What is Your Dog or Cat Eating?

By Eric Hartwell

Commercial pet food is an easy solution to our pet's appetite. It's easy, tasty, simple, and answers the question of what to serve them. However, is it the healthiest option, or the best?

Food producers are motivated by cost. So reasonably, if an ingredient is higher quality, it will find itself in a premium pet food, and so lesser quality food will end up in the less expensive packages.

Because of this, the contents of pet food will quite likely be poorer than 'people' meals. Plus, the laws for labeling and contents are not enforced like human meals, which could cause some to ignore the laws.

All-meat diets are costly, so to keep petfood costs down, filler and extender are used. As was shown in March of 2007, impure filler resulted in deaths. The culprit was wheat gluten, which was used to extend and enhance the petfood.

Another extender is byproducts, a broad term that covers a large variety of parts, and can hide a number of problems.

With the preparation of animals for human eating, quality pieces are removed first. What's left is usable, but is rarely labeled individually, instead being called by-products. This can include fetuses, ligaments, livers, blood, feet, spleens, fat trimmings, lungs, bones, heads, intestines, and various other parts.

According to reports, animals that are viewed as unfit for humans can end up in the pet food. For instance, there are indications that animals that are ill, dying, euthanized from veterinarian clinics, and also roadkill are used in the ingredients for pet food.

In the petfood industry, there is an acronym for this varied meat - 4D, standing for dying, disabled, diseased, dead, which are not allowed in our foods, but is ok for pets.

Using by-products provides extra protein in the resulting pet food, and increases the animal content of it, but is considered an poorer quality food for dogs and cats to eat.

It is up to you to decide if what is in these foods is important in what you give your pets, and whether you want to change. By paying careful attention to the ingredients on labels, and investigating the petfood companies and industry practices will help you decide if the meals you give your cat or dog is food you're content with, or if you might want to change your favorite pet's menu.

About the Author:

Eric Hartwell oversees "The World's Best Homepage" intended to be a user-generated resource where YOUR opinion counts. Anybody can contribute and all are welcomed. Visit us to read, comment upon or share opinions on pets, cat and dog care and animal health and visit our associated site articles for free.

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