What Is In Your Pet’s Food? (Part 1)

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

One problem in the industry is that the products are motivated by cost. So reasonably, if an ingredient is higher quality, it will be used in a better petfood, while the lesser quality food will end up in the less expensive packages.

Because of this, the ingredients in cat and dog will more than likely be inferior to ‘people’ meals. As well, the regulations for labeling and contents are not enforced the same way as with human meals, which may encourage some to be lax in how they label.

All-meat diets are costly, so to keep pet food costs low, extender and filler are used. As was shown in March of 2007, tainted filler resulted in deaths. The culprit was wheat gluten, which was used to extend and enhance the pet food.

Another extender is byproducts, a broad term that covers a wide variety of animal organs, and can hide a huge host of serious issues.

Using byproducts provides more protein in the product, and raises the animal content of it, but is an inferior food for dogs and cats to eat.

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