The Pet Food Industry Is Heartless
There are some hard truths in this world one must face as an animal lover. My heart aches with the truths I know. But we can’t change things unless we face some serious facts.
Fact number one: the pet food industry is heartless.
Once I realized the pet food industry is completely self-regulated… major alarm bells went off.
I had known that some things weren’t good, like preservatives and such, and felt like I could skim the ingredients list and could be tipped off by something I couldn’t pronounce… I was totally wrong.
“By-products” is a sneaky term. I never thought much of it. I thought it was all the leftover bits like hooves or hair and wasn’t thrilled but it was so common I didn’t dig deeper – and I should have.
Meat rendering plants process over one hundred million pounds per year of waste material which can end up in your pet’s food. This waste material (aka by-product) can include roadkill, ground up diseased animal parts and fecal matter.
Just so you know, another fancy term for “by-product” is “meat meal” (including chicken and fish meal).
But that isn’t the worst of it, I’m afraid.
Some meat processing plants have been caught processing the remains of dog and cat carcasses that have been euthanized – and if that wasn’t bad enough, they will leave their highly toxic collars and tags on.
I told you they are heartless.
And to top all of this off, they then load your pet’s food with chemicals. These are easier to spot and understand on the ingredients list. They are things like: BHA, BHT, artificial color (especially FD&C Red No. 5 and Yellow No. 7), ethoxyquin.
BHA and BHT are used as preservatives but are carcinogenic.
Artificial color always gets me. The pet doesn’t care what color their food it. This is purely a marketing tool for humans – and a dangerous one for pets.
And ethoxyquin might be the worst of preservatives. This is also used in weed killer and as a rubber stabilizer. Pet owners will go out of their way to not let their pet eat the freshly sprayed grass but then feed them pet food with this ingredient in it. It’s just as bad.
But here’s the real kicker… even if you understand what to look for and are adamant about avoiding the items I just discussed, anything added to an ingredient before it gets to the pet food plant doesn’t need to be on the label.
So even if you are the savviest of label-readers, you won’t know what they don’t tell you.
Many well-known brands in health food stores carry food that may contain preservatives added to the grain before it arrived at the processing plant.
They also add salt to our pet’s food. And believe me, this is not a harmless pinch of salt. If you see salt in the list of ingredients it is there to mask the inferior ingredients and get pets to eat it. Salt can have enormous repercussions on your pet’s kidneys, heart, and liver.
Then they try to trick you with semantics.
When food says it is “complete and balanced” that simply means it meets the very low government standards of merely sustaining life. This means that only 12% of the pet food needs to be digestible.
And when it says “USDA Inspected” – well all ingredients are inspected, but even if it doesn’t pass inspection it is allowed to still be used in pet food.
So, there are just some hard facts about the heartless pet food industry. There is a great documentary I suggest on Netflix called Pet Fooled if you want to dive deeper into this topic.
It is important to educate yourself about the reality and the sickening truth that the pet food industry doesn’t care about your pet. They care about profits. The more we educate ourselves, the more awareness we can share.
And listen, it is equally important that you not be hard on yourself for things you did yesterday, or things you didn’t know last month. The important thing is that today you can make better, healthier choices for you and your pet.
With wild grace,
Annika Darling
