What’s really going into commercial dog food? The answer is horrifying.
Big Kibble is big business: $75 billion globally. A handful of multinational corporations dominate the industry and together own as many as 80% of all brands.
What’s even more shocking is how lax the regulations and guidelines are around these products. The guidelines—or lack thereof—for pet food allow producers to include ever-cheaper ingredients and create ever-larger earnings. For example, “legal” ingredients in kibble include poultry feces, saw dust, expired food, and diseased meat, among other horrors. Many vets still don’t know that kibble is not the best food for dogs because Big Kibble funds the nutrition research. So far, these corporations have been able to cut corners and still market and promote feed-grade food as if it were healthful and beneficial—until now.
Just as you are what you eat, so is your dog. Once you stop feeding your dog the junk that’s in kibble or cans, you have taken the first steps to improving your dog’s health, behavior and happiness.
The pet food industry as a whole has served as the repository for waste products of the human food chain practically since its inception, and this poses real threats to our dogs.
We generally refer to commercial dog food as “dog feed,” because what dogs eat is regulated as livestock feed, not as food for humans. This distinction allows Big Kibble to legally include adulterated ingredients purchased from barely regulated factories overseas. They can mix in the scraps from the human commercial meat industry, such as rendered byproducts, and include them as protein. They can add minerals laced with heavy metals and purchase spray-on flavor and fat to meet nutritional profiles and boost flavor.
The Association of American Feed Control Officials sets the standards for pet feed, with serious input from Big Kibble and the suppliers that profit from it. This structure is riddled with conflict of interest, and its enforcement processes pose grave danger to our pets.
Unlike meat raised for slaughter for human consumption, the “meat” in a bag produced by Big Kibble isn’t generally raised but rather rounded up—including from the discard pile of slaughterhouses. Only about 40% of the livestock “grown” (to use the meat industry term) on factory farms makes it into the human food chain. The rest of the animals—the hoofs and beaks, sinews and blood, bones and contents of the intestines—is waste. In the United States, the livestock industry churns out nearly a billion and a half tons of waste each year.
“Meat” is also gathered from “4 D” meat, as in animals that are dead, dying, destroyed, or diseased.
These are cows, chickens, pigs, and other farm animals that did not take the usual stockyard-to slaughterhouse-to-processor route because something went very wrong along the way. Maybe a cow got so sick, it died in the feedlot. Maybe a chicken is still alive but too diseased to be legally included in the human food supply. Four D meat cannot be legally included in human food. But it can in dog food.
Another “D” word you may hear when it comes to animals raised for slaughter: “deadstock.” In clothing and other businesses, “deadstock” means unopened, unsold items that are removed from the sales floor—new tennis shoes, say, that went out of style before consumers bought them. When it comes to meat, “deadstock” also means dead (live)stock, “products” taken off the sales floor, as in 4 D meat. These are removed from the sales chain of meat for humans. And, like tennis shoes, can find another life as a discount items—protein in processed dog feed.
How toxic is 4 D meat, those downed animals, the deadstock, really? Potentially very toxic … A disease can jump from a dead animal to a live one.
Renderers don’t use nice slabs of bacon but, rather, the bones and feathers and blood; dead animals that die on farms or en route to somewhere else; and offal—the “protein” that doesn’t make it into our food chain. They also use leftovers from grocery stores, butcher shops and restaurants.
Each year, the North American rendering industry “recycles” about 60 billion pounds of animal parts, not only from livestock and poultry but also from aquaculture farming and processing, food processing, supermarkets, and restaurants.
The movement away from grains—and, more recently, the return to so-called “good” grains—are both examples of Big Kibble marketing to pet parents’ fears while not actually improving the quality of the feed for dogs … grains can actually be a good source of carbohydrates, energy, and nutrients.
The grain-free movement wasn’t created by Big Kibble out of thin air; it was a business response to the benefits pet parents perceived. So what was going on here? What was causing the digestive distress or skin problems that drove many pet parents to try grain-free blends? It wasn’t the grain, it turns out, but rather the use of moldy grain.
If mold grows on corn stored in a damp silo, say, it eats that corn and produces toxic waste products, called mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are basically the poop of mold, and they can cause a host of problems. Mycotoxins suppress the immune system, which can lead to diarrhea, vomiting, and weight loss. Many mycotoxins, such as aflatoxin, are carcinogenic and have been linked to tumors and various cancers.
At JustFoodForDogs, we helped fund a study investigating the presence of mycotoxins in grain-containing and grain-free kibble, as well as in wet food. The study, published in 2019 in the journal Toxicology Communications, showed mycotoxins present in 75% of the grain-containing kibbles tested.
