I take it that you’ve never seen the movie Never Cry Wolf (very cool film, by the way). Mice are listed in survival guides as a legitimate source of nutrition. Many small animals are more edible than we are used to believing. When my older brother was a child, he stayed overnight once at a friend’s house, whose family were dedicated outdoorspeople. They sent him and his friend out into the barn with BB guns to shoot sparrows, and when they had enough of them, the mother of the family dressed them all, carved what meat there was out of them (just a US quarter-sized piece on either side of the breast), and made a sparrow pie out of them (rather like chicken pot pie, only with sparrows).
My brother said it was one of the best things he’d ever eaten.
Mice are meat, too. Never had one myself, but I wouldn’t be afraid of it: cut the feet off, skin it, pound it with a rock to pulverize the bones (too small to remove, but a good source of calcium), and cook them like stew meat. Probably a bit crunchy, but probably not bad.
I’ve never tasted mice, but I wouldn’t be afraid to…if they’re cooked right.
The standards are lower, but they’re not low to the point where the food would be hazardous to your health. Millions of people worldwide eat things that are “dirtier” every day.
No, I don’t wash the bowl every time. I see no reason to do so. The food itself, while not steril, wouldn’t be covered in harmful bacteria, and a dog’s saliva isn’t cause for concern once it’s dried. Whatever bacteria there was was apparently benign because the kid suffered no ill effects.
shrug How long had it been in the bag before I poured it out? The bags are not air-tight.
I know of no diseases which humans can catch from dried traces of dog saliva. My dogs are immunized and they don’t roam around to where they would be exposed to rabies and the like, anyway.
A dog may be germy, but so are we. Everything’s germy. Unless a kid has an auto-immune deficiency the ordinary germs that they come in contact with every day won’t hurt them. It may even be that it’s a bit beneficial, because it helps build a health immune system. (Some studies have suggested that kids raised in an ultra-clean environment may be more succeptible to allergies and bugs.)
As a long time owner of cats, I can assure you that cats pick their food by smell and not taste. In fact, some cats will stop eating when their sinuses get stuffed up and they can’t smell the food. I had to force feed one of my cats once for this very reason. If it doesn’t smell right to the cat, it never gets into the mouth to be tasted.
Was it the dry food, or the wet food? Because the dry food seems okay, and I’ve tried the Milk Bones (curiosity killed the cat, you know) but that wet food smells like gravy-coated death. I wouldn’t give it to my baby or the dog.
if the pet food standards are lower than those for human food, there must be a higher risk, or else you’re saying that the human standards are set significantly higher than they need to be.
This just doesn’t seem to make any sense at all - OK, I’ll admit that I was under the mistaken impression we were talking about a mixture of kibble and more moist canned/‘sausage’ dog food, but it’s ridiculous to imagine that a bowl covered with dog saliva wouldn’t be anything but teeming with bacteria.
Noted, but that’s a sample size of one, and we’re not talking about whether or not the kid got away with it, we’re talking about whether there were signiciant risks - that was your assertion - that there was no cause for concern.
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I know of no diseases which humans can catch from dried traces of dog saliva.
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Several kinds of food poisoning pathogens at least, I would imagine (dogs don’t use toilet paper or shampoo).
I’ve heard of these studies too, and they are all too often mentioned to try to dismiss arguments such as this one - Do you happen to know if the studies suggested exposure to food poisoning pathogens? I suspect they did not.
At some point, you’re going to tell me that you let your dog lick your face; I feel sure of it.
No, but I’m not all that concerned about it. Yeah, there’s a slight risk that the food might be infested with e.coli, but I don’t think it’s likely. After all, dogs are succeptible to food-bourne illness as well, and I’ve seen no ill effects on their part. (By the way, this is a high-quality food we’re discussing, not that Old Roy kind which I wouldn’t feed to a dog I hated.)
EVERYTHING is covered in bacteria. Right now, your skin teems with it. Something like 20% of people have staph bacteria on their skin. But there’s also good, bad and indifferent bacteria. The bowl may be covered with bacteria but are any of them bad ones, or is it benign? Babies put all sorts of stuff into their mouths-- the other day a friend told me that she caught her baby chewing on her dog’s chewtoy. Kinda gross, yes, but it’s not something to panic about.
Well, to answer that question exactly, I’d need to take a swab of the surfaces of the bowl and grow a culture to see what is there. Not too many bacteria thrive in dry envionments, and that’s what you’d have in dry kibble, especially if the dog licks the bowl clean afterwards.
In foreign countries where refrigeration and sanitary conditions such as we have do not exist, the people still manage to get on pretty well. I submit that if you’ve been “poisoned” all your life (as was your mother before her) you build up a natural resistance to food-bourne pathogens. You’d have to. Think about it-- whenever you go to Mexico, they tell you not to drink the water, but the locals do. Apparently, they must be “used” to that bacteria and have built up a resistance to it. I’m certainly no expert in this area, and this is just my WAG, but it seems logical.
People didn’t used to wash plates like they do today. Back in the Tudor age, people wiped their plates with bread after a meal and that was considered clean enough. Spices were prized for their ability to mask the “off” taste in aging meat. There certainly were deaths from it, but people weren’t dropping like flies even under those bad conditions.
While modern hygeine has certainly reduced the death rate from poisoned food and water, humans can survive on much, much reduced standards. I think sometimes we take the idea that everything should be steril too far. We’re almost paranoid about it.
Actually, I don’t. I don’t like the tactile sensation. I do let them lick my hands, though, and I’m not studious about washing them afterwards. I do wash before I prepare food and the like, but I’ve been known to chew my nails. I’m sure I get traces of dried dog saliva in mouth on occasion. I have three affectionate dogs, so my odds of getting sick if my dogs’ saliva carries harmful bacteria is pretty high. I can report, however, that thus far, I’ve had no illnesses in more than a decade of dog ownership.
I don’t know about where you live, but in the U.S., no major brand of hot dog uses meat by-products. U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations stipulate that meat is limited to skeletal muscle; any other animal product is meat by-product, and must be included in the name of the product on its label. For example, “Beef Hot Dogs With Beef By-Products.”
I know; the problem occurs when they get transferred onto a growth medium (and I did think we were talking about a mixture including moist canned dog food) and are given time to reproduce.
I’d ask for a cite on that if it was relevant; back in the Tudor age, people occasionally dropped dead for reasons that linked to any specific cause.
I have read that this is a myth; spices were expensive; anyone wealthy enough to afford them would be eating fresh meat.
I understand the most popular cat food in the UK is ‘rabbit.’ In the US it is not even sold, as few people can tell the difference between ‘rabbit’ and ‘bunny.’
It’s possibly worth noting at this point that whilst ‘mouse flavoured cat food’ would have to contain mice as a discernible flavouring ingredient, ‘mouse flavour cat food’ would not; it merely needs to have a flavour that is reminiscent of mice, but may in fact be manufactured from something else, such as hedgehogs or guinea pigs.
Praps I need to read this thread more carefully to follow the side track, but animals are susceptible to many bacteria that humans are not, and vice versa. So what you’d eat that would make you sick would not necessarily make your cat sick, and vice versa. The bacteria in your dog’s mouth may make you sick but not your dog, and so forth. Why would we think that the FDA’s standards for human consumption should be appropriate for our animals? Or vice versa? Setting aside for the moment the matter of what your dog would eat that you’d never put in your mouth, the standards of what might be safe for him and what might not be safe for you are the things that should consider in determining what you ought to consume.
