Pet Food and Feeding: Personal Ruminations

How much have we really learned about dogs' nutritional wisdom and behavior after 40-60,000 years of domestication? They often eat dirt, feces, grass, elm tree sprouts and leaves and other herbs for good reason, not simply because they are sick, want to make themselves sick, or simply have a depraved appetite — pica. Pet owners are discouraged from allowing their dogs and cats to eat "dirt" — usually high mineral clay or rich, loamy humus, and various grasses, especially Couch and Bermuda grass. But these are rich sources of nutraceuticals, trace minerals, and even pharmacologically identified medical benefits (notably for some hepatic, digestive, urological and inflammatory conditions). The feces of deer and rabbit are packed with probiotic bacteria, and with prebiotic substances and substrates also in the grasses, that may help prevent intestinal dysbiosis in dogs and cats confined indoors or otherwise confined in unnaturally sanitized environments; and unable to self-medicate by eating herbs and soils — and different prey parts of choice!

 

Much pet food research has focused on making the inedible palatable, and the incomplete or non-nutritious ingredients complete, "balanced" and "fortified" with synthetic additives. The end result is a sickening chemical feast for pets that their kind of profit driven science, funded to find efficient ways to recycle slaughterhouse, food and beverage industry wastes, actually applauds. The pet food industry has convinced many veterinarians, and veterinary associations, that pet foods are not a cause of animals becoming ill, and that cereal-based dry foods are fine for cats.

 

As for my own veterinary ethos, I am a critic, since I advocate bioethics. I acknowledge that it is easier to be critical rather than constructive, to find fault rather than to find remedy. But I and my co-authors of Not Fit For a Dog, Dr. Elizabeth Hodgkins and Prof Marion Sharp, have applied reason and critical thinking in our efforts to remedy the cat and dog health problems associated with many popular brands of manufactured pet foods. The denial and ignorance, as well as the bad science that stand in the way of reform and progress in the pet food industry, we have confronted dispassionately and non-judgmentally as concerned and informed professionals.

 

Those who may feel misjudged, or who deny the validity of our documented concerns, must be held accountable for the continued and unnecessary health problems and suffering of companion animals from improper diets, many of which are sold world-wide for profit by veterinarians.

 

The pet food multinationals pour hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising, into support of animal shelters and adoptions, veterinary colleges, lectureships, research, conferences, seminars, cat shows, dog shows, and the American Kennel Club. One of the biggest, Hill's Pet Nutrition, along with two drug companies, gave the AVMA $4.5 million in 2008, this same pet food company giving $ 5 million soon after to a Canadian veterinary college. We need not wonder why it has taken so long for the connection between pet foods and pet health problems to be recognized.

 

This is like digging into a hornet's nest, but we must not lose perspective — it's the big multinationals using nutritional science and advertising to recycle the hazardous and potentially harmful waste of the cosmetics, food and beverage industries into livestock feed and pet foods, with added ingredients from the drug industry, and contaminants from the petrochemical- agrichemical, pesticide industry. Now more evidence is accumulating that demonstrates how much healthier livestock and poultry are when fed organic, biologically appropriate feed than what they are fed according to industry standards; and on how nutritionally inferior, even harmful (e.g. because of omega 6 excesses and vitamin A deficiencies) the produce is of conventionally fed rather than organically fed farmed animals. (The situation with farmed salmon is deplorable, the feed given leading to dioxin accumulation in the fish, and increased susceptibility to sea lice and disease).

 

After reviewing the testimonials of pet owners that attest to often spectacular improvements in animals' health and wellbeing once they are taken off these kinds of highly processed, food-industry based by-products filled with synthetic additives, I am convinced that veterinarians applying an evidence-based medical approach to pet health problems will be gratified when there is due attention given to what the patients are being fed, and appropriate dietary changes are prescribed.

 

So long as the kinds of pet food being put on the market shelves continue to be biologically inappropriate and potentially harmful to cats and dogs, the veterinary profession as I see it, is not serving the best interests of companion animals by remaining silent on this issue. But many are breaking away from the hypnotic mantra which they were conditioned to incorporate as students that main-stream pet foods are scientifically formulated and are therefore good. Consider that over the past 20 years of his holistic veterinary practice Minnesotan Dr. Will Winter, for instance, has observed and effectively treated his client's pets with a natural diet of raw meat and greens. And, in so doing, he has helped foster many important and lasting changes in dog and cat well-being, including: beautiful gums and teeth and fresh breath; shiny coats with less shedding and dandruff; less allergies for people in the house; healthier ears; a drastic reduction in fleas, ticks and lice; smaller stools, cleaner litter boxes and less urine; less inflammation of the anal glands; and, overall calmer, more centered and vibrant pets.

 

There are many veterinarians now following suit, but in the mainstream this holistic approach of integrative veterinary medicine that regards nutrition as the cornerstone of health care maintenance is seen as either quackery or not needed because there's nothing wrong with manufactured pet foods because they have been scientifically formulated. It concerns me that some veterinarians and many pet owners are seduced by the pseudo-science of manufactured pet foods that have nutraceutical additives that claim medical benefits, as for fur balls in cats, obesity, heart, joint and skin problems, not unlike the health claims made on the packages of main-stream sugar coated cereals and "health" snacks. A bag of pet food, (that could be a year old before it is opened), bearing the label claim of containing chondriotin and glucosamine, good for the joints, or L-carnitine, good for weight control, and omega fatty acids, good for the coat, give the false impression of being special, "improved," while the basic ingredients are no better than any other highly processed junk pet food. Such supplements, of dubious therapeutic levels in the food, are at best a gimmick, and worse, a cover-up window-dressing for pet food formulations deficient in essential nutrients.