I am a Grenade

Disclaimer(s): It is not my intention to imply that one does not love their pet if they do not feed them a certain kind of food.  I am self-educated, and I am therefore not a "professional pet nutritionist."  While I have spent months researching and cross-checking sources and reading pet food ingredients and so on, this does not make me qualified to give any kind of professional advise.  #you can't fight city hall

I think I'm going to ramble for a little while today.



I want to talk about pet food for a little bit, so excuse me while I get up on my soap-box.  If you have an extremely weak stomach, maybe you shouldn't read this.

I feed my cat raw meat.  As in, not cooked, not processed, whole raw meat.  She has been eating this way since she was eight weeks old.  I make a big online order once every three-to-four months for frozen mice, chicks, quail, rabbit, guinea pig, and rats.  Small animals that a cat of her stature could reasonably hunt in the wild.  In addition to this I buy chicken gizzards and liver when it is on sale, give her an egg one to two times a week, and spoil her with grass-fed pork, venison, or beef once in a great while.  I have a (small) second freezer specifically for her food.  She knows the sound of it opening like other cats know the sound of a can opening.



Her coat is beautiful.  Silky soft, clean, nearly odorless.  Her teeth are as white as they were when she was a kitten--hardly a speck of tartar.  When she meows in her face her mouth smells like a mouth, not like a rotting dead carcass and gum deterioration.  The litter box smells even cleaner--I almost forget that it exists.  She is lean and fit with no flab to speak of, alternating between energetically playful to peaceful after-mealtime-snuggles. 

I have grown to adore the sound of her crunching into her breakfast and dinner, thinking fondly of how tiger-like this is and how right it feels, how different to the sound of munching and gulping of dry meat-cereal.

My father lives upstairs.  He has three cats.  They share three large bowls of meat-cereal buffet--open 24/7.  It takes me twenty minutes to adjust to the smell of recently-cleaned kibble-cat litter box.  After these cats finish their business in the box, they come rocketing out as though they could outrun the smell coming from their own bodies.  I do not enjoy these cats.  I can smell their breath without holding them.  Two of them (Pandora and Rhianna) are only a few years older than Zelda--the third cat (Dublin) is almost 13.

Dublin - 13 yrs

Pandora

Not Rhianna, but close enough

Dublin and Pandora have long fur like Zelda, but I cannot recall a time where those two did not have painful mats and clumps of tangled fur.  I do not have to brush my cat, her fur stays naturally neat (raw egg once a week will do that).  Rhianna's fur has a dry and wiry texture, reminiscent of the crumbly food that they all ingest constantly throughout the day.  They eat so much and puke and go back for more.  And I won't even begin to talk about the hairballs.

Their breath overpowers the smell of their fur, generally.  But there is a kind of "rancid meat-flavored oil" quality about it.

These differences alone are enough to convince me that I am onto something (setting aside a giant online community of pet owners who do the same).



Let me back up, though.

Cats and dogs (and ferrets) are carnivores.  The most obvious proof lies in their teeth.  When I worked at Petco (before I adopted Zelda) they trained us for exactly one hour in "pet nutrition" (aside: would YOU trust someone with only ONE hour of training to tell you what your pet should be eating?).  This consisted mainly of the differences between benefits, features, and advantages; how this relates to pet food and how we can sell it better.  We had representatives from pet food companies come in to do "demonstrations" as part of our staff training.  I'll give you an (extremely laughable) example.

I came in for a meeting early and was sitting in the break room when this representative comes in with an armful of potato chips.  We exchange greetings as she begins to open four different kinds of potato chips and pours them into large bowls.

"Do you know why I am here?"  They ask me, setting up what I thought was a party all over the only table in the break room.  They are now pouring M&Ms into a smaller bowl.

I am sitting at the computer desk about to log in to do my (internet) training.

"No."  I laugh offhandedly, "What's with all the chips?"

"Well, since you're the only one here so far I'll just tell you first."  This person then explains to me what company they are from, what their mission statement is, yadda yadda.

"Now, what do you think all of these chips represent?"  The breathlessly-enthusiastic representitive gestures over to the bowls of Sour Cream & Onion, BBQ, Ruffel, and Plain potato chips.  I hesitate.

"Junk food?"

We share a laugh.  It is clear that I haven't gotten the point.

Well, the pet food company's point anyway.  But I think I was onto something there.

The answer was "variety."  All of the chips represented the variety of dry food available.  But it all boiled down to chips.  This person then proceeded to ask me

"Now when you go on a picnic and you're eating your hamburgers and potato salad, why doesn't your dog get a nice treat?"  The representative pushes the bowl of M&Ms to me to take and eat, which I politely decline because I have a piece of gum.

The representative was trying to demonstrate a new line of refrigerated wet food for dogs.  But they were using Junk Food as the basis for their demonstration without even realizing that they were giving away the biggest scam in the pet food industry!

Let me talk about the pet food industry for a little bit.

The top ten pet food companies may sound familiar to you.  These are the few that I recognize.
1) Mars Inc.
2) Nestle SA
3) Colgate-Palmolive Co.
4) Procter & Gamble Co.
5) Del Monte Foodsm Co.


Most of these companies also manufacture food for human consumption.  Most of them probably started out exclusively doing just that.  But as stricter health and safety codes came along, dictating that more control be exerted over what goes into human food, more was "left over" that could not go in.  In this profit-driven society, this is a problem.

So the most convenient way to deal with this problem would be to put all of the leftover crap into pet food.

Unfortunately, waste deemed inappropriate for human consumption--such as animals who have died due to disease or anything besides slaughtering--is processed into those tiny nasty doom kibble bits.  But there are regulations for pet food too, you say? Right.

Now, I know that the meat industry (food industry in general) is fucked.  That big food companies raising, slaughtering, packaging, and shipping meat do a piss-poor job at keeping things neat and stomachable (is that even a word).

But I'm not just eating meat.  I get my nutrition from a wide variety of things.  My cat can only get her nutrition from what I feed her, and if I can't control what is going into her food then why am I even bothering feeding her?  I might as well let her eat out of my trashcan.

The pet food industry likes to pretend that if you buy the higher-end kibble your pets will be healthier.  No.  See, pet food industries don't care about your animals.  They care about their money.  They keep getting away with putting chicken skin and bones into food and labeling it as "chicken" when there isn't any actual meat.  Not to mention trying to convince the general public that vegetables are species-appropriate for canines.  Just.  No.

What makes up most of dry pet food?  Corn.  Its cheap and we grow so much of it.
Cats (and dogs) can't digest corn.  (Cats also tend to be allergic to corn.)  Carnivores have systems designed specifically for consuming meat, why the hell are we feeding them corn?  Cats specifically have extremely short highly-acidic digestive tracts specifically for breaking down meat.  There is no part of their system designed to break down anything else.  Everything that isn't meat passes through the system much like waste that we don't need passes through us: huge terrifying poop.

No wonder my dad's litter box stinks to high heaven.

The pet food industry likes to say that dry food is better for your pet's teeth.  Truthfully, the kibble is much too brittle to do any scrubbing of tartar at all.  It's only slightly better then wet food (god only knows what is in there).  Have you ever tried cleaning your teeth with a cracker?

Cats gulp that nasty doom kibble up like it's going out of style.  Problem: it takes about 10 minutes for those digestive acid-juices to build up (via chewing action) to even begin to digest.  This is great for me because that's roughly how long it takes for Zelda to crunch the bones in her mouse down to comfortably swallow it (or rip then swallow) whole.  (Again, look at their teeth).  All that built-up acid is perfect for killing off any bacteria that you could possibly be concerned about (no sick kitty for me).  Not that the sterile interior of a mouse carcass has enough surface area exposed to contamination (the air) for me to worry about. Which leads me to pet food recalls due to illness.  

Pet food is ground up.  Pulverized until unrecognizable.  This multiplies the surface area astronomically.  Surface area = exposed area.  Ever notice how ground beef goes bad faster than a hunk of steak?  Surface area.  After whatever garbage goes into pet food (dead zoo animals, undesirable parts, diseased farm animals, etc) has been ground into oblivion, they have to bleach the shit out of it to kill whatever is in there (hopefully anyway).  Of course, this makes it taste like...nothing.  So they have to add flavoring--oils--to the pet food.  What happens to oil when it's left out at room temperature (or, in this case, exposed to high/unregulated temperatures on an 18-wheeler during shipment from AZ to somewhere in New England)?  It goes rancid.  Which leaves ample room for bacteria to grow, even before you purchase it.

Animals gulping down kibble without enough time for the acid to build up means an increase risk of illness.  And that shit goes rancid FAST.  You can smell the difference between "just purchased" and "halfway through the bag."

Salmonella.  Seriously.

Which seems kind of counter-intuitive, right?  I grew up frantically washing counter-tops after preparing chicken to cook and scrubbing my hands raw.  Now I let her eat on the floor, a quick squirt of natural all-purpose spray wiped with a paper towel after she's done.  I haven't gotten sick once and I've fed her hundreds of times by now.  I don't go crazy, I wear gloves while prepping her food and cleaning up small spots of blood she may have missed, but I don't bleach the floor (which would be bad because she eats off of it).

Really, there's more germs on the bottom of your shoes that you walk around with every day

Another thing that is added to cat food specifically is Taurine.  Cats need Taurine because they do not naturally produce it in their bodies.  Taurine begins to break down when exposed to air.  So ground-to-bits-and-boiled-for-ages-crapple needs added Taurine that would be found naturally in--you guessed it--raw meat.  And it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of the "taurine" they use is synthetically manufactured. 

My point is, why would you try to re-create a diet for a cat if what they naturally eat is perfect?  I laugh so much now that pet food companies are putting out commercials talking about how their pet food now contains "more meat" because dogs/cats are carnivores.  Well, its about time you guys admit the carnivore bit, but "more meat" and "still giving veggies and shit" isn't going to cut it.

But seriously.

These big companies make enough money where they can buy the vets too.  My vet freaked out when I accidentally told them what I was feeding my cat and they recommended I feed Science Diet (recalls, holy crap).  Point is, they make commission if you buy pet food from them (at the office).  In reality, vets are not nutritional specialists.  They only have two to three days of "nutrition" training during their study, an "education" coming from the big pet food companies themselves.

I'm going to cut out the middle man and, ya know, just feed my cat what she's naturally designed to eat.

Would you feed a snake some dried out pellets?

That's my point.

In the meantime, I can quickly pluck a bird and skin a rabbit. # survival skills 101