What Is In Your Pet’s Food? (Part 1)

For most, commercial dog or cat food is an easy solution to our pet’s appetite. It is simple, tasty, easy, and solves the problem of what to feed them. However, is it the best solution or the healthiest?

Food manufacturers are motivated by cost. So reasonably, if a food is higher quality, it will be used in a better petfood, while the lesser quality items will end up in the less expensive packages.

Because of this, the contents of petfood will probably be poorer than our food. Additionally, the laws for labeling and contents are not enforced the same way as with human meals, which could affect how some obey the laws.

Meat is costly, so to keep pet food costs down, extender and filler are added. As was shown in early 2007, tainted filler led to deaths. The culprit was wheat gluten, used to enhance and extend the pet food.

Another extender is byproducts, a broad term that covers a wide variety of animal parts, and which may hide a huge host of issues.

The use of by-products provides extra protein for the resulting petfood, and increases the animal content, but is an poorer quality food for dogs and cats to eat.

Some reports indicate animals that are viewed as unfit for our food can find their way into the petfood. For example, there are reports that creatures that are sick, euthanized from clinics, dying, and also road kill are included in the pet food.

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