More info, suggested reading...
For those of you concerned about pet food, here are some books that you may want to check out at your library:
By Ann Martin: "Food pets die for--shocking facts about pet food" and "Protect your pet".
By JP McNamara: "Principles of companion animal nutrition" Covers what pet nutritional needs are and how to put together nutritional meals to meet those needs.
For those that are feeding commercial food and worried, you should be. The average commercial foods, including the supposed "premium" brands that spend millions marketing themselves as pet friendly, were unmasked in this pet food recall. Some of them started out with good product, but greed took over (like the brand that starts with the big "E" and now markets a trash bag of dog food). There are natural pet food companies out there that have not been involved in these recalls and that are selling human-grade pet foods. They cost more. There is a reason.
I still use Innova kibble to supplement what I cook for my dogs (mainly for the crunchy teeth-cleaning that the kibble provides).
http://www.naturapet.com/ Go to their Web site and read the ingredients.
I was at the pet store hefting the bag of Innova in the cart when another shopper actually quizzed my wisdom of buying such an expensive dog food when "they're all the same". She had the big "P" brand in her cart with the pretty pictures of peas and carrots on the bag.
I rolled my cart up to hers, pointed to the ingredients and asked her to read: chicken, rice, sweet potatoes, cottage cheese, turkey, etc. Then I asked her to look at her brand's ingredients. Corn, corn gluten, (dog's can't digest corn, it's a cheap filler that creates big stinking messy poops), chicken by products (marketing euphenism for: "the slop wastes from the chicken slaughter house" we're talking beaks, eyes, feet, guts, and excrement here), etc. She was stunned to discover they are not all the same, pretty pictures of peas and carrots not withstanding. Then I pointed out that my "expensive" brand came out to about $.50/day for my dog.
She actually put the bag back and bought the Innova.
Innova isn't the only natural food out there, it's just the one that I particularly liked. Search and find out what they're putting in the food. Dr. Weil the famous nutritionist makes some recommendations on his Web site of what he feeds his dogs. Merrick is another good brand (I watched one of the Merrick sales reps eat their dog food--how many big P or E reps would do that???).
And the big companies caught in this scandal are going to be spending bezillions of dollars in the coming months on propaganda to tell you how wonderful they are. They are concerned about protecting profits, not your cute little pooch as they'll say in their commercials, as human actors will snuggle actor dogs and smile happily as they watch the actor dogs eating out of a dog dish--which usually contain raw meat to get the proper gusto while filming for pet food commercials--not the product they're selling.
And as I always say: Caveat emptor y'all.
