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Stop the Confusion!
- 3-25-2009
- Categorized in: Pet Food Regulations
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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…
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. http://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
Truth about Pet Food
Petsumer Report
www.TruthaboutPetFood.com
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Still can't get over how the policy of "Truth in advertising" is completely ignored.
If just one major source showed a tape or printed any one of Susan's articles, there'd be a revolution and boycott's of the "big "P"' and all the rest!
Do you think if you sent a CBC panel to a pet food company they could recommend one of their products with written assurances that it would be a nutritious food for your animal? If your animal has allergies, can they tell you for a fact that the premixes, natural flavorings don't have anything in them that would set off an allergic reaction? When a human doctor does blood work on you, has the doctor every recommended a diet option to help you?
If the pet food companies chose to pretend to humanize the products then they need to do it right, not just hyperbole and marketing hooks.
Examples, the forum post in the pet food industry magazine and the Canola article by Aldrich. I'm sure there are many more, but I think the industry magazine should spotlight the good, the bad and the ugly performances by the pet food industry & their mouth pieces on the internet, like in Itchmo among others. They want to point to Itchmo in the Florida legal documents, but nobody says much about the pfi "performances" on the net.
I guess it puzzles me how they refuse to provide the science, use the "that's proprietary" shields and then look down their noses when we ask for facts, can't give us the actual protein in the foods, don't have a clue if the GRAS they're tossing in is good or bad or what the interactions of the manufacturing process causes in the ingredients they use, why they only focus on one ingredient pros/cons, but never tell us what the "whole mixture" accomplishes and if any interactions can be toxic or unbalance what they present on paper in the one-by-one ingredient
The pet food industry whines about the "mis information" on the internet, but they don't make any public attempt to provide the science or the facts about the overall product. I've said before, they'll tell you, for example, baking soda is good (ingredient a), vinegar is good (ingredient b) but they cannot tell you what happens when you mix the two.
Pet Food Industry Magazine writers should write a very long article after reviewing those and interview those folks about THEIR posts and how they represented the industry as a whole on the internet & websites to consumers.
I have a feeling she'd find out why the industry didn't respond to her post.
http://www.petfoodindustry.com/Discussions.aspx?g=...
The person posing those questions could find her answers on many internet forums and rate the pet food industry performances from the above examples in internet forums and posts.
She asked:
"What do you think are the best ways to better educate and inform pet owners about petfood and nutrition? What steps is your company taking?"
I think this forum & others have several examples of those pet food company ways & steps....and it's not helping the quality of **their**
information nor does it make pet owners happy.
They didn't take a proactive stance on the MDL limits in MARC (10ppm won't cut it), they didn't take a proactive stance on the FDAAA, nor have they been proactive with reporting problems with their foods and their dealings with consumers. They cannot tell you the amount of true protein in their products, they don't use the tests to measure true protein (they use ancient crude protein tests), and I'd bet they don't know the usable protein in it either.
Taking all that into consideration, I think the PFCs can only brag about sales & ranking, but not the science behind their products...