hink that stuff in the 50lbs bag is perfectly healthy for your pets and unloved elderly relatives to eat?

Think again and read on, if you dare.

More recent updates are added on top.

September 9, 2003

New vet report says that pets are almost as fat as their owners.

The report, from the National Research Council, finds that one-quarter of the dogs and cats in the western world are obese. As with humans, this puts them at risk of diabetes, heart disease and other health problems.

The article goes on to talk about the differences between cats and dogs when it comes to diet, and gives some recommendations as to how you should feed your animal.

For instance, cats and dogs make their own vitamin C, it says, and do not need it added to food. But cats and dogs in the wild need high levels of fat, it added.

The report confirms that cats are carnivores, and need meat products in their diet, whereas dogs can get along fine on balanced vegetarian diets. The best balance of protein and carbohydrates is also different for cats than for dogs.

Cat owners who worry about their pets' finicky eating habits are reassured that felines do tend to be pickier than dogs about what they eat. The report notes that in the wild, cats will catch and eat eight to 12 small animals or birds every day.

Feeding of cats should reflect this -- with 12 to 20 very small meals being offered through the day, the report says.

"Any dog owner, on the other hand, knows that his or her dog can eat its 24-hour energy need in just a few minutes at a single meal," the report reads.

"It is reported that a male Labrador once ate 10 percent of its body weight of a canned dog food."

You know people are reading that and thinking, "Well hell, my dog can eat 11% of his body weight at a time, and I'll prove it right now!"

Our Bongers has a self-refilling bowl, sort of like a bird feeder where more dry food drops down as he eats what's in the bowl, and he snacks all day, often just a few crunchies at a time. I'd say at least two dozen times a day, so yeah, that seems to match up.  He needs all of that energy for napping and pooping, after all.

But how do you know if your kitty or poocher is fat?

The report advises on how to tell if a dog is too fat -- if the ribs cannot be felt, it is probably overweight. Cats should have a slight waist but no roundness of the belly.

Being as there's no mention of a dangling udder like Dusters has, I think I can safely assume he's a bit above average.

February 7, 2003

You should really read this article about what exactly is in pet food.  It's mostly about dog and cat food, and isn't just some list of the junk that's in it, but discusses the manufacturing process, the effect on animal health that eating such stuff has, the historical development of cheap dog/cat chow, and more. I found it quite informative and interesting enough to keep me reading.

I shall quote some, as well as freelance quite a bit, as is my habit.

You may have noticed a unique, pungent odor when you open a new bag of pet food -- what is the source of that delightful smell? It is most often rendered animal fat, restaurant grease, or other oils too rancid or deemed inedible for humans.

Restaurant grease has become a major component of feed grade animal fat over the last fifteen years. This grease, often held in fifty-gallon drums, may be kept outside for weeks, exposed to extreme temperatures with no regard for its future use. "Fat blenders" or rendering companies then pick up this used grease and mix the different types of fat together, stabilize them with powerful antioxidants to retard further spoilage, and then sell the blended products to pet food companies and other end users.

These fats are sprayed directly onto extruded kibbles and pellets to make an otherwise bland or distasteful product palatable. The fat also acts as a binding agent to which manufacturers add other flavor enhancers such as digests. Pet food scientists have discovered that animals love the taste of these sprayed fats. Manufacturers are masters at getting a dog or a cat to eat something she would normally turn up her nose at.

So that black, used-motor-oil-looking goop that oozes out of the MickeyD's FF machine at the end of the day, or the slimy scum they scrape off the grill, or the drippings from raw fish before it's fried, etc. All of that waste gets siphoned into these 50 gallon drums which sit out back of your local Royberto's Taco Emporium for six months, until they are finally full and sucked out into some tanker truck.  Where they mix with other, even more foul goo, before being boiled and distilled and reprocessed and sprayed on your Friskies or Kibbles 'n Bits.

And you're grossed out when Fido pushes around the floater in his water basin?

The whole topic of nutrition and health in pet food is an interesting one, and one that most pet owners do not want to be bothered thinking about.  It's hard enough to stick to a healthy diet for yourself, so worrying about the shit in a bag of Alpo is more than most people are willing to bother with.  I've talked to health nut type people who have researched it and would no sooner feed their dog/cat Alpo (or any other major brand) than they would feed themselves McDonald's.

There are health food type pet foods, or you can feed them what you eat, with a higher concentration of raw meat, of course.  Or there are even vegetarian pet foods, with soy and rice and other such stuff.  Supposedly dogs love baked potatoes, and can be quite healthy with no meats, though it seems counter intuitive given the diet of wild dogs and wolves.

The thing is, what's in that sack of Alpo isn't anything approaching quality animal parts.  As the article says, it's rendered grease, by products like intestines and ligaments and skin, and lots of surplus filler crap, like grains unfit for human consumption.  To make dry dog food, that garbage is ground up and then processed like breakfast cereal, puffed into crunchy shapes and sprayed down with oils and greases to make it smell like flesh, or at least like something an animal will eat.  They have such sensitive noses that good smell is much more important to them than the actual taste.

People just assume that pet food is healthy and meat and something like kitty evolved eating. But it's not, it's nothing like an actual bird or mouse or raw egg or cricket or whatever else a cat might catch. Kitty's wild 300th generation grandfather didn't live on reconstituted pork skin and ground horse esophagus, coated in recycled French fry grease. 

The other thing that probably factors in is that most pet breeds today are mutations that would not survive in the wild.  I don't know how much their digestive systems have changed over the hundreds of years of selective breeding and mutation since they were domesticated, but I would assume at least somewhat, given that they have been so mutated/evolved in appearance and size and weight.

Animals do not live to an old age, normally.  They mature very quickly, become sexually active as soon as they can, and generally die in their prime from an accident or disease.  If they live longer, they are generally dead as soon as they can't fend for themselves anymore. There's not a lot of "taking care of your aged parents" in the animal world, and no hospitals with angioplasties or blood transfusions or antibiotics.

So pets, on average, live far longer than wild animals, and wild animals seldom live long enough to worry about whether or not their diets are healthy. They eat what you can catch, and they eat it fast before someone bigger takes it.  Which is to say that with wild animals, much like teenagers and single men, what they do eat is no real indication of what they should eat.

And it's pretty well known that animals can't take real quality raw meat all the time. Dogs get digestive problems if you feed them just fillet mignon, since it's too thick and meaty for them to process in a timely fashion.  Wild dogs would be eating all sorts of smaller animals, like mice, and chewing on grass and bushes and leaves and roots and such out of hunger, and that stuff helps them digest the big logs of flesh they gorged on when they made a nice kill or found some nice carrion.

So in a way, the fillers and grains and puffed air and such crap in commercial dog foods are useful, since they are digestible.  However one thing you hear about with more quality dog chow is that it's got a lot more nutrients and calories and therefore the animal needs to eat less to stay healthy.  And will not get fat, or spend as much time eating or shitting.  But is the food nutritious?

Not really.

Dr. Randy L. Wysong is a veterinarian and produces his own line of pet foods. A long-time critic of pet food industry practices, he said, "Processing is the wild card in nutritional value that is, by and large, simply ignored. Heating, cooking, rendering, freezing, dehydrating, canning, extruding, pelleting, baking, and so forth, are so commonplace that they are simply thought of as synonymous with food itself."

Processing meat and by-products used in pet food can greatly diminish their nutritional value, but cooking increases the digestibility of cereal grains. To make pet food nutritious, pet food manufacturers must "fortify" it with vitamins and minerals. Why? Because the ingredients they are using are not wholesome, their quality may be extremely variable, and the harsh manufacturing practices destroy many of the nutrients the food had to begin with.

Cereal grains are the primary ingredients in most commercial pet foods. Many people select one pet food and feed it to their dogs and cats for a prolonged period of time. Therefore, companion dogs and cats eat a primarily carbohydrate diet with little variety. Today, the diets of cats and dogs are a far cry from the primarily protein diets with a lot of variety that their ancestors ate. The problems associated with a commercial diet are seen every day at veterinary establishments. Chronic digestive problems, such as chronic vomiting, diarrhea, and inflammatory bowel disease are among the most frequent illnesses treated. These are often the result of an allergy or intolerance to pet food ingredients.

To conclude my musings on optimal diet; it's clearly not the crap in the box/can, but neither is it what animals eat in the wild, where many are malnourished.  Nor is just giving them more of what they'd eat in the wild necessarily the answer, since "whatever they can catch" isn't really a balanced food pyramid.

I would think that the best food for your pet is some sort of scientifically formulated diet with a wide variety of nutrients and supplements. As you'll see if you read the full article I've been quoting from here, there are lots of cases of pets getting sick and/or dying from various problems with pet food.  Not just contamination, but lacking odd things like Iodine. The pet food companies have historically known nothing whatsoever about pet nutrition needs, and have just bagged or canned up whatever sort of meat and fillers they could obtain the cheapest.  That seems to be mostly changed today, but for the price of pet food (generally pretty damn cheap if you don't go with designer types) you can't expect too much quality, I don't suppose.

The obvious benefit to feeding your pet healthier food is that they will not get sick, will have more energy to play, and will live longer. Mice can live 50% longer just by going to a lower calorie, healthier diet.  With a few decades more research, we may find out that cats and dogs could have been living 25% or 33% or 50% longer all along, if we'd just been feeding them the right stuff, in the correct amounts.

Given that people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on surgery and organ replacement and other such ridiculous expenses for their pets, not to mention all the toys and furniture and treats (which may well be unhealthy and shortening their lives), I would think that getting their pet on a really healthy diet would be a bigger priority than it seems to currently be, given how many people just dump a bunch of Alpo in Rover's bowl and figure he'll be fine.

I don't have a dog or a cat, and my pets get complete extremes of diet.

My rats eat everything, basically anything I eat if there's a bit left of, I give to them, along with their staples of canned corn, rice, and alotta dry rat chow, which I'm lucky to see them eat half of. (The half they like.)  They get almost no sugar and very little salt, and not much meat, and aside from probably being overfed, they couldn't ask for much better.

My snakes are the other extreme, and they eat one thing, and one thing only.  That thing being rats. Snakes aren't real big on salad. However given that most of the rats have been Hansel and Greteled on the above-mentioned diet, I'm assuming that's good enough for the snakes.  And I've had the slithery ones for 8 and 6 years, and both are very healthy, so there you are.

I doubt I'll ever own a dog, but if I do get a cat again some day (likely I will not have rats/snakes at that point) I would probably try to do some of their clever sample cat food recipes, but I don't know how long I'd stick with all of this:

Feed an adult cat as much as she will eat in 20-30 minutes. Refrigerate leftovers promptly. Feed adult cats twice a day. Recipe provides approximately 3 servings.

CHOOSE ONE PROTEIN SOURCE:
(meat amounts given in raw weight)

• 1/2 lb boneless chicken breast or thigh, minced
• 6 oz ground turkey, or minced turkey (dark meat)
• 1/2 lb lean beef, minced
• 1/2 lb beef, chicken or turkey heart, ground or minced
• About 3 times a week, include 1 chopped hard-boiled or scrambled egg
• Optional: once a week, substitute 4 oz organic liver for 1/2 of any meat source
• Optional: once every 2 weeks, substitute 4 oz tuna (packed in water, no salt), 6 oz sardines (canned) or 5 oz salmon (canned, with bones) for any meat source. Do not use canned fish as a protein source for cats who are prone to urinary tract problems.
• Optional: for cats needing a lower protein diet, add cup cooked white rice.

Supplement with goldfish, served Gollum style.

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