December 11, 2004

• Great, I screwed up my first FPP
• Cheap dog food is often made from dog meat. The Soylent Green of the dog world.
• Doesn't seem screwed up to me - works fine.
• Dogs? We feed it to preschoolers around here.
• Where is the documentation? While I won't put it beneath pet food manufacturers (who rely on nasty rendering) I would think the claimant would at least have a scanned copy of the study posted or some of the correspondence.
• Here
• And if yer lookin for a good dog or cat food these guys rock.
• who's webpage is that? the piece is written in 1st person, but who is that person? the website's owner? or is this just a mirror? etc? and it is rather unsettling that i feed my puppy... horse and dog meat, every day. she likes meat, though, and i don't tell her where it comes from. there are a few vegetarian brands, i think. what are they, again? and has anyone had success w/ them? wake up, leo... the meatrix has you.
• More FDA info (At least no cats and dogs!)
• People who think pets belong in a cage all day long probably don't much care about their food, either. Harrumph.
• More kibble, more kibble! Speak dog! Speak, I say! What? Sodium Pento thal? Oh. Never mind.
• So according to the (poorly written) article, some vet found out that pet food has minute traces of an animal euthanizing agent. The facts from the report confirm that the source is *not* rendered cats or dogs. My questions are: 1) Isn't it more likely the source is rendered farm animals, euthanized with sodium pentobarbital? 2)Why would it be bad to use cats and dogs in pet food? The animals don't care. And wedge: Your dog is a carnivore. Not feeding her meat would be cruel.
• So according to the (poorly written) article, some vet found out that pet food has minute traces of an animal euthanizing agent. The facts from the report confirm that the source is *not* rendered cats or dogs. My questions are: 1) Isn't it more likely the source is rendered farm animals, euthanized with sodium pentobarbital? 2)Why would it be bad to use cats and dogs in pet food? The animals don't care. And wedge: Your dog is a carnivore. Not feeding her meat would be cruel.
• Why would it be bad to use cats and dogs in pet food Prions
• Actually, I thought dogs had moved over to an omnivore lifestyle. And I can't think of any circumstance where systematic long term cannibalism is a good idea.
• I would have assumed they used dogs in cat food and vice versa.
• Humans could be considered carnivores but there are plenty that choose to not eat meat. I highly doubt a dog is going to complain about an all vegetarian diet or have dietary problems down the road, but feel free to link to studies the prove otherwise.
• *studies that*....last time I try and post while drinking
• yes Ol'Roy Krunchy Bites & Bones yes Ol'Roy Premium Formula with Chicken Protein and Rice yes Ol'Roy Premium Formula with Chicken Protein and Rice yes Ol'Roy High Performance with Chicken Protein and Rice yes Ol'Roy Krunchy Bites & Bones Ol' Roy = Wal-Mart store brand. Just thought I'd pick on them.
• This explains why my friend Rambo dropped dead - I was convinced it was a conspiracy against me.
• I wonder if munch munch munch that includes dry munch munch munch dog food as well as munch munch munch canned or if it's only munch mu ...
• Dogs can be vegitarians (cats cannot). You just have to make sure they are still nutritionally supported -- plenty of protein, etc. Some friends of mine have made their dog vegitarian, and it actually saved her life. She has a liver condition, and keeping her diet low fat/low protein has extended her life. My dog eats meat. And whatever else he can find on the ground, and cat poo (dog candy!)... Omnivore indeed! Also, I feel weird about recycling animals who have been euthanized back into the food chain. Isn't this how mad cow spread? Not that dogs are in our food chain like cows are (we hope), but they live so closely with people that a disease like that could potentially jump to us. At the very least, lots of people would be sad because of their dogs died.
• Dogs might be able to be vegetarian, but I'm not gonna be the one to tell Lil' Woogums he can't have steak. Seriously, this business of grinding up dead domestic animals to put back in pet food is deranged. In nature, it's one thing - but some jackass somewhere had to come up with the idea. Hope his/her descendants are skeletonized by a pack of feral chihuahuas.
• Amazing what corporations do in the name of making money, isn't it? Well, makes sense to me now why they named it "Ol' Roy" dog food.
• The news that euthanized pets get put into dog/cat food has been around for a while. Ann Martin's book Food Pets Die For gives a thorough accounting of the situation. The big problem, of course, is that it's usually not HEALTHY pets that get rendered into food. Vet's offices are a big source of animals for rendering, and these animals were euthanized because they were sick. They're likely to contain tumors, diseased tissue, contagious diseases, and all manner of medications - including, obviously, the chemicals used to euthanize them. When the scandal initially broke, it caused a huge PR debacle for a lot of US pet food manufacturers. My understanding is that most decent pet food manufactured and sold in the US no longer contains rendered pets. (Cheap brands and food manufactured elsewhere still do.) If you're worried, and don't have the time to look up statistics on your brand of choice, just check the label. If it specifies the kind of meat used (e.g. "chicken byproducts"), it's fine. If it just says "meat" (as in "meat byproducts"), then it's probably got sick dogs and cats in it. In which case, it's time to step up to a better brand. Premium brands cost a little more, but they're much better for your pet - you'll be surprised at what a difference they make. And since you feed less [because premium brands contain less in the way of useless fillers], it's not as expensive per meal as you'd think.
• At 70 milligrams sodium pentobarbital per kilogram of horse (to euthanize it), and an average of 17 parts per billion dogfood contamination by same chemical, we can come up with about 1 animal in 4100 being euthanized by barbiturate overdose being fed into the dogfood input stream. Now, assuming that the wet weight of the meat in the kibble is 5 times what the dry weight is, that would increase the barbiturate dosed animal input proportion to about 1 in 800. Either way, I don't think the numbers support a "soylent brown" scenario of animal shelters being the primary input to the kibble factories.
• Dogs can be vegitarians (cats cannot) Not quite vegitarian but when my parents grew up in Japan it was common practice to feed cats rice sprinkled with just enough fish flakes (dashi) to fool the cats into eating the rice. Apparently the cats did not suffer from this, although they likely ate mice/birds/insects as well.
• And babies...we all know what cats are like.
• I once heard that 30% of all pet food is eaten by homeless people, but when I went to look it up now I couldn't find any info to back it up. Anyone know if this is true?
• Apparently it's difficult to give cats a vegetarian diet but it's possible if you give them enough protein and supplement with necessary nutrients. If I had a cat or a dog I'd feed them the most verifiably natural food I could. I shudder to think about what's in purina et. al and how it got there.
• Bacon Bacon Bacon Bacon Bacon! Only one thing tastes like bacon and that's BACON!!