Pet Food and Feeding: Personal Ruminations

The big, multinational pet food manufacturers — a subsidiary of our non sustainable and increasingly toxic agribusiness industry — and still far too many veterinarians, tell people not to feed their pets human food. "Dog food is for dogs, cat food for cats — all scientifically formulated and properly balanced for health and maintenance" is the constant refrain. What goes into manufactured pet foods of the kind that concerns us here are ingredients that food scientists and engineers have put together from the byproducts of the human food and beverage industries and fast food restaurants that recycle used cooking oil and baked goods into pet food. These kinds of pet foods and pet snacks soaking in sugars, salts, and propylene glycol, are akin to the junk, convenience and fast foods that are now being recognized as causing and contributing to a host of costly and disabling diseases in consumers.

 

I am an advocate of whole, organic foods that are biologically appropriate for the species. Food for dogs is different from "Dog Food" — it's human food quality, but with less grains — and none for cats. Food for cats is not the same as food for dogs because cats are different physiologically and are obligatory carnivores. Many cat foods are not biologically appropriate because they are primarily based on plant by-products like corn gluten, wheat "middlins," rice bran and soy.

 

I learned my first lesson about manufactured and adulterated human food at the age of nine when my dog Rover developed running fits, racing through the neighborhood in absolute terror, shaking and having petit mal seizures and snapping at flies that he seemed to imagine were chasing him. I too was terrified, but I caught him, carried him home and sat with him in a dark place to help him calm down. He began to improve after he had vomited several times.

 

I later learned that he had stolen a loaf of white bread from a neighbor and it had been bleached with the chemical called Agene — nitrogen trichloride — that causes running fits in dogs. So much for human junk processed foods! My parents only bought real bread — whole wheat, Hovis, locally baked.

 

Then as a vet student I worked on sheep farms and learned what sheepdogs were usually fed — a porridge of flaked maze. I did a survey and found that many of these hard working dogs developed a debilitating disease that the shepherds called Black Tongue, canine pellagra. Some got better around lambing time when they could eat the afterbirth placentas. This provided a vital source of tryptophan, the precursor to niacin or Vitamin B3, a deficiency of which was shortening the lives of many sheepdogs, even national trial champions!

 

Many of the coal miners in my part of northern England kept greyhounds and whippets, and they put linseed oil in their food to make their coats shine — we call it flax seed oil today — the latest pet food industry "discovery" additive to sickening dry dog food, sixty years later.

 

The miners would also put a small lump of yellow rock sulfur in their dogs' water bowls that they felt was good for their joints and protected against distemper and other infections. Modern science is rediscovering the values of such old folk medicine.

 

The pet owners in those days would get part of their dog and cat food from the local butcher — lights (lungs) green tripe, and other nutritious trimmings and organ parts that were fresh and un-processed. Dogs would have knuckle-bones to chew on — best thing for their teeth and joints, because the cartilage included nutraceuticals like chondriotin and glucosamine that are the latest discovery to go into manufactured pet food formulations — sixty years later. The most common nutritional problem in those days was secondary nutritional hyperparathyroidism seen as crippling rickets in dogs, and osteoporosis/ osteogenesis imperfect — in cats, easily corrected lack of calcium deficiency in the diet. Skin problems were fixed with fish oil or linseed oil,  by not giving cats any seafood, or dogs with diarrhea, horse meat.

 

When pet food ingredients were whole and simple, so were the nutrition-related maladies and solutions. Now, the multiple, fragmented, depleted, denatured, bleached, and once or twice already processed and cooked ingredients made from the byproducts of the human food industry, and synthetic additives, nutrition-related maladies and solutions are more complex and costly than ever. The nutritive value and healthfulness of meat, dairy, and poultry products are likewise jeopardized by food industry byproducts being recycled into their feed.

 

Veterinarians are charmed by the pet food industry seminars, scientific reports and lavish grants to their colleges that advance our understanding of nutraceuticals, like the new pet food ingredient miracles of taurine, L-carnitine, and omega fatty acids; nutritional genomics or nutrigenics, and nutritional epigenetics. The end product is more special diets, prescription-only formulations for specific health problems that arise predominantly from dietary deficiencies, imbalances, and related intestinal dysbiosis.

 

We should be wary of this kind of reductionism that continues to justify testing pet food ingredients and supplements on cats and dogs in contracted laboratories around the world. There would be no need for such continued animal testing, long-term cage-confinement and suffering, if whole food ingredients of known origin and content were used to make wholesome food for pets and people alike. Now all the super-antioxidant nutraceuticals and other supplements that are being put into new and improved manufactured, convenience foods, especially healthy snacks, beverages and pet foods, are a prop, a science-based piece of quackery when the basic diet of most consumers — 20 million of whom are morbidly obese in the US alone, — and of our dogs and cats — remains unchanged.