Cow brains. Sheep guts. Chicken heads. Road kill.
Rancid grain. These are a few of the so-called nutritionally balanced
ingredients found in the commercial pet food served to companion animals
every day.
More than 95 percent of US companion animals derive their
nutritional needs from a single source: processed pet food. When people
think of pet food, many envision whole chickens, choice cuts of beef, fresh
grains, and all the nutrition that a dog or cat may ever need -- images that
pet food manufacturers promote in their advertisements. What these companies
do not reveal is that instead of whole chickens they have substituted
chicken heads, feet, and intestines. Those choice cuts of beef are really
cow brains, tongues, esophagi, fetal tissue dangerously high in hormones,
and possibly diseased and even cancerous meat. Those whole grains have had
the starch removed for corn starch powder and the oil extracted for corn
oil, or they are hulls and other remnants from the milling process. Grains
used that are truly whole have usually been deemed unfit for human
consumption because of mold, contaminants, poor quality, or poor handling
practices. Pet food is one of the worlds most synthetic edible products,
containing virtually no whole ingredients.
Pet food manufacturers
have become masters at inducing companion animals to eat things cat and dogs
would normally spurn. Pet food scientists have learned that it's possible to
take a mixture of inedible scraps, fortify it with artificial vitamins and
minerals, preserve it so that it can sit on the shelf for more than a year,
add dyes to make it attractive, and then extrude it into whimsical shapes
that appeal to the human consumer. For this, pet food companies can expect
to earn $9 billion in sales in 1996.
Scraps and Byproducts
For
years, many care givers have tried to avoid feeding their companion animals
people food leftovers, having been warned by veterinarians about the heath
problems they can cause. Yet much scrap material from the human food
industry is ending up in dogs and cats dinner bowls. What the consumer
purchases and what the manufacturer advertises are often two entirely
different products, and this difference threatens the animals healthy,
especially as they age. Learning to read ingredient labels and taking the
time to read them carefully is crucial to making an educated choice when
purchasing pet food. Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight
(heaviest first) under standards established by the Center for Veterinary
Medicine for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The name of the product
(in most states) is dictated by the regulations of the American Association
of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO). The trouble is, AAFCO standards can lead
to deceptive product names due to the weight and volume variations between
wet and dry ingredients. Also, the average consumer has no idea what the
definitions for the listed ingredients mean. Preservatives, vitamins,
minerals, flavorings, and cereal make up most of what the companion animal
eats.
It is not happenstance that four of the top five major pet food
companies in the United States are subsidiaries of major multinational food
production companies: Colgate Palmolive (which produces Hills Science Diet),
Heinz, Nestle, and Mars )see The Corporate Connection). From a business
standpoint, multi-national food companies owning pet food manufacturers is
an ideal relationship. The multinationals have captive market in which to
dump their waste products, and the pet food manufacturers have a direct
source of bulk materials. Both make a profit from selling scraps that
originate from places far worse than the dinner table. In his 1986 book Pet
Allergies veterinarian Al Plechner sums up what goes into companion animals
food: Condemned parts and animals rejected for human consumption are
routinely rerouted for commercial pet foods. A similar fate applies to
so-called 4-D animals. These are food animals picked up dead, or that are
dying, diseased, or disabled, and do not meet human-food qualifications.
They are processed straightaway for companion animal consumption. Little
goes to waste. Says Plechner, Food processing refuse of all sorts winds up
in your animals dinner bowls. Moldy grains. Rancid foods. Meat meal. The
latter is ground-up slaughterhouse discards often containing disease-ridden
tissue and high levels of hormones and pesticides, the very things that may
have contributed to the death of the steer or hog. A decade later, his words
still apply. When cattle, swine, chickens, lambs, or other animals meet
their ends at a slaughterhouse, the choice cuts -- lean muscle tissue and
organs prized by humans -- are trimmed away from the carcass for human
consumption. Whatever remains of the carcass (bones, blood, pus, intestines,
ligaments, subcutaneous fat, hooves, horns, beaks, and any other parts not
normally consumed by humans) is, according to the pet food industry,
perfectly fit as a protein source for cat and dog food.
The Pet Food
Institute, the trade association of pet food manufacturers, acknowledges in
its 1994 Fact Sheet the importance of using byproducts in pet foods as
additional income for processors and farmers. The purchase and use of these
ingredients by the pet food industry not only provides nutritional foods for
pets at reasonable costs, but provides an important source of income to
American farmers and processors of meat, poultry, and seafood products for
human consumption. Many of these remnants are indigestible and provide a
questionable source of nutrition. The amount of nutrition provided by meat
byproducts, meals, and digests varies from vat to vat of this animal protein
soup. A vat filled with chicken feet, beaks, and viscera is going to make
available a lower amount of protein than a vat of breast meat. James Morris
and Quinton Rogers, professors with Department of Molecular Biosciences at
the University of California at Davis Veterinary School of Medicine, assert
that there is virtually no information on the bio-availability of nutrients
for companion animals in many of the common dietary ingredients used in pet
foods. These ingredients are generally byproducts of the meat, poultry and
fishing industries, with the potential for wide variation in nutrient
composition. Claims of nutritional adequacy of pet foods based on the
current AAFCO nutrient allowances (profiles) do not give assurances of
nutritional adequacy and will not until ingredients are analyzed and
bioavailability values are incorporated. Meat byproducts, the catch-all term
of the pet food industry, is a misnomer because these byproducts contain
little if any meat. Byproducts contain little if any meat. Byproduct are
animal parts leftover after the meat has been stripped from the bone.
Chicken byproducts include heads, feet, entrails, lungs, spleens, kidneys,
brains, livers, stomachs, noses, blood, and intestines free of their
contents. What the pet food manufactures fail to mention is that most
byproducts, digests and meals are also filled with other substances, such as
cancerous tissue cut from the carcass, plastic foam packaging containing
spoiled meat from supermarkets, ear tags, spoiled slaughterhouse meat, road
kill, and pieces of downer animals.
Canned Cannibalism
Another
source of meat that isn't mentioned on pet food labels is pet byproducts,
the bodies of dogs and cats. In 1990 the San Francisco Chronicle reported
that euthanized companion animals were found in pet foods. Although pet food
company executives and the National Renderers Association vehemently denied
the report, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the FDA
confirmed the story. The pets serve a viable purpose by providing foodstuff
for the animal feed chain, said Lea McGovern, chief of the FDA's animal feed
safety branch. Because of the sheer volume of animals rendered and the
similarity in protein content between poultry byproducts and processed dogs
and cats, rendering plant workers say it would be impossible for purchasers
to know the exact contents of what they buy. In fact, Sacramento Rendering
cited by inspectors five times in the past two years for product-labeling
violations.
Grease and Grain
The most nutritious dry pet food
is no better than the worst if an animals will not eat it. Pet food
scientists have discovered that spraying the kibble or pellets with a
combination of refined animal fat, lard, kitchen grease, and other oils too
rancid or deemed inedible for humans makes an otherwise bland or distasteful
product palatable. Animal fat is mainly packing house waste or supermarket
trimmings from the packaging of meats. Animals love the taste of this
sprayed fat, which also acts as a binding agent to which manufacturers may
add other flavor enhancers. The pungent odor wafting from an open bag of pet
food is created by this concoction. Restaurant grease has become a major
component of feed-grade animal fat over the last 15 years. Often held in
50-gallon drums for weeks or months in extreme temperatures, this grease is
usually kelp outside with no regard for its safety or further use. The
rancid grease is then picked up by fat blenders who mix the animal and
vegetable fats together, stabilize them with powerful antioxidants to
prevent further spoilage, and then sell the blended products to pet food
companies. Rancid, heavily preserved fats are extremely difficult to digest
and can lead to a host of animal health problems, including digestive
upsets, diarrhea, gas, and bad breath. Once considered a filler by the pet
food industry, the amount of grain products included in pet food has risen
over the last decade as the American population has focused its attention
away from consuming beef and toward a healthier diet of grains and
vegetables. Commonly two of the top three pet food ingredients are some form
of grain products. For instance, Alpo's Beef Flavored Dinner lists ground
yellow corn, soybean meal, and poultry byproduct meal as its top three
ingredients. 9 Lives Crunchy Meals lists ground yellow corn, corn gluten
meal, and poultry byproduct meal as its top three ingredients. Of the top
four ingredients of Purina's O.N.E. Dog Formula -- chicken, ground yellow
corn, ground wheat, and corn gluten meal -- two are corn-based products from
the same source. This is an industry practice known as splitting. When
components of the same whole ingredient are listed separately (ground yellow
corn and corn gluten meal) it appears that there is less corn than chicken,
even when the whole ingredient may weigh more than the chicken. Soy is
another common ingredient in many pet foods. It is used by the manufacturers
to boost the claimed protein content and add bulk so that when animals eat a
product containing soy they will fell more sated. Tofu is suitable for
humans, but most forms of soybean do not agree with a dog or cat's digestive
system. Like many other pet food ingredients, soy is virtually unusable by
an animal's body. Being obligate carnivores, cats have little ability to
digest any nutrients from soy. The problem is worse for dogs because they
lack the essential amino acid to digest soy products. Soy has also been
linked to bloat and gas in many dogs.
Additives and Processing
Pet food industry critics note that many of the ingredients (such as
corn syrup and corn gluten meal) used as humectants to prevent oxidation
also bind water molecules in such a way that the food actually sticks to the
animal's colon and may cause blockage. Blockage of the colon may cause an
increased risk of cancer of the colon or rectum. Two-thirds of the pet food
manufactured in the United States contains synthetic preservatives added by
the manufacturer. Of the remaining third, 90 percent includes ingredients
already stabilized by synthetic preservatives. Because most pet food
contains large percentages of added fat, a stabilizer is needed to maintain
the quality of the food. Sodium nitrite, often used as a coloring agent,
fixative, and preservative, has the ability to combine with natural stomach
and food chemicals (secondary amends) to create nitrosamines, powerful
cancer-causing agents, according to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food
Additives.
Many pet foods advertised as preservative-free do not
contain preservatives. Almost all rendered meats have synthetic
preservatives added as stabilizer, but manufacturers aren't required to list
preservatives they themselves haven't added. Premixed vitamin additives can
also contain preservatives. In the 1003 Journal of the American Veterinary
Medical Association, veterinarian Philip Roudebush reported finding low
concentrations of synthetic antioxidant preservatives in all analyzed
samples of products labeled as chemical free or all-natural. Other types of
additives depend on whether the pet food is semi-moist, dry or canned.
Because semi-moist food contains 25-50 percent water, antimicrobial
preservatives must be used. Propylene glycol was frequently used in cat food
until it was pulled in 1992 for causing a variety of health problems.
Processing greatly alters the nutritional value of the food ingredients.
Veterinarian R. L. Wysong states in Rationale for Animal Nutrition:
Processing is the wild card in nutritional value that is, by and large,
simply ignored. Heating, freezing, dehydrating, canning, extruding,
pelleting, baking and so forth, are so commonplace that they are simply
thought of as synonymous with food itself. Because the ingredients that pet
food companies use are not wholesome, and harsh manufacturing practices
destroy what little nutritional value the food may have had in the first
place, the final product must be fortified with vitamins and minerals.
Questionable Nutrition
How, then, can any pet food be guaranteed
to be 100 percent complete or nutritionally adequate? As long as it meets
the AAFCO minimum standards, such a guarantee can be on the label. Yet in
1994, feed tests conducted by the New York State Agriculture Department
showed 7 percent of all pet foods analyzed failed chemical analyses for
guaranteed nutrients. Other states report similar findings, with failure of
analyzed feed ranging from to 12 percent. Even if a pet food meets AAFCO
standards, certain nutritional requirements (for example, lysine) can vary
between species by as much as seven-fold. Although manufacturers clam that
millions of companion animals can thrive on a diet consisting of nothing by
commercial pet food, research and an increasing number of veterinarians
implicate processed pet food as a source of disease or as an exacerbating
agent for a number of degenerative diseases. For example, kidney disease is
on of the top three killers of companion animals. According to Plechner, the
extra protein and harsh ingredients of many pet foods place an overload on
the kidneys. Left untreated, the toxic buildup leads to vomiting, loss of
appetite, uremic poisoning, and death. Wysong adds, In the last few years,
large statistical studies have shown the link between the diet (of processed
foods) and a variety of degenerative diseases, including cancer, heart
disease, allergies, arthritis, obesity, dental disease, etc. After extensive
research, the Animal Protection Institute (API) published a Pet Food
Investigative Report to educate companion animal care givers about pet food
ingredients, ingredient definitions, labeling, and dietary ailments
resulting from processed commercial pet food, including the most commonly
know brands. Yet, whether such food is purchased at the supermarket, pet
store, or from a veterinarian, it makes little difference in terms of the
quality -- only in the cost. Since the report was published earlier this
year, API has conducted more research on holistic pet care and pet food
alternatives, but still claims that the vast majority of pet foods available
on the market today provide less that optimum nutrition for companion
animals.
It is sad to think that the food provided by animal care
givers to their four-legged friends could be hazardous to the animals';
health and longevity. Care givers should assume responsibility for providing
as healthful a diet as possible for the animals in the care. Consumers
should be informed: speak with a holistic practitioner or herbalist, or
consult your veterinarian (but be aware that a veterinarian's knowledge of
nutrition may be limited to the two weeks of nutrition he or she had
veterinary school 20 years ago). Although the ideal solution would be for
companion animals to be fed only wholesome homemade and/or vegetarian diets,
this is not an optician for everyone -- the cost and time commitment is
sometimes prohibitive. By taking more moderate steps, however, care givers
can still greatly improve a companion animals' diet and quality of life.
Tina Perry is an animal advocate with the Animal Protection Institute.
Reprinted from The Animals' Agenda
Nov/Dec 1996
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