I recently revisited a website that tackles some of the more troubling aspects of commercial pet food. Since there are no commercial pet foods that can be considered good by any standard of measure, the best I can say about the site is that it does a pretty good job of separating bad foods from really bad foods. However, even though the site claims to be 100% “consumer supported”, it may as well be sponsored by the so-called premium pet food brands, because it sells a list of “good” pet foods, which can only be “good” if they are compared to the worst dreck ever concocted under the guise of food production.
Apart from that, and as long as visitors continue educating themselves so they can tell what’s wrong even with the foods that this site approves of, it does dish out a lot of legitimately good dirt on the commercial pet food industry and makes a strong case for avoiding commercial foods altogether, since it’s so difficult to tell the difference between the low and the lowest.
Euthanized cats and dogs end up in commercial Pet Food
Everyone has probably heard the “rumor” that euthanized cats and dogs end up in commercial pet food. Whenever you ask a vet or any pet food apologist about it, it is characterized as unsubstantiated conjecture. Of course, in the 20-some years since the public was first made aware of this particular practice, the rendering business has done a very good job of keeping its ugly secrets out of the press. There is still enough disturbing information to give any conscientious pet owner pause, however, and I congratulate the writer of this article for doing the hard work of digging into this very unpleasant topic that so many would like to keep under wraps.
Another question you may have pondered is: how many times is commercial pet food cooked before it is packaged and sent off to your local market? We all know that just cooking food once causes serious damage to nutrients. How much can be left over that’s of any use to a dog or cat when the food is cooked not once, but FOUR times? Can there be any question whether this stuff causes disease? Here’s another article from the same website about how even the marginally edible ingredients in pet food end up as inedible, shelf-friendly kibble and canned slop.
More shenanigans from the vet/government/pet food partnership
If all this isn’t enough to turn you away from the commercial pet food industry, there’s more. Recently there was a story on my local news, reporting that county animal control authorities are buying lists of customers from grocery stores. They then sort out those customers who buy pet food in order to harass them about licensing their pets. If selling licenses was the only goal of this particular mining expedition, even then it would be controversial. But the really troubling part is that the government-pharmaceutical cabal is using licensing to enforce vaccination compliance. People are harassed or fined into licensing their pets, but they can’t get a license if the pet has not been vaccinated. So we have government helping to prop up the veterinary business, just like it does with human medicine. Think about that the next time a grocery store lures you in to their “specials” by offering them only to card-holders. Privacy advocates told us 20 years ago when stores first started doing this that it would be misused, and it seems they were right. For those of us who have learned the truth about commercial pet food, this is yet another reason to avoid buying it and feeding your dog or cat a raw diet.