Food and Consumer Product Safety Hazards.

I'd like to see more regulation on the pet food industry. It's gone largely unregulated and, as a result, most people don't know crap about what they should be feeding their pets anymore.

In the old days, say, 40-50 years ago, it was rare that people would feed their dog "dog food". The dog would typically eat table scraps. Then there came a push from the dog food industry and now we're at a stage where people think it is harmful to feed a dog people food. The interesting thing is that the incidence of things like cancer and heart disease has gone up in dogs (as has our ability to treat it) with this change in diet. If pet food was held to the standards of people food (or if people stopped being so lazy and made their dog food), pets would be much healthier.


As for things like E. coli and the like, I do think the media blows them out of proportion a bit. Viruses and bacteria are natural things. They are bound to happen. There's nothing bad about eating a steak that had E. coli as long as you cook it properly. And, frankly, I don't want to eat a poorly cooked hamburger, whether or not it started out with E. coli.

How ya doing, buddy?

That's part of it, of course. Most of what I've read indicates, though, that diet is also a contributing factor. You have to keep in mind, too, that the number of purebreds goes down as time goes on, which means that genetic defects leading to issues like these also will go down.

And part of it is just me wanting pets to get better treatment. You wouldn't have a child and, for the entire time he lives with you, feed him only one single thing and never stray ever. And, even if you did do that, you wouldn't feed your kid something that has no regulation, little nutritional information, and mostly filler (as what a lot of dog food on the shelves is these days).

There's a vet that was interviewed for the last The Bark magazine (yes, I get that) on a story about the recall:

Quote:

The industry learned to advertise and describe their products as being the "best", at least according to them. They send a lot of literature and books to veterinarians who teach. One of the dogmas they have promoted, and that many veterinarians have bought into, is that you should only feed commercial pet foods because they are balanced and provide everything an animal needs. And that you shouldn't feed any human food or add any table scraps to it. ...most of the people who are trained in nutrition programs get their degrees and are hired by the pet food industry. Most of the money available for research on small-animal nutrition comes from the industry as well. It is a conflict of interest.

And from another pet food researcher:

Quote:

They can use anything they want for proteins, grains, fats, anything they want. If it says meat meal, it can be from road kill to zoo animals or diseased material from slaughterhouses -- anything is fair game.

I talk to old-time vets and they say that years and years before this industry grew, our pets ate table scraps; the vets will tell you that back then, pets either died of old age or were hit by a car. We didn't see so many cancers like we are seeing now. Pets ate what we ate.

There's nowhere I can't reach.