Is your pet a cannibal?

[Guest guest]

I found this article on Life.ca, a website for a Canadian magazine on natural

living. Since we've been talking about pets and their diets so much I thought

this would be very informative!

 

 

By Wendy Priesnitz Dead, dying, diseased and disabled. Those

four D words describe how government inspectors decide that meat is not fit for human consumption. And what happens if it’s not? It ends up in

pet food.

 

Dead cats and dogs are even found in pet food.

Along with various slaughterhouse and restaurant scraps, dead farm animals

and road kills, euthanized family pets are often "rendered", which means

melted down in processing plants.

 

Renderers in the United States pick up an

estimated 5,000 tons of waste material every day. The city of Los Angeles

on its own sends 200 tons of euthanized cats and dogs to one rendering

facility every month.

 

Rendering, which dates back to the early Egyptians,

operates in the shadows of polite society. But the resulting products

are commonplace. The fat that floats to the top of rendering vessels

is used in lubricants, lipstick, cement, inks and waxes. Some of the

more gelatinous material ends up in soap, candles, pharmaceuticals and candy. The heavy material that sinks to the bottom is dried, named "meat meal",

and becomes the major ingredient in most pet and animal feed.

 

If you no longer have the stomach to feed

your pet this stuff, there are alternatives. You can buy one of the growing

number of "natural" pet foods, make your own, or investigate vegetarianism.

 

With a little extra attention, most pets can

be vegetarians. Dogs are fairly easily converted to a meatless diet,

while cats require some nutrients from meat that cannot be obtained in

sufficient amounts from plant foods. These include taurine, and vitamin

B12, which must be supplemented.

 

The Vegetarian Society of UK points to scientific

studies where animals fed meat alone (without supplementation) develop

soft bones and generally poor health, and sometimes die. The condition

is attributed to lack of adequate calcium, iodine and vitamins A and

B1. The natural diet is far more varied. Wild dogs and cats eat not only

the meat but also the bones, organs, and intestines containing assorted vegetable matter.

 

The Vegetarian Society recommends providing

your vegetarian dog with plenty of variety, to avoid deficiencies. It

also notes that dogs are fond of yeast products so flavouring with Marmite

or Barmene might make food such as Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) more

attractive to them, as well as providing extra B vitamins. Dogs often like a little honey for flavour, on cereals for example. At the same time,

check that you provide sources of protein, carbohydrates, fats and oils,

vitamins, minerals etc.

 

Remember that dogs have a shorter digestive

tract than humans, and may not cope so well with large quantities of

fibrous foods. However, they do need their share of roughage (vegetables,

bran, whole grain cereals, raw fruit). Cooking fibrous vegetables (15

minutes at boiling) breaks down the fibres, reducing the roughage value and making them more digestible but too much cooking destroys some vitamins,

especially thiamine. Dogs love most cooked vegetables, but may prefer

them cut into small pieces or pureed.

 

Dogs generally do well on two meals daily,

a smallish breakfast and a main afternoon or evening meal. For breakfast,

try feeding your dog wholegrain cereals like muesli, Shredded Wheat or

porridge in milk. Flavour with a little honey or dried powdered yeast

if necessary. For dinner, you could offer grated cheese, cottage cheese, egg, nutmeat, TVP, or cooked lentils and other pulses, not forgetting

baked beans. Combine that with raw (grated or chopped) and/or cooked

vegetables such as carrot or cauliflower. Other suitable foods for dogs

include raw, chopped or grated fruit, dried fruit, brown rice, sprouting

grains, and a teaspoon of vegetable oil.

 

Cats, on the other hand, are natural carnivores

and are unlikely to willingly give up eating meat. Cats fed on vegetarian

diets are likely to look elsewhere for their preferred meat diet, and

many cats will hunt and kill small rodents and birds.

 

While cats may enjoy certain plant foods,

The Vegetarian Society cautions that vegetarian diets high in fibre and

polyunsaturated fatty acids may be detrimental to a cat’s health. High

fibre foods can fill the cat’s digestive system without providing the

necessary nutrients in sufficient concentrations. Excess polyunsaturated

fatty acids in vegetable oils can lead to a vitamin E deficiency related illness.

 

If your animal is picky about its food, switching

to a new diet may be difficult. Start by mixing a small amount of new

food with a normal amount of their regular food. Keep providing a little

more new food while decreasing the old food by the same amount, until

eventually the new food has completely replaced the old. It may take months.

 

Occasionally, a pet can experience vomiting

or diarrhea. This can occur when the switch is made too quickly, but

may sometimes be due to a lack of intestinal bacteria necessary to efficiently

digest plant material. This problem can be easily solved by supplementing

with a commercially available digestive enzyme.

 

If you don’t want to turn your pet into a

vegetarian, but the contents of commercial pet food turns you off, you

can still cook for your animal. But notice that home-cooked does not

mean table-scraps, which may lack nutrients and contain too much fat.

Some vets suggest that you make meat approximately one-third to one-half

of your dog’s daily diet, with the addition of fruits, vegetables and

grains.