Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats (5 page)

• Slaughterhouse wastes
  
• Toxic products from spoiled foodstuffs
  
• Non-nutritive fillers
  
• Heavy-metal contaminants
  
• Sugar
  
• Pesticides and herbicides
  
• Drug residues
  
• Artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives
  
• Bacteria and fungi contaminants
  

When you feed your pet convenience foods, you unknowingly help to create another problem: The presence of various toxins and pollutants actually
increases
the body’s need for high-quality nutrients necessary for combating or eliminating these same contaminants. When the overall nutrition is already lower than it should be, we are inviting trouble.

“But wait,” you say, “my cat loves this dry food and won’t eat anything else!” I have heard this statement many times. But here’s the thing to understand: Animals don’t know any better. When a food has the right smell and taste, like those they have become used to over the last several millennia, they will eat it. Have you ever heard an ad for pet food in which the statement is made about all the research that has gone into the making of the food? Have you every wondered about how much of that “research” was discovering that irresistible flavor?

So far, we have considered a couple of important factors: the issue of how commercial pet foods are labeled and how misleading that can be in determining their value, as well as how feeding the same processed food over and over again clearly cannot support the same level of health that follows a natural diet. Now let’s turn to the quality of commercial pet foods.

THE QUALITY OF PET FOODS

Pet food makers make a big effort to produce competitive, consistent products manufactured from a fluctuating market of least-cost ingredients. Using computerized analyses, they draw from these constituents to presumably make a product that meets or exceeds minimal nutritional standards for dogs and cats. Two questions concern us now: What are these standards, and are they enforced?

The usual standard is that set by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) which “is a private advisory body whose members are representatives of individual
state and government agencies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other federal and foreign agencies that share responsibilities in the regulation of animal feed.”

Like me, you likely assumed that pet food is regulated as to
quality
by organizations like this, right? AAFCO, however, has no input as to the ingredients actually used in pet foods, as it has no enforcement authority and does no analytical testing on pet food or the sources of protein, fiber, or fats used. Feeding trials, which are done for some (not all) of the foods are “either run by the company itself or by a contracted facility, and the company then attests to the results.”

Even more disappointing, as Ann Martin reports in her book
Food Pets Die For
, acceptance of even the AAFCO standard of quality is not universal. She sent a letter to each state asking, “Could you please advise if your state adheres to the AAFCO guidelines regarding pet food ingredients?” Ann had replies from only 20 states. Of these 20, just 13 stated that they adhere to AAFCO guidelines. Some officially have no guidelines at all.

Some of the food you buy might say “USDA inspected.” But the point to realize is that the inspection was to determine if the food was suitable
for human consumption
. What was not edible goes into pet food. So it is incorrect to think that because the food is inspected, what your pet is eating is of high quality. It actually means the opposite—that
because
it is inspected, your dog or cat is eating the discarded remnants. An even more shocking fact, to me, is that the standard for human beings, which is higher than that for animal food, is so low.

Prevention
magazine once published a letter from a reader who offered an inside glimpse of the pet food industry:

I once worked in a chicken butchering factory
in Maine. Our average daily output was 100,000
chickens… . Directly ahead of me on the conveyor
line were the USDA inspectors and their trimmers.
The trimmers cut the damaged and diseased parts
off the chickens and dropped them in garbage cans,
which were emptied periodically. These parts were
sent to a pet food factory
.

So the next time you hear a pet food commercial
talk about the fine ingredients they use in their
product, don’t you believe it
.

Similarly, a story appeared in our local paper revealing that dead animals found on the highway are sent to rendering plants, where they are used in pet food. The reporter actually talked to the Road Department, which led him to Animal Control, which then led him to Eugene Chemical & Rendering Works, where he was told the rendered material was sold to companies that make pet (and livestock) feed. Similar reports have surfaced, so I don’t think this is just a local phenomenon. Ann Martin offers considerable evidence in her book that pets are routinely rendered by veterinary hospitals or shelters and recycled into pet food.

It is very difficult to determine exactly what pet food makers are using as ingredients. It can change on any day, and they don’t volunteer information like this. It takes
some insider information or good detective work to find these things out. There are no federal regulations against using what are called 4-D sources—that is, tissues from animals that are dead, dying, disabled, or diseased when they arrive at the slaughterhouse.

H
EALTH
E
FFECTS
?

What effect might these wastes be having on animals? After all, maybe it is entirely acceptable to feed these by-products to animals. Don’t they eat all sorts of stuff off the ground, even digging up dead animals to eat at times? This statement is generally true for canines, but not wild cats, that eat only freshly killed prey. Wolves and dogs seem to be able to eat meat that is not fresh, even partly decayed, without becoming ill. But here is the difference—in nature, the animals captured and eaten are not chronically ill or filled with drugs or hormones. Having worked with livestock medicine in my early years, I know that a significant percent of the animals sent to slaughter, but not suitable for human consumption, have first been extensively treated with drugs. Since veterinary treatment failed, they are then processed for whatever monetary value can be captured by turning them into food—even pet food.

It is a similar situation for the animals killed on the highway. Yes, it is possible that a deer was healthy when hit by a car and killed. This meat would be considered appropriate to use. But think of the many agricultural fields sprayed with insecticides or herbicides. Animals caught in these fields or that enter them after they are sprayed can become sick and disoriented, wandering into a road where they are easily killed.

The pets recycled from veterinary hospitals or shelters can have high levels of antibiotics and various other drugs (in the last attempt to keep them alive), or perhaps the final euthanasia solution. Most of these drugs end up in the food. That is why animals that have had drug therapy are not used in human food. It would make people sick.

From his experience as a veterinarian and federal meat inspector, P. F. McGargle, DVM, has concluded that feeding slaughterhouse wastes to animals increases their chance of getting cancer and other degenerative diseases. This practice has also been related to mad cow disease, which is discussed in chapter 3. Those wastes, he reported, can include moldy, rancid, or spoiled processed meats, as well as tissues riddled with cancer.

These meat scraps can also contain hormone levels comparable to amounts that have produced cancer in laboratory animals. Dr. McGargle attributed these high levels to two causes: synthetic hormones routinely fed to livestock to stimulate rapid growth, and meat meal, often produced from glandular wastes and fetal tissues from pregnant cows. Both are naturally high in hormones. When this material is processed, even by high heat, the hormones remain active. Ironic, isn’t it, that the high heat destroys nutrients but retains the harmful drugs? High hormone
levels have the most severe effect on cats, who are extremely sensitive to them. The hormone implants that are used to fatten steers and caponize male chickens, for example, are considered toxic to cats, even in
very low
levels.

W
HY
S
OME
P
ET
F
OOD
S
MELLS
T
HAT
W
AY

Although USDA inspectors are only allowed a few seconds to examine each carcass, there are many animals with obvious signs of disease or abnormality, according to Deborah Lynn Dadd, author of
The Non-Toxic Home
and Office
. Dadd’s research shows that:

“Each year about 116,000 mammals and nearly 15 million birds are condemned before slaughter. After killing, another 325,000 carcasses are discarded and more than 5.5 million major parts are cut away because they are determined to be diseased. Shockingly, 140,000 tons of poultry are condemned annually, mainly due to cancer. The diseased animals that cannot be sold are processed into… animal feed.”

It’s no wonder that so many pet foods have such an awful smell and appearance, despite the heavy use of artificial flavors and colors to make them more appealing. According to breeder Lee Edwards Benning, author of
The Pet Profiteers
, one marketing study showed that some kids found the smell of dog food so obnoxious they refused to feed their own pets—poor Mom got stuck with the job. The same study showed that even Mom had qualms. She said she hesitated to use the family’s knives, forks, and spoons to dig the glop out of the cans.

Perhaps consumer turn-off was one factor that led to the development of ever more “convenient” pet foods. Since they were first introduced, the popularity of “burgers,” soft-moist chunks, and dry kibble has grown, while the popularity of canned foods has diminished. Unfortunately, this trend means the average pet is eating more “junk food,” because these new foods are full of sugar and preservatives to keep them fresh without canning or refrigeration.

ANOTHER MISSING INGREDIENT: LIFE

All processed pet foods—whether sold in cans, bags or frozen packages, in either giant supermarket chains or local health food stores—are missing something that seems to me to be the most important “nutrient” of all. This key ingredient is practically ignored by nutritional scientists, but we can sense when it’s there. It is a quality found only in freshly grown, uncooked whole foods:
Life
energy!

To those accustomed to mechanistic explanations of the universe, this statement might sound a bit farfetched. Yet in recent years, some researchers have been confirming through laboratory tests a phenomenon that’s been described by many people around the world for centuries. It is a subtle force field that permeates and surrounds all living things. What exactly this field is, and
how it operates, is still largely a mystery. There are, however, a number of successful therapies, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, and various Eastern disciplines (see chapter 14), which address healing at this energetic level.

Through a special medium of photography developed in Russia by a husband and wife team, the Kirlians, a number of investigators are now discovering a whole new world of colorful and complex emissions and “auras” of energies given off by living organisms. They seem to vary, especially according to the individual’s emotional state, health, and use of drugs.

The Kirlians were the first to discover that the energy field around “a withered leaf (shows) almost no flares… . As the leaf gradually dies, its self-emissions also decrease correspondingly until there is no emission from the dead leaf.” What are the implications of this finding for animals (or people) who never or rarely eat anything still fresh or raw enough to retain this mysterious energy?

P
ROVING
THE
P
OTENCY
OF
R
AW
F
OODS

Raw food contains more vitamins and minerals than cooked food, because cooking destroys many nutrients. When nutritional standards were originally set up for dogs and cats, it was presumed that raw foods, not cooked, would be used to feed these animals. Yet, most of the foods available commercially are very thoroughly cooked, more than would be done in a home kitchen, and none of these are nutritionally equivalent to what was established by these original standards.

Let’s talk about using raw foods for animals. By this I mean feeding uncooked food as much as possible. Some things, like grains and some vegetables, will have to be cooked to be digestible, but meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, soft vegetables, and fruits can all be fed raw with great benefit.

The living testimony exemplified in the many people and animals who thrive on diets that include plenty of fresh raw vegetables, fruits, dairy products, and other foods is enough to convince me that a diet of cooked foods alone will not maintain your pets in top-notch condition. Moreover, my clinical experience over the last 27 years confirms this. The difference in many animals given a home-prepared, raw food diet after eating processed foods most of their lives is nothing short of amazing.

One illustration of this point concerns a remarkable experiment run by Sir Robert McCarrison, a doctor stationed in India some years ago. Impressed by the enviable degree of health enjoyed by the Hunza, Pathan, and Sikh peoples, he wondered if a diet similar to theirs could produce comparable physique and health in experimental rats.