All canned meat for pets seems to involve just about every common meat except for pork: chicken, turkey, beef, salmon, shrimp, all manner of white fish and tuna. So why not some pig? Is it for safety reasons? Do humans use pig for more profitable products? What gives?
Humans taste like pork, and we don’t want to give our pets any ideas.
Actually, I have no idea. But I’ll guess as you did that it’s more profitable not to use deadpig in pet food.
Here’s my WAG. Pet food is marketed to the owner’s tastes, not to the pet’s. America is not a real big pork-eating society–we eat more beef and poultry. Also, pork “flavor” isn’t a really appealing “flavor”, in terms of market research. Pork itself doesn’t really have a distinctive flavor, not the way “beef flavor” and “chicken flavor” do.
Also, when you say “shrimp” and “salmon” to the owner, he thinks “Luxury!”. When you say “pork” to the owner, he thinks of negative connotations, like “pork barrel projects” and “porky” meaning “obese”.
There’s a reason the Pork Council has had that “It’s The Other White Meat!” campaign running for such a long time–they’re desperate.
Per capita meat consumption statistics, if anybody’s interested.
http://www.eatchicken.com/statistics/consumption_pounds_60-02.cfm
Damn you Johnny L.A.! I clicked on this thread with a perfect little bon mot about fido developing a “fever for the flavor” only to see that you had beaten me to it.
::shuffles away
I always wondered how come they decided to make beef food for pets… I mean in the real wild, do you think our little cats if wild could eat a cow?? It just always thought it was funny…!
Hmm, you may be onto something there, DDG. Although I must say, my cats loooove pork. I make tenderloins every so often and both of them go into non-stop begging mode every time. Thanks for the input. And Johnny L.A., you made me giggle!
I just had another thought about it: Pork tends to be pretty fatty, so maybe the meat isn’t suitable because it’s not worth the effort to get the fat content down to acceptable levels for pet food.
If they used low quality pork for pet food, then what would they make hot dogs out of?
i think that part of it may be that pigs are more often house pets than cows or chickens are. i know that it’s rare for someone to have a pet pig, but it’s even rarer to have a pet chicken, and unheard of to have a pet cow. this is the same reason why we don’t have pet food made of cats (which i think is a good idea). people would think that was gross and wrong, even though it’s no different than killing a cow for food. less practical of course, as a cat would not yield much meat. speaking of yielding meat, a cow can feed a helluva lot more cats than a pig could.
Here is the reason. I used Google and found this page on the Purina website:
http://www.catchow.com/search_mentor.asp?combinedID=21222&TidyCats=no
Basically, the reason is that Americans aren’t as interested in buying pork pet food as they are in buying other flavors.
And why dont they have pictures of lovely bunnies playing in the meadow on the tin. Or cows grazing?
[hijack]
In Golden Gate Park there is an area in the middle called the Buffalo Paddock. When I saw this on the map, I did not think they actually had any buffalo in there, but in fact they do. It is really a rather strange and incongruous thing to be walking through a park in a large city and come across a bunch of buffalo!
Anyway, when I was there on a visit and saw the buffalo, there was a cat in the field behind the herd, creeping up on them, looking for all the world as if he actually expected to bag himself a buffalo! It was pretty hilarious.
[/hijack]