Defend Our Pets

The site seems to be about melamine. Melamine is no longer in pet food, it was never a legal ingrediant and now they have a test for it and inspect for it.

I posted this recently in another thread - - this is incase you missed it.Table scraps are ok - but if you have a cat please make sure that the food you give them has not got onion in it - or has been cooked with onion. That is if you have roasted some meat and also roasted an onion with it you should not give it to the cat/s. Onions cause anemia (sp?) in cats. I think there are some sites that give recipes for home made cat and dog food - if you do a search you'll probably find some.

I think you should search out other sources of information rather than just go on one. Quality formulations (e.g. not dirt cheap no-name brands) of commercial pet food are well-designed and people using it have healthy pets including cats living into their thirties. Different food types have differenet advantages and disadvantages, but commercial foods are not evil. And no, I don't work for a pet food company. I looked into dog foods quite a lot before choosing a mid-price commercial brand with a good formulation and I feel comfortable with every ingredient in it--confidant it will be better for his health than anything I could make.

Carmy said:

Cats can't digest grain and should be fed only meat and fish. I never knew that.

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Yeah, cats are "hypercarnivores". By definition a hypercarnivore's wild diet is at least 70% meat, but cats are a special case -- they eat almost nothing but meat. As a result they have a short gut typical of carnivores, which is not long enough to absorb enough nutrition from straight plant sources, though some species will use fruit as a supplement when live food is a bit short. Should go easy on the fish though; domestic cats are a (very recent) descendant of one of the wildcat species [apparently current thought is the Asian wildcat] which eat primarily rodents as well as a lot of other land animals depending on availability, including very small antelope. They are not particularly adapted to fish.

That said, there are a lot of factors to look for when looking at an animal's health, many of them easily checked by the owner in how they look and act. It's really hard to buy that there are no commercial pet foods at all with any nutrients to speak of when one has several healthy pets who eat them. And it's not the ideal source by any stretch, but they're probably getting nutrition from the grain as well because it's been heavily processed, which does some of the work the intestines normally would have to.

The cat food has the nutritients needed. They also need fiber which is provided in the form of grain rather than hair, hide and the half digested stomach content of herbivores (which would be the natural source). The grain is there for a reason.

You can't lump commercial food in a file named 'evil' and home made diets in 'good'

There are a number of dogs and cats each year that end up at the vet's with nasty nutritional disorders due to home diets.

Either put the research and energy into it that the high end commercial folks do (which involves a large number of people and tons of research money) or stick to the folks who have done the work and done it well.

My first two Ibizan Hounds lived well beyond the average life span (10-12 years). The first one, Wisdom, broke the record for the breed by living to 16 years, 46 days. The second, Mercy, lived to 15 years, 11.5 months. Our vet says that to live that long they had received "immaculate care".

We fed them high grade commercial food (dry with 1/3 of a can of wet), mixed with small amounts of table scraps, peanut butter, raw almonds, eggs, brown rice, cheese, etc. (not all at the same time). Wisdom LOVED cooked broccoli and cauliflower and butter was the only thing she would snitch off the kitchen counter. Mercy loved peanut butter, almonds, eggs, chicken, and cheese.

If you stick to high quality food your animals will have smaller poops since they are getting all the nutrients out of the food.

To save money, we would buy the giant bag. I would then repackage it into gallon zip lock bags and keep it in the freezer. That way the food wouldn't loose any nutrients toward the bottom of the bag. The 'current' supply we kept in a small ice chest. That helps minimize the foods exposure to air.

We only gave them filtered water, which I think matters too, esp. if your live somewhere that uses chemicals in the water supply. That's just my opinion.....

I agree that one advantage for dog and owner of the better food is less poop (and less stinky poop).

I have a little kitten I have raised since 7 weeks on a high quality pet store kitten food exclusively, and I am shocked at how gorgeous her coat is and how healthy and active she is (she came to me anemic, bloated, rheumy eyes with legs slightly twisted - vet said it was mild rickets) She had been taken from her mama too young and fed adult grocery store adult cat food. After 4 months of the good stuff, she is sleek and gorgeous and a royal pain my butt. So I don't doubt that her food is good quality.