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Pat McKay
Animal Homeopathy

Pat McKay Animal HomeopathyPat McKay Animal HomeopathyPat McKay Animal Homeopathy

​The Poisons in Pet Food by John Anderson

From the May 1998 issue of ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE magazine

A  homeopath of our acquaintance, who specializes in animal health,  recently reported that nearly all of her new cases are dogs and cats  with cancer. This is a most unusual and alarming trend, she told us. One  of the reasons American dogs and cats are getting very sick can be  found in the pet foods they eat every day. The realities of animal  health aren’t much different than human health: if you consume a diet of  toxins, eventually you will get terribly sick.

Despite the  appealing blandishments of pet food advertisements with their claims of  providing "complete and balanced nutrition," if you’re not exceedingly  circumspect, you may end up feeding your pet chicken heads, road kills,  spoiled or moldy grains, cancerous material cut from slaughterhouse  animals, tissue high in hormone or pesticide residues, and even shredded  Styrofoam packaging, metal ID tags and minced flea collars.

Don’t  expect the food label to be any true guide to the product’s contents.  The list of ingredients on that bag of dry pet food or can of "meat" can  mask the toxic horrors behind innocuous-sounding phrases such as "meat  meal," "bone meal," and "meat by-products." It’s the substances you  don’t know about in that can of pet food that may sicken or even kill  your pet.

Rendering Garbage into Pet Food—Rendering is the  process of grinding up and then melting down or cooking scrap material  from animals. The final products of this process—meat and bone meal and  squeezed-out-fats—are sold primarily to pet food companies.

The  list of materials that go into the rendering process is extensive and  horrific. When cattle, sheep and poultry are slaughtered for human  consumption, the parts deemed unsuitable for eating—heads (including  growth hormone implants in cattle), skin, fat containing pesticide  residues, toenails, hair or feathers, joints, hooves, stomach and  bowels—are rendered.

Other animal parts sent to rendering plants  include cancerous tissues, worm-infested organs, contaminated blood and  blood clots. Compounding these toxins, slaughterhouses add carbolic acid  and fuel oil to these remnants as a way of marking these foods as unfit  for human consumption.

Slaughterhouses aren’t the only source  for animals that end up rendered. Animals classified as "4-D" (dead,  diseased, dying and disabled)—that is, too unhealthy for human  consumption—are rendered. These include animals with residues of  antibiotics, such as chloramphenical and sulfamethazine, that are  commonly used in meat production.

Road-kill animals and some  deceased zoo animals are also sent to rendering plants. A report in the  San Francisco Chronicle (February 19, 1990) presented evidence that dead  pets from animal clinics and shelters are carted away to be  rendered—with their name tags and flea collars intact. Other items  tossed into the rendering "soup pot" are rancid grease from restaurants  and supermarket meats that are no longer fresh (including their  Styrofoam and shrink-wrap packaging).

All of this material is  slowly ground up at the rendering plant, then chipped or shredded, and  cooked for up to an hour at 220 degrees F to 270 degrees F. The fat or  tallow separates during the cooking and is removed. What’s left over is  then pressed to remove all moisture and crushed into what is  misleadingly called "bone meal" or "meat meal."

Meat and poultry  by-products, another major category of pet food ingredients, are the  unrendered parts of the animal left over after slaughter, everything  deemed unfit for human consumption. In cattle and sheep, this includes  the brain, liver, kidneys, spleen, lungs, blood, bones, fatty tissue,  stomachs and intestines. The items on this list that would normally be  consumed by humans, such as the liver, would have to be diseased or  contaminated before they could be designated for pet food. Poultry  by-products include heads, feet, intestines, undeveloped eggs, chicken  feathers and egg shells.

Other items counted as acceptable  protein sources and included under "by-products" are dried animal blood  and hair, dehydrated stomach contents from cattle and dried pig and  poultry excrement. As explicit as the facts about pet food contents may  be, you won’t find them listed on the label; the truth about these  poisons is conveniently buried under the rubric "by-products."

The  primary ingredient in many dry commercial pet foods is not protein but  cereal. Corn and wheat are the most common grains used but, as with the  meat sources, the nutritious parts of the grain are generally present  only in trace amounts. The corn gluten meal or wheat middlings added to  pet foods are the leftovers after the grain has been processed for human  use, containing little nutritional value. Or they may be grain that is  too moldy for humans to eat, so it’s incorporated into pet food.  Mycotoxins, potentially deadly fungal toxins that multiply in moldy  grains, have been found in pet foods in recent years. In 1995, Nature’s  Recipe recalled tons of their dog food after dogs became ill from eating  it. The food was found to contain vomitoxin, a mycotoxin.

Perfecting  the Contamination – The nutritional needs of pets are hardly the  concern of most manufacturers. Commercial pet foods are usually  concocted with the profit margins in mind, and nothing else. A new food  may be tested to see whether animals like it (eat it in large  quantities), but not whether it is good for them. For dry foods,  ingredients (meat meal, by-products, cereals) are mixed together with  water or steam, pushed through a machine called an extruder which gives  the food its shape, then cooked at high temperatures and dried. To make  the food palatable to your pet, fats—often the tallow separated during  the rendering process—is sprayed on after the food is dried. Wet foods  are made from raw ingredients ground up with additives and  preservatives. "Chunky" canned foods are run through an extruder to  produce the look of natural meats.

Harmful chemicals and  preservatives are added to both wet and dry food. For example, sodium  nitrite, a coloring agent and preservative and potential carcinogen, is a  common additive. Other preservatives include ethoxyquin (an insecticide  that has been linked to liver cancer) and BHA and BHT, chemicals also  suspected of causing cancer. The average dog can consume as much as 26  pounds of preservatives every year from eating commercial dog foods.

The  manufacturing process destroys most of whatever minimal nutritional  content remained from the dubious list of ingredients. Even when the  companies include more healthy ingredients at the outset, manufacturing  depletes the nutritional value. "Processing is the wild card in  nutritional value that is, by the large, simply ignored," states R L  Wysong, DVM, a veterinarian who founded Wysong Corporation to produce  healthful pet foods. Proteins, enzymes, vitamins and minerals and fatty  acids present in the foods can all be altered or destroyed by the  manufacturing process, leading to nutritional deficiencies in the pets  eating these foods.

Nobody’s Watching the Pet Bowl—No consumer  agencies are looking out for your pet’s health interests. The pet food  industry is virtually unregulated regarding food composition. In fact,  information about the poisons in pet foods is not easily obtained; hence  its shock-value when it’s finally revealed to the unsuspecting public.

The  problem is that only the label, not content, of pet foods is regulated.  The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), a group of  federal and state bureaucrats, define the ingredients listed on the  labels of pet foods, but they do no testing on the foods themselves and  have no enforcement authority. So don’t expect their semantics to keep  your pet healthy.

The United States Department of Agriculture, a  government agency you might think would be watching the pet food  industry, only oversees food for human consumption, letting pet food  makers off the leash. The Food and Drug Administration’s Center for  Veterinary Medicine (FDA/CVM) concerns itself mainly with labeling:  manufacturers must substantiate any health claims they make for their  pet food, but they aren’t asked to prove that their food is not quietly  toxic to pets. While the FDA/CVM can prohibit an ingredient’s use if it  is proven detrimental to health, they do no ingredient quality testing  on pet foods, so how will they ever know? The claims of "complete and  balanced nutrition" on many commercial pet foods are based on AAFCO  nutrient profiles.

What isn’t addressed on the label is the  quality and bioavailablity of these nutrients. For instance, the label  may state that the food contains a "minimum of 65% protein," but is it  clean and can it be absorbed? The labels will never tell you. "Although  the AAFCO profiles are better than nothing, they provide false  securities," states Quinton Rogers, DVM, a veterinarian with the  Department of Molecular Biosciences, Veterinary School of Medicine,  University of California at Davis. "There is virtually no information on  the bioavailability of nutrients for companion animals in many of the  common dietary ingredients used in pet foods."

110 Million Sick  Pets?—There are an estimated 55 million dogs and 63 million cats living  in American households. Given the appalling condition of most commercial  pet foods, it’s a wonder there are any healthy pets walking around  anymore. "Nature never designed canine or feline kidneys to handle the  volume of impurities that come their way," states veterinarian Al  Plechner, DVM, author of Pet Allergies. "The result is fatigued,  irritated, damaged and deteriorated kidneys after several years of life.  Left untreated, the toxic buildup leads to vomiting, loss of appetite,  uremic poisoning and death."

Recent studies have shown processed  foods to be a factor in increasing numbers of pets suffering from  cancer, arthritis, obesity, dental disease and heart disease, comments  Dr Wysong. Dull or unhealthy coats are a common problem with cats and  dogs and poor diet is usually the cause, according to many veterinarians  and breeders. The AAFCO nutrient profiles may play a role here, in the  "balanced" nutritional levels they recommend may be inadequate for an  individual animal.

It is estimated that up to two million  companion animals suffer from food allergies. Dr Plechner believes that  the commercial pet foods are a primary cause and can contribute to a  host of health problems. "Among pets, there is a widespread intolerance  of commercial foods," he states. "This rejection can show up either as  violent sickness or chronic health problems. It often triggers a  hypersensitivity and overreaction to flea and insect bites, pollens,  soaps, sprays and environmental contaminants. "Feline urological  syndrome, a chronic condition similar to cystitis in humans  (characterized by frequent urination with blood in the urine), is an  increasingly common and potentially fatal illness in cats. It has been  linked to elevated levels of ash and phosphorus, two substances commonly  found in commercial pet foods. High iodine levels are seen as a  contributing factor for thyroid tumors in cats. "New diseases are being  discovered that are linked to ‘100% complete’ diets," states Dr Wysong.  These include "polymyopathy (a muscle disorder) from low potassium  levels, dilated cardiomyopathy (heart muscle disorder) from low taurine  levels, arthritic and skin diseases from acid/base and zinc malnutrition  and chronic eczema from essential fatty acid malnutrition," he reports.  Given the high possibility that your favorite pet foods may be slowly  poisoning your cat or dog, it’s crucial that you prepare your own foods. 


Copyright © 2021 Pat McKay Animal Homeopathy - All Rights Reserved.

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