Pet Food Ingredients

Stop the Confusion!

Pet owners are bombarded everyday with conflicting pet food advice. Your veterinarian tells you table scraps are bad, but by-products are good; your neighbor tells you grocery store foods are just as good as the high priced stuff. How can a pet owner learn the real truth? Here’s an idea…

Susan Thixton

Published

March 25, 2009

Consumer Reports, a long time trusted source for honest recently told pet owners that higher priced foods might not be any higher quality than cheap pet foods. Their March 2009 article was chocked full of inconsistent advice from cost per day comparisons of low end to high end pet foods, to telling pet owners that antioxidants aren’t a benefit to pet health. https://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/articles/252/1/Consumer-Reports-reports-on-Pet-Food-Its-Bunk/Page1.html

Veterinary Hospital chain Banfield recently told pet owners in their March 2009 newsletter ‘by-products’ provide pets with quality nutrition. http://www.banfield.net/r/banfield-offers-pet-nutrition-tips-for-march-pet-nutrition-month

Type ‘How to choose a pet food’ into a Google Search, and you’ll find 76,200,000 different web pages offering advice. Your vet, your neighbor, Consumer Reports, and over 76 million web pages all telling different things about pet foods and quality…Stop the Confusion!

Just in case the FDA and AAFCO are listening, here are some suggestions to Stop the Confusion!

• This isn’t brain surgery; pet owners CAN decide what pet food is better for their dog or cat…given ALL the information. As example, by-products. By the time a by-product meal reaches a pet food manufacturer, it has no resemblance to the diseased animals or animal bits and pieces it once was. How great would it be if every pet food manufacturer that uses by-product meal simply provided customers with a list of what’s actually ‘in’ that by-product meal. Back it up, all the way back to the renderer. Somebody knows exactly what types of animals, what type of animal parts are in that by-product meal. It HAS to be documented somewhere. Follow the information trail and provide that to pet owners on every pet food website. For every batch of by-product meal (and all similar ingredients such as meat and bone meal, animal digest and animal fat), provide ‘before’ pictures of by-product meal and animal fat; before the euthanized animals and animal parts are cooked. That’ll stop the confusion.

• Provide another information trail of ingredient country of origin. This should be a piece of cake to provide. Somebody knows the name and address of every company that provides ingredients in a pet food; share that information on your website.

• FDA & AAFCO, let’s just stop the confusion over human grade and pet grade meat. Either a meat used in pet foods is the same quality as meat sold in grocery stores, or it isn’t. Someone at the pet food company knows the grade or quality of the meat, share that information with customers.

• Add a manufacturing date to a pet food label. Stop the confusion of ‘Best By’ dates. One food has a shelf life of 3 years while another has a shelf life of 9 months. The ‘Best By’ date doesn’t tell us how old the food is, only when it expires. We want naturally preserved foods, and we want them fresh. Give us the manufacturing date on every pet food bag or can.

STOP the Confusion! Pet owners are completely capable of making proper pet food decisions given all the information. Attention FDA & AAFCO, give us all the information. Get off your regulatory duffs and think of the consumer for a change. The solution is simple; provide pet owning consumers with ALL the pet food information. We’ll take it from there.

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
Author, Buyer Beware
Co-Author Dinner PAWsible
TruthaboutPetFood.com
PetsumerReport.com

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