Last month, I encouraged you to ask the makers of the foods you feed your dogs for complete nutrient analyses of those products. If you found companies refusing to answer or representatives without information, know your attempt was not wasted. You helped make manufacturers aware we want answers.
The purpose of the exercise was not to frustrate you or to annoy the pet food companies. What I hoped to do is to highlight the fact that the industry whose products are fed to 95% of the dogs in this country canโt be bothered to provide consumers with accurate, understandable information about those products. I am outraged at that fact โ and I hope that more of you will join me in my fight, in hope of pushing the industry to change. The idea that even companies with billions of dollars of annual sales canโt or wonโt make nutritional information about their products available to consumers is appalling.
While researching the article that appears on page 22 of this issue (โDrilling for Dietary Copperโ), I checked the websites of every pet food maker on our โApproved Dry Dog Foodโ list, and found โtypicalโ nutrient analyses on only about a third of their websites. I also searched the websites of the largest pet food companies in the world, whose products generally do not get included on our โApproved Foodsโ lists. Even fewer of their sites include typical or โexpectedโ nutrient analyses for their products โ and nobody provides โactualโ nutrient analyses, which are the results of laboratory tests of their finished products.
A pet food company representative, irritated with my questions, once asked me, โDo you get this information from the makers of the canned soups or breakfast cereals in your cupboard?โ No, I donโt, I told him โ but then, my diet mostly consists of home-prepared fresh foods. By eating a wide variety of foods, I can readily achieve โnutritional balance over time.โ In contrast, the dogs who subsist almost entirely on commercial dog foods are solely dependent on the makers of those products for all of their nutrients. If thereโs too much of something potentially deadly in the food that dogs eat every day, year in and year out, something that can accumulate in the bodies of some dogs, such as dietary copper โ well, Iโd like to know, so I can avoid that product โ or at the very least, lobby for change. Or start feeding my dogs a home-prepared diet, which I should be doing, anyway!
Doesnโt it seem reasonable to ask that the companies that ostensibly provide โcomplete and balanced nutrition for dogsโ show us, the consumers that provide their ever-increasing annual earnings, what that nutrition actually consists of?
