ETHICS
(by: Jane Rice)
One of the most unethical marketing situations I have witnessed involved the sale of dry cat food. Two years ago a co-worker asked me what I fed my cat and I told her. She asked me if I knew if it was the most nutritious food available, so I began looking on the internet. To my surprise I found that pet foods claim to be “complete and balanced for the life of the pet” when in fact, the ingredients used in dry food are usually low-grade by-products left over from human food production.
Labels on bags of pet food can be deceptive too such as dividing carbohydrates into 3 different categories so they appear low on the list of ingredients. The manufacturers also measure the ingredients before the dehydration process so it appears to contain higher levels than it actually does. Enriched with vitamins you end up with nothing more than sugar coated breakfast cereal. Pet food manufacturers actually spend more money on packaging than on the actual product, furthermore, dry cat food is not species specific and lacks the ingredients a cat needs for optimal health.
In order to make the dry food it needs a considerable amount of fillers to hold its shape, about 30%. These are grains such as corn, rice, barley, wheat flour, potato or tapioca, among others and are all high in carbohydrates. This is obviously not what a cat would eat in the wild. An acceptable amount of carbohydrate for a cat is around 2-4%. Furthermore, it looses a lot of its moisture and nutrients during the cooking process. But consumers are lured by the convenience of an all-in-one food source and the ability to leave it out all day while they’re away at work.
Another gross misconception is that dry food cleans a cat’s teeth. Just as dentists do not recommend potato chips or cereal to clean humans’ teeth, people should not feed high carbohydrate crunchy food to clean their cat’s teeth. The perpetrators of this myth are the pet food companies themselves. The scientists that stake their claims also work for the pet food companies and veterinarians subscribe to these beliefs partly due to the fact they do not receive much nutrition education in school. The FDA can hardly keep up with human food production so these companies are self-regulated, like a fox guarding the hen house
Cat food is formulated to closely resemble dog food but the two digestive tracts are very different. Cats are classified as obligate carnivores meaning they can only derive their protein from meat. This is due to their overall shorter digestive system. Dogs and humans are classified as omnivores meaning they can derive protein from either meat or plant matter. Cats evolved very quickly in prehistoric times and then stopped abruptly never developing into omnivores. Additionally, unlike other animals, the cat has only one enzyme system with limited ability to breakdown carbohydrates.
Getting a cat that has been fed dry food to eat wet food can sometimes be difficult. This is because dry food has a substance called “digest” sprayed on the outside. This digest is fermented by-products of meat-processing. While it has no nutritional value it is highly palatable for the cat and can even cause actual addiction to dry food. This explains why some cats refuse to switch from high-carbohydrate dry foods to more healthful wet food.
My 10 year old cat, Tiffany, ate Iams dry food before I switched her to grain-free canned food about 2 years ago. Even today she gets excited about crunchy treats. On average, a 10 pound cat needs around 200 calories per day which is about what is in one can of cat food. One word of caution, do not mix dry food and canned food together because once moistened, in about 1-2 hours, the dry food develops bacteria that can be harmful to the cat.
There are several websites on the internet about cat food and the ways in which it is marketed , such as, www.catinfo.org and books on the subject such as ‘Your Cat’ and ‘The Cat Bible’.
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