet. He is still alive today. All our other cats showed a great improvement on the home-cooked food. Glossier coats, clear eyes, no diarhea, etc.
The commercial pet food out there is gross. Nasty. It can make your pet ill. Some of the brands you get at the vets (Science Diet, etc.) are better, but really, we tried them all. My sister’s ailing cat wasn’t getting that much better with them. But with the home-cooked food, he’s better. So judge for yourself. Besides, the home-cooked kitty meatloaf is actually cheaper (or at least not any more expensive) than the expensive canned food. And it’s SO much better for your pet!
Oh, and of course, feeding your pets an all-vegetarian diet is not appropriate at all.
My sister had a cat. It preferred the dog food they fed their great danes and ate nothing but. It went blind because dog food doesn’t have that chemical in it that cats need to see (felines are one of the few mammals that don’t make their own and have to get it from other animals). Your friend is blinding her cat.
