I felt pretty smug last night as my wife and I watched the CBC’s Doc Zone, replaying the documentary Pet Food: A Dog’s Breakfast on the pet food industry’s huge discrepancy between how pet food is marketed and what’s actually in the bag/can. Regular readers of this blog know that 10 years ago I decided to put our new Briard puppy, Asta, on a “traditional” diet of human leftovers, supplemented (rarely) with dry dog food (when there just weren’t enough leftovers). Our vet was scandalized and we debated the issue quite hotly (she’s also a close personal friend). She maintained the industry’s party-line that dog food was nutritionally balanced and that a human diet was inappropriate for good health and longevity. Then came the contaminated pet food scandal last year and the world changed overnight as brands ranging from cheap grocery store to high-end vet clinic foods started killing off thousands of pets.

A Dog’s Breakfast traces the unraveling of that industry and more importantly takes a cold, hard look at what’s really in pet food, even today. The one scam that I really didn’t know about was “ingredient segregation”. Since pet food is supposed to be heavy on the protein and low on grains (cats and dogs are carnivores – cats more so than dogs are “obligatory carnivores”, i.e. they must get almost all their nutrition from meat). Since by law, ingredients must be listed in order of highest content by weight first, in order to make it appear that there is more protein than grains, what the companies do is to “segregate” the grains into different types, e.g. corn isn’t listed just as corn but as “corn meal”, “corn flour”, and “corn byproducts”. In this way the three corn ingredients can represent a smaller proportion of the total, making it look like meat is the main ingredient. Sneaky bastards!

The highpoint is when a veterinary nutritionist cooks up a sludge made of old leather boots, motor oil, and sawdust, and then sends it to a lab for nutrient testing….and it passes as having the right proportions of protein, fat, and fiber….even though it is completely indigestible!!!

“You can’t protect yourself part-time, from people committed to taking advantage of you full-time”.