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... )
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.
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