Question about pet food.

[gemfyre]

I hear a lot of people go on about how bad canned and/or dried foods are and that they only feed their cat/dog fresh meat.

I have a Certificate in Animal Care and part of that involved studying animal nutrition. We had to devise a balanced diet for various animals (different weights and breeds of dogs and cats), using non pet food products (canned and dry stuff and things like that). It was EXTREMELY tough to get it balanced and required a heap of supplements. In the wild the animal would eat the whole carcass and get all the nutrients from a combination of muscle, skin, bone and organs but with people feeding their pets raw meat they usually only get muscle meat - which does not provide all the essential nutrients.

What I'm actually wanting to know is the legislation on pet foods in other countries. Here in Australia if a pet food says "complete" (most do, but some of those fridge rolls of meat and most treats aren't) it is just that. It has all the essential nutrients to keep your pet healthy. You can easily feed your cat the same food day in day out and as long as it continues to eat it it will stay healthy (it's usually good to give dry food for dental care, a pet on purely wet food will have awful teeth problems if they don't chew anything else).

So, are the rules the same elsewhere? Or are pet food companies allowed to stick whatever they want in pet food hence causing people to go on about how bad canned and dry foods are?

Comments

[riverstar.livejournal.com]

jp is very much for the only real meat for pets.
he complains that i give mouse kitten food

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Some raw meat is fine and even good.

But unless they're being fed whole carcasses it can't be a balanced diet.

[peppermintrose.livejournal.com]

I don't have my links with me right now, but they can stick some sick stuff in animal food here. Maybe it's "complete", but those nutrients come from bad sources. Plus they sometimes add chemicals that are unnecessary, like stool hardners so you don't notice how your dog gets the runs from their food >.<

They use food and chemicals that are rated "not human grade" (some of the chemicals are outright banned in human food), so that's why I'm wary of feeding it to my animals.

[peppermintrose.livejournal.com]

Then there's also talk that some companies will even use euthanized dogs and cats in their pet foods (this sounds too horrific to imagine, but I've read it several places). Anything goes when it comes to pet food, I guess, as long as it's cheap.

Aaahhh, dogs; my favourite subject!!

[wolflullaby.livejournal.com]

I feeds my puppy raw chicken carcasses, all sorts of organs (kidney, liver, heart, etc), beef soup bones and other sorts of meaty bones too, with vegies (put it through a juicer, and then feed him the pulp (it's supposed to make the vegies similar to how they would be when eaten by a wolf from a herbivores stomach)), yoghurt, eggs (shell and all), brewers yeast, kelp, vitamin e and vitamin c. plus some miscellaneous meal scraps. I would recommend the book "give a dog a bone", very interesting information.

One of the things he says is that dogs don't need their diet to be balanced each meal, or even over a day. A dogs diet should be balanced over two or three weeks. My puppies poop is always firm and non-offensice in odour, his teeth are clean and his breath is good, and he is a healthy looking puppy.

Hope that info helps. If you want more info I would suggest looking at some of the dog communities on LJ, such as rawdogs (or is it raw_dogs?). >O_o<

Re: Aaahhh, dogs; my favourite subject!!

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Considering what dogs eat if left to their own devices I really doubt they are balanced every day in the wild.

Interesting about replicating stomach contents of prey - I never would have thought of that!

Your puppy sounds like he eats better than I do!

Re: Aaahhh, dogs; my favourite subject!!

[wolflullaby.livejournal.com]

Considering what dogs eat if left to their own devices I really doubt they are balanced every day in the wild.

Nods, indeed. The writer says that dogs that eat vomit and faeces often do so because they have more available nutrients in them than in the processed glop they get fed. Apparently it is really bad for a dog to be fed a fully balanced "stew" at every meal because some of the vitamins react badly with other vitamins making them less available to the dog. Kind of like how you should eats things like spinach with foods that contain vitamin C, because it makes it more available for your body to process (or is it that you shouldn't have them with vitamin C...? I can't remember).

Interesting about replicating stomach contents of prey - I never would have thought of that!

Me either, the book I mentioned advised doing that.

Re: Aaahhh, dogs; my favourite subject!!

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

You should have spinach with vitamin C. It assists absorption of the iron in it. However the vit C is only neccessary for plant foods with iron in them

The iron in meat is readily available to the (human) body so vitamin C isn't neccessary.