This & That - The November-December edition
Am slightly miffed because the adorable little microwave potholders left over from the Bazaar (end of October)sold before I could free up the money to buy them myself. They would have made cute stocking stuffers.
My elder sister oddyssia's husband died suddenly the weekend before Thanksgiving -- heart attack/stroke. He was a large man, with health ( Read more... )
My elder sister oddyssia's husband died suddenly the weekend before Thanksgiving -- heart attack/stroke. He was a large man, with health ( Read more... )
For those reading who don't know me, I'm a professional dog breeder and trainer with over 40 years experience, my background is biochemistry, and I used to manufacture dog food. Unlike most of what you see online, I'm not pulling this out of my ass. This is what I do for a living.
Here's what I've figured out (and as you know I go thru a lot of dog food, right now 70-80 pounds a DAY): it's not a quality control issue at the dog food manufacturer level. The problem is that since 3 or 4 years ago, when biodiesel became a much more lucrative market, that's where the recycled restaurant grease is going, which used to go straight into pet food. And that grease (itself a perfectly good feed ingredient) is becoming contaminated, probably a matter of being processed through the same equipment as the biodiesel.
If you open a bag and it smells like gasoline, diesel, or "old tires" (or benzene, which is what I think it is -- I used to work with benzene and I recognised the smell), that's the redflag. Or if you see liquid fat dripping out of the food -- fat is actually better (more digestible, distributes the preservative better) when it's sprayed on than when mixed in, but when it's got this biodiesel contaminant it doesn't soak in like ordinary liquid fat does, so it drips.
The primary effect I was seeing was stillborn and fading puppies, with a mortality rate of 50%-80%. Some dogs had "the daily vomit" after breakfast, along with loose or liquid stools. And older dogs lost weight and looked like crap (and a few died years before the norm, which in my line is age 14). This is consistent with liver stress, which would be typical with the suspected contaminant. Big tough healthy adult dogs don't seem to be much affected, but smaller, neonatal, elderly, or stressed dogs can't handle it.
The problem started with products made by Pedigree and its subsidiaries (including Doane's which makes Sam's/Walmart labels et al.) but has spread industry-wide, to varying degrees. Purina is still spotty; some plants are affected, others not. (It's not all made in one plant, ya know; they all have factories all over the country. And most of the small-label and specialty/premium diets are made in a Purina, Doane's, or Diamond plant.)
Until the root problem is rectified (which if I'm correct is not going to happen, given the energy market), this is going to be an issue. And since it's very hard to pin down to a point where you can identify a culprit, that may not happen any time soon regardless. Meanwhile -- what can we do?
-- Feed something that uses chicken fat. This isn't as good for the dog as animal fat, but so far it's not had the problem. That may change at any time, as biodiesel demand increases. Fish oil is NOT a suitable substitute (it degrades too rapidly which can lead to catastrophic vitamin E deficiency and subsequent blindness).
-- Feed a diet with animal fat but less than 10% fat, and supplement it with cooking oil from the grocer's shelf. (This is what I'm doing in my kennel. It's a nuisance but it works, probably because the contaminant consumed stays below bio-critical levels.) With puppies, you will also have to supplement meat proteins to keep things in balance.
Beware of "grain free" and "raw" diets -- they have a variety of deficiencies (to the point that I will not warranty puppies fed such diets), and hard-working dogs can actually starve on them. A natural wild diet includes the half-digested grain eaten by rodents, and that is a major source of vitamins for canids. If you must feed a grain-free diet, supplement it with a daily slice of toast or dry bread.
Reply
http://boosette.livejournal.com/1190600.html#cutid1
Even though it looks very much like a regional quality control problem as most reports seem to generate from the East Coast and South, I decided it might be time to look at other possibilities. Kent and I did some on-line research, and queried at the local pet food retailers. We liked what we heard /read about BLUE Buffalo and decided to give it shot.
So far so good.
Reply
Most of the "information" about pet food online is from the tinfoil hat brigade, and biochemically, is somewhere between halfbaked and sheer nonsense. And as to local shops... the profit margin is a lot higher on the small-label diets. That's how they finagle shelf space in the first place.
The complaints as noted in your link are the exact problem I was talking about. If you go up one and look at some of the other major labels, same thing.
The majority of big-name dog food in this area comes from plants in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Las Vegas (I don't know offhand where the plants are back east), and I've seen the problem from various L.A. and L.V. products, but not from Seattle while Purina HiPro was still being made there (Nestle killed that line as insufficiently profitable). The small-label stuff mostly comes from Missouri, and various small mills all over that do custom batches. Most smaller labels do NOT own their own mill.
Blue Buffalo is probably all right for unstressed, nonbreeding adults, but I wouldn't use it with anything else. It's just not very balanced. And they use the wet-weight/dry-weight cheat "real meat" which means pre-processed wet weight. If it were dry weight, as with "meat meal", it would be about the 5th ingredient, not the first. And did you ever wonder where the scraps and peelings go from canned sweet potatoes?? that's why it's so high in fibre. (Anything over 4% is too much, and frankly 1% would be plenty.)
The other thing that bothers me about these new "premium" diets is the inclusion of a wide array of ingredients *not* known to be GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) for dogs and cats, notably stuff like rosemary. There's actually a warning about that on the USDA feedstuffs site. And the bacillus stuff can lead to chronic diarrhea due to abnormal gut flora balance.
Nothing wrong with feeding table scraps, ya know... good supplement for a cheap or unbalanced diet.
Reply
Leave a comment