"The Jungle" of the Pet Food Industry. Road kill, other pets in the food of the animals you love and care for?

The Jungle is a book by Upton Sinclair both about the wage slavery of the Gilded era and the attrocious practices of the meat packing industry which spurred the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

 Time magazine reporter Kristina Dell may have written "The Jungle" for the Pet Food Industry in "Unraveling the Pet-Food Mystery " if this information gets around enough.

Excerpt:

Rendering plants, which boil down dead animal carcasses from slaughterhouses into fats and proteins, sell cheap material that often ends up in pet food. The "meat" in your cat's kibbles could be any kind: there's no law against even using rendered material from cats and dogs in pet food. Plants can mix in anything from road kill to supermarket deli meats, and investigations by KMOV-TV in St. Louis and the Los Angeles Times have suggested that pets killed in animal shelters just might make it into the slop. The Pet Food Institute, whose members create most of the dog and cat food sold in the U.S., told the Times that pets are not allowed in their products. But the FDA has admitted to finding "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital — the chemical used to euthanize animals — in some brands of dog food. Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the U.S. said the allegations need more scrutiny. "The pet food industry is not the most transparent of industries and it has been really difficult for the public to obtain information," he says.

Well, maybe she needs to flesh it out 500 pages or so.

(BTW, I have not represented all the great information in this article at all like the fact that there are growing complaints about recent deaths in animals who only ate dry food as well.  Please read original report for all the details.) 

Time's solution is to buy more expensive food, with a Cornell professor saying that commercial food has the vitamins your animal needs.  I think that's rather sad though, when commercial cat foods have been killing our felines by causing urinary tract blockages for years.  

The New York Times earlier suggested that healthy table scraps could constitute a good diet for pet. I have been suplementing my cat's diet with some canned tuna (mainly at her insistence which began when I tried to make myself a tuna sandwhich one day).  Her ardor for that one treat has faded a bit, but  any fish we cook has been fine with her as well as low fat unseasoned ground turkey and other unseasoned easily eaten meats  that we eat.  My brother in law was serving his large dogs ALPO for weekspossibly months before the news came out that it had the tainted gluten in it, without noticeably bad effects, but  he also gave them dry food and table scraps, which probably diluted any toxin and reduced the problem for them.  The dogs I read about having died were small.  Possibly the smaller breeds are more susceptible  

tags: pets  fda  food industry  

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