A Dog-Eat-Dog World

If the package of dog food that you regularly purchase for your dog had a picture of a dead dog on the front accompanied by the words, “Fortified with 100 percent natural dog meat!” would you still buy it? Probably not. And yet this might very well be what you are scanning at the grocery store checkout and scooping into your dog’s bowl.

Dog food is made from many strange things, only a few of which are evident in the list of ingredients. The packaging tends to depict fat, healthy chickens; vegetables that look like they ought to win a ribbon at the county fair; and either thick, juicy steaks or sedate-looking cows. But at around $15 for a 15-pound bag of dry food, nobody is spending enough money to turn a T-bone into dog food. The stuff that ends up in dog food is material that can’t be sold as food for humans. We have different standards for what our animals eat from what we would put in our own mouths, but where should we draw the line?

Under Food and Drug Administration regulations, only about 50 percent of a cow can be sold for human consumption. The hide, bones, digestive system and it contents, brain, feces, udders, and various other undesirable parts are all left over after a cow is slaughtered and butchered. The stuff that can’t even go into hotdogs gets consolidated and shipped to rendering plants. Slaughterhouses that handle pigs and chickens also send their leftovers to rendering plants. So do many other facilities that find themselves with large volumes of otherwise unusable dead animal parts, including animal shelters and veterinary clinics that euthanize a lot of animals.

Read more from this story HERE.