Sunday, August 19, 2012

Wet dog food.

I spent quite a bit of time shopping the wet dog food section, Saturday night at Fred Meyer.  Turns out, they all utilize meat-byproducts.  Note though, there was no natural / organic wet dog food or anything similar, at FM.

What is meat-byproduct?  Via Wikipedia's citation of the AAFCO:  "It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents."

Gross.

Do I really want my dog to be eating brains?  Well okay, so dogs aren't going to catch a form of BSE, but cats have FSE, and the whole idea of eating brains is too zombie-ish for me.

Mechanically separated meat is almost as bad -- one reason why the only hot dogs I eat are from Hebrew National.  Of course, I do love Spam, which has mechanically separated chicken, but chickens are presumed to be immune to spongiform encephalitis.

I feel unsettled now.

Update: Just came back from Safeway and both Newman's Own and Dogswell are in the clean, without any meat-byproducts.  I've bought Dogswell before, and they have these little slices of what I think is ground duck.  Looked good, but smells...well smells like something a dog would love.

Lately I've been cooking my own dog food with brown rice, eggs, beef / chicken, various beans, peas, corn, corn meal, carrots, onions, celery and broccoli.  The dog likes this a lot more than dry dog food, for sure.

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