This is something I have pondered around dog food as well.
There is, apparently, an old perception that pork is somehow bad/poisonous to dogs. Friends/dog minders have looked at me in horror when I’ve said I give my dog pork.
It looks, from research to be an old wives tale, probably born out of the days when we gave pigs all manner of rubbish to eat and pork could cause poisoning issues.
So, old superstitions die hard and many people avoid pork products for their pets, but cooked pork is actually totally fine.
Not a old wives tale, it used to be fairly common for people to die from eating undercooked pork. Not so common anymore, but there is a basis for the fear. This one is still a concern. So basically, there may be some real issues with feeding pork to house pets. Maybe the pet food makers don’t like being sued.
Two of my cats are on canned prescription cat food that’s mostly pork liver and other pork by-products.
I suspect that the lack of pork-flavored cat food has to do with pork’s lack of popularity relative to chicken, beef, etc. After all, pet food is purchased by people, not pets, and people impose their own food preferences and cultural biases when shopping. Religious Jewish or Muslim shoppers may be unwilling to bring pork products into the home under any circumstances, even if those items are not going to be consumed by people.
ioioio, mice are cheap to raise but their size and low protein to waste ratio make them a poor choice for industrial-scale pet food production. Most big-box pet stores sell pre-killed rodents as reptile food, though. I have no doubt that somewhere, there is a cat owner who buys frozen rats or mice as cat food.
Well, that and the fact that the vast majority of animal flesh that pets eat comes from the leftovers of the animal which the vast majority of humans don’t eat. Why raise puny mice when we got all these gross animal leftovers that our pets love and thrive on?
I think in practical terms the pet food knackery is not getting pork.
So there is no consistent supply for that reason.
All pigs are suitable to send to the human food supply abattoir…
and the bits of the pig that is difficult to sell as a cut is put into manufactured meat or pork mince. Since pigs litters are much larger, there isn’t so many sows per 1000 porkers to dispose of.
Meanwhile with beef there is a consistent supply of excess abbertoir product, and old or sick cattle that is sent to the knackery. The cow has fewer cattle in her life so there’s more cow to get rid of per 1000 calves.
And there aren’t any mouse abbatoirs (retail cat food is generally made from the leftovers of meat that the packers can’t easily process for human consumption).
So part of the reason there’s no pork pet food is that we only raise pigs for human food, and thus all pigs are processed as human food from the beginning. Other animals have alternate service paths, and when they reach the end of that service life, they are sent to the knackers in a state wholly unsuitable for human consumption, but perfectly fine for pet food.
Unfortunately there does not seem to be a good answer here. Even Cecil didn’t have a definitive answer.
I think we can make some good guesses though.
In the end it comes down to cost and what people will buy.
We know cats can eat pork just fine (i.e. they are not allergic or unable to process it).
So, it is likely that either cats don’t like it much (they are a finicky bunch) or pork is comparatively too expensive for manufacturers to put into pet food when other proteins are cheaper (e.g. fish or chicken or whatever).
Has anyone asked the cats whether they even like the taste of pork?
This might be urban legend or some manner of conjecture … but when cute lil’ Fluffy brings in a mouse and drops it un-eaten on the floor … it’s not a present … rather that big bowl of kibble tastes oh so much better than some filthy rodent … they just flat lose interest in the mouse … cats aren’t interesting in eating what they kill … to them it’s all about the cold-blooded killing, nothing more …
I don’t know where or when I got this but I’ve long understood that when pigs are slaughtered there is very little left over that is not suitable for some sort of human use – that means there is very little cheap pig product going to pet food producers who use animal parts that might otherwise go to waste.
For some reason (I walked into the wrong room at the wrong time, got handed a copy of “The Big Bang Theory and Philosophy,” and was told to be there every Wednesday until Lent) at church we are discussing TBBT. I don’t particularly appreciate how the show and its audience treat what seems to me to be perfectly normal and reasonable behavior as something to laugh at, but I went for months having BK sausage biscuits with onions and pickles for breakfast and lunch.
Nooooooo! That stuff is for making braunschweiger! Chicagoan here. Everything but the squeal. Cats don’t deserve pork.
In college, for a school project, I visited a slaughterhouse for cows.
Long story short one of the things I was amazed at was how pretty much everything was used. The bones, the hooves, the blood (that part was nasty). You name it. Almost nothing went to waste.
I cannot say I know the same is true for pigs but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. These places want to maximize profits so if they can sell it rather than pay to dump it they will do so. If they have leftover crap humans don’t want our pets get it (which is fine…just gross to us…our pets love it).
One of the world’s least popular professions? Cat mohel.
Someone I know was having problems with a cat not eating, and after trying various foods ended up trying some very expensive “medical” food with an alternate meat–supposedly sometimes pets develop adverse reactions to some animal proteins and therefore have to be switched to something new. In this case the food was duck-based, but I see that alligator, buffalo, and rabbit are available, too.
Tonight, as we had a fresh ham that was slow oven roasted…
…and as a cable channel played on old movie with John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, and Barry Fitzgerald…
…and as she asked so very nicely with her paw on my knee, I shredded some strands of pork, no more than an inch long each and I shared them with my cat.
I fed her a few, one at a time, and I was quite worried about her accidentally chapping her lips, given how she was licking them so.
Several years ago, when “pink slime” was a big news story, the autistic cow and slaughterhouse expert Temple Grandin spoke here, and I went to see her. During the Q&A, someone asked her opinion of it, and she replied that she was all for it, because it extracts an average of 15 pounds of usable (not necessarily edible) products from each cow carcass, which means we discard a lot less of it.
