Pet Food Unhealthy Ingredients

In 2000 I lost several pets to various forms of cancer. This prompted me to begin looking at everything in my pets life that could contribute to causing this, of course, the food I was feeding them was top on list, and what I discovered about commercially prepared pet food was sickening. It goes well beyond the scare of the tainted food ingredients from China that recently made the news. Every pet owner should educate themselves on what they are feeding their beloved pets. Why in the world would anyone think it is acceptable to feed our pets with "food" that we recoil from and behave as though we have put our hands in feces if we accidently touch it? Fact of the matter is your pet food may actually contain feces (if you need and don't have a dictionary, feces is crap) if the label says "meat-by-products" that can be crap, literally.

One very informative book I read is titled "Why is Cancer Killing our Pets?" by Deborah Straw. Following is a relative excerpt.

"There are several reasons you really do not want to feed your dog or cat commercial foods only. Perhaps the most compelling reason, morally, is that there are rendered euthanized pets in much of this food. These pets have been mixed with other materials including some condemned for human foods: rotten meat from supermarket shelves, restaurant grease....4D(dead, deseased dying and disabled) animals, roadkill. The Minister of Agriculture of Quebec told Ann Martin, author of "Food Pets Die For" that, indeed, dead animals are cooked with viscera, bones and fats; the fur in not removed. In both the United States and Canada this rendering of pets is not illegal. Martin points to an article originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle in which an employee and ex-employee of a rendering plant admitted that their company rendered...between 10,000 and 30,000 pounds of dogs and cats a day.

...A Canadian writer who...Went a bit further in her investigations and discovered that some pets are euthanized with sodium pentobarbital and then rendered. This does not break down the poison, yet this rendered material goes into commercial pet food and into feed for cows, pigs and horses."

"According to the Animal Protection Institute of Sacremento, CA, commercial pet foods....contain mostly grains and meat by-products, which may be the euthanized shelter animals mentioned above or even "cancer-ridden livestock."

My local news did an article awhile ago about how the build up of pentobarbital in pets from the food they are consuming is making it more difficult to euthanize them when they are elderly or sick, they have built up a resistence to the pentobarbital.

The fact of the matter is, any meats fit for human consumption are going to be sold for human consumption which brings in a much higher price then feed for animal consumption.

The flip side of the coin is, if everyone began using human quality meats to prepare their pet foods there would be alot more "feed animals" (chickens and cows) being raised for slaughter, in inhumane factory farming conditions, and increasing the plethora of problems that arise from meat production. But until I am satisfied that a company is manufacturing their own food, not farming out pieces of production to companies that may not have a vested interest in quality, and that they are using only quality ingredients, there are parts of feed animals that are not used for human food traditionally just as a matter of appeal (cow head, tongues etc) that could be used without a risk of to the health of our pets. Until I am satisfied that such a commercial pet food is available, I cannot in good conscious feed my pets this food.

Unfortunately my research indicated that a cat's diet is much more demanding then a dogs, if the nutritional requirements of a cats diet are not met, it could result in a sudden untimely death. So I cannot personally support a homemade diet for cats. If I had more time to research it perhaps I could. I welcome any input from anyone who has provided home made food for their cats for a lengthy period of time to educate both me and my readers on what they provide their cats and what measures they took to ensure it is a healthy, balanced diet. I would very much like to get my cats off of commercially prepared foods as well.