I am so grateful to WOR for allowing me to have this hour to set things straight for dog owners. Having this little “Hyde Park Corner” where I can set up my soapbox and get your attention is a privilege I take very seriously.
Res Ipsa Loquitor – “the thing speaks for itself”
My father got a law degree before he became a best-selling author, and he shared this Latin legal phrase with me when I was telling him the truth about dog food and what is in the bags. It is not my feelings – or opinion – (although I do have both on the subject!) but the facts themselves about the dry dog food ingredients which “speak for themselves.”
The side of every bag of dog food tells exactly what is in it. If you do not recognize some of the words, that is intentional on their part. My book THE DOG BIBLE gives definitions for those fancy-sounding ingredients. For example, “powdered cellulose” means sawdust, or he equivalent in bulky, cheap, indigestible filler…and no, that is not organic sawdust.
What you learn about your dog’s nutrition on this show will inspire you – I hope - to make changes for a healthier life for her. What you learn here every week about feeding your dog may even save her life. Everything you hear here will be fact-based, with experts confirming it. What I am “selling” here is ideas – the idea that you should Question Authority – especially when authority figures (like veterinarians) were themselves indoctrinated in vet school. Sometimes it seems that the questioning, cynical, logical part of their brains was switched off in vet school by the constant flow of free bagged dog and cat food, the free nutrition textbooks (written by a major commercial pet food manufacturer), and often the underwriting by pet food manufacturers of the salaries of professors on nutrition. Common sense and logic get parked and eliminated. An important goal of this show is to re-engage your questioning brain and start applying it to all the aspects of the life you share with your pet.
We are what we eat – same goes for our dogs. Garbage in, garbage out. Except you may be paying top dollar for a bagged food without stopping to question what was in it. And without asking what such a high carb diet of low quality ingredients can do to your dog.
Commercial pet food companies make the majority of their billions on the backs of our poor pooches by assuring that we owners swallow the “dry food only” credo. We need to engage our minds and think logically for ourselves. On top of the illogical orders to never feed anything at all except kibble, we also had drummed into us that we were never to feed “table scraps” (a derogatory word for “the food you just ate”!).
Where dry dog food is concerned, the cheapest ingredients go into dry food, giving the highest profit. Most commercial kibble is made from the remains of the human food industry and often ingredients too foul to even go near a human food processing plant. Getting vets and pet owners to believe this form of feeding is superior was initially a big challenge for pet food companies – but once they solved that problem, they have us eating out of their hands. And their hands are dirty.
We need to get our heads out of the bag!
Kibble is a four-letter word for most people who are well-informed people about how commercial pet food companies manufacture dog food. Most of you have heard by now about the questionable or downright disgusting ingredients that are permitted in dry dog food. Years of research have confirmed this for me – but also shown me that there are responsible dog food companies, which are the smaller, privately owned ones.
The biggest tall tale you have been fed is that kibble is a well-balanced diet for a dog – when common sense will tell you it is obviously a very lop-sided, unbalanced diet. All dry dog food (even the best stuff made with good ingredients) is basically highly processed carbohydrates and indigestible plant fiber (bulky filler that goes right through a dog without any nutritional value). Even good ingredients get degraded by the high heat and process of becoming crunchy little brown discs or triangles.
Dogs are omnivores – they need a varied diet that is minimum 30% quality protein – real recognizable protein in the form of actual meat, chicken, fish, eggs, cottage cheese and/or yogurt. They need some real vegetables and simple carbs, and a bit of fruit, if available.
The second untruth is that you must feed only one dry food throughout your dog’s life. What if someone told us to feed our human children only one fried corn-based cereal every meal for their entire lives? We would laugh t them. It is absurd and we know from common sense it would be unhealthy. You can see that it would lead to fat children who were nevertheless malnourished from the lack of minimally processed real fresh food.
When you are told to take your vet’s advice about feeding your dog, who is telling you that? The vet herself? Does she recommend feeding the food she is selling in the front of her clinic (some of which now resemble pet food stores?) Why do we not become suspicious of the validity of such advice? We need to Question Authority, my friends – on behalf of our animals who have become victims of terrible feeding decisions by us, as we have become customers in a marketplace where veterinarians are being used as middlemen and salespeople by the pet food companies who once fed their pets in vet school. A vicious cycle that needs to be exposed and stopped!
There are a number of problems with the clear conflict of interest of veterinarians who sell “vet prescribed” foods and make a profit off what they tell you to feed your dog and cat. First of all, from the moment every young, impressionable student enters veterinary school she is bombarded with free bags of dog food for her own animals for her entire academic career. The same commercial pet food companies whose trucks back up to the vet colleges with pallets of free food also happen to fund the salary of the few professors teaching the few hours of nutrition education each student receives in the years of study (yes, a few hours). But taking it a step further, the food companies also write, publish and distribute the very textbooks the students read. (These are facts easily verified – I did so myself when I visited and lectured at Tufts University, U.C. Davis and Virginia Tech.) The “proof” on the side of each bag of why it is okay or even advisable to feed these bagged foods to our animals is based on testing done to prove the claims; it is not real science in any sense of the word. Small groups of dogs and cats are fed these bagged concoctions for a few months. Nobody oversees the process except the employees of the pet food companies, many of them with vet degrees. And by law, the food companies hav great latitude to make whatever claims they wish about the food in those bags. There is no government oversight, no objective, disinterested party anywhere in the process.
Once your vet is practicing, she has already been schooled in this faith-based science – she believes what the pet food companies told her from Day One in school. She has never stopped to recognize that in business the goal is to make a product at the lowest possible cost – get away with the least they can – and therefore make the highest possible profit. Using the doctors themselves as the “priests” to bring more people into the fold was a brilliant idea – vets are practicing “faith-based” science (a contradiction in terms, of course) where pet food is concerned. There is no objectivity where vets and good nutritional practices with dogs and cats are concerned. Telling you what to feed your pet is based on their early indoctrination by purveyors of products about which the students themselves rarely felt compelled to question the reasoning or ingredients behind formulations of dry dog food. A precious few vets today question any of the claims made about the safety, actual nutritional value, nor logical place as the sole diet of omnivores (dogs) and obligate carnivores (cats) [about which you can read more on the page on The Truth About Cats]. In fact, the basic ingredients on many vet-prescribed diets rival those sold at the lowest end of the food chain in grocery stores – loads of corn, cheap fats and bulky fillers with zero nutritional value.
Do I need to add it is time for us to stand up and “take back the food bowl” - and fill it with our own conscious, purposeful choices?
The next tall tale you have been fed is that dry dog food cleans a dog’s teeth – what a brilliant marketing idea! Imagine if the folks who sell (highly processed, sugary, bad-fat-laden) toaster pastries to people for their children’s’ breakfasts mothers could claim it would clean their kids’ teeth! That is a parallel to what is being claimed about dog food cleaning a dog’s teeth - on the contrary, the fat sprayed on kibble can actually contribute to tar, plaque, gum disease and tooth decay. And all those carbs themselves leave residue in the mouth, too. It’s as if your own dentist sent you home after a dental cleaning with a bag of corn chips – instead of the toothbrush and toothpaste – and told you to rub them all over your teeth to keep them clean. This is a wishful thinking absurdity on our part that continues to be passed down as fact – when in fact it is a sales pitch concocted by commercial pet food manufacturers and our gullibility suits the pet food companies just fine.
More to come…
But meanwhile, tune in every week to get the story behind these stories…
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