Pet Care: What’s Inside Your Cat And Dog Meal? (Part 1)

Commercial dog or cat food is the solution to our pet’s appetite. It is easy, simple, tasty, and answers the question of what to feed them. But is it the safest option, or the best?

Food producers are motivated by cost. Naturally, if an ingredient is higher quality, it will find itself in a premium petfood, and so lesser quality food will go into the less expensive products.

For this reason, the contents of cat and dog will probably be poorer than human food. As well, the regulations for labeling ingredients is not enforced like person’s foods, which may encourage some to be somewhat lax in how they label their food.

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

Other extenders include ‘byproducts’, a broad term that includes a large variety of organs, and which may hide a huge host of issues.

The use of by-products provides more protein in the resulting product, and raises the animal content of it, but is an poorer quality food for cats and dogs to eat.

In preparing animals for human food, quality pieces are removed first. The remainder is available to use, but is rarely labeled as such, instead being called ‘by-products’. This may include livers, lungs, spleens, ligaments, heads, fat, blood, bones, feet, intestines, unborn babies, and various other parts.

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