The downward spiral in our economy has meant cutting corners, clipping coupons and forgoing certain luxuries. Goodbye caramel lattes, adios three course dinners at Ceviche, farewell organic dog food.
Although I have pared down my needs to the essentials—mostly home-brewed coffee and ramen noodles—I am skeptical of the tradeoff in the long run. I’m still feeding my family and dogs, but at what cost?
At first, the idea of switching dog food was a non-issue for me. Although I took pride in feeding my pets the best food I could afford, as long as their bowls were full, I felt like I had accomplished something.
Before the big switch, I spent a Saturday morning in the pet aisle at my local supermarket, deciding on a price point and going from there. Brands like Pedigree, Beneful and Science Diet sounded legitimate, and because the FDA has fairly strict regulations about the names of pet food and false advertising, I felt at ease.
But scanning the labels, I quickly felt pangs of guilt. Gone were the free-range chicken, salmon and sweet potato. In their place were ambiguous food-like fillers that sounded like meat and vegetables but were not.
First ingredient: ground whole corn. Second ingredient: meat and bone meal. Third ingredient: corn gluten meal. Last ingredient: food coloring. Food coloring in dog food seems a little odd. Like most dogs, mine have zero interest in what their food looks like. If they could eat straight out of the garbage can, they would.
But corn?
With two children, I try to make healthy choices and set a good example. When the whole country went into an uproar a few years back over high fructose corn syrup, I was on board, and eliminated it from anything I brought into our house. It never occurred to me to think about that same corn issue with my pets’ food. But wasn’t corn a common ingredient known to trigger allergies in dogs?
Despite my apprehension, I narrowed down my choice and lugged home the new bag of dog food.
The next day, my dogs stared blankly at their heaping bowls of food, refusing to eat. I have witnessed them devour hangers, Batman action figures, aqua socks and palm fronds. Of course, I snatched those out of their mouths as soon as I could, but it made me wonder why they preferred eating plastic and wood to actual dog food.
I found myself on the FDA website, deeply enmeshed in a dry dog food article about the ingredient referred to as meat and bone meal. A random sampling of dog food in the Maryland area turned up traces of pentobarbital, a drug commonly used for euthanasia, meaning the meat and bone meal ingredient in the sampled pet food came from a euthanized animal.
That very same ingredient was in my dogs’ new food.
The study was random; it was not supposed to be considered the standard. But if it were the standard and our pet food included meat and bone meal, we would all be feeding our pets the discarded and processed euthanized animal remains.
This made my stomach turn, and I imagine my dogs’ stomachs, too.
I have since tossed the processed dog food into the trash and wasn’t worried when I forgot to close the lid. I knew the dogs wouldn’t be digging through the trash anytime soon.
What a wonderfully written column! You make such a great point. The sad part is that those yucky things are in more meat that us, humans, eat more often than we’d like to think. Either way, I suggest you start feeding your dog food scraps — and that doesn’t mean you have to cook them ground beef. There are many people who raise their pets vegan and while that makes it seem like the most spoiled animals ever, all it means is that you are feeding them leftovers of food that don’t have the most expensive item of them all in them: meat. Give it a try. You might just find it to be frugal and that it works! Here’s an article from PETA on how to have a vegetarian pet :http://www.peta.org/living/companion-animals/vegetarian-cats-and-dogs.aspx