Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Website claiming to help you decide what you should feed your pet

Here is yet another website claiming to help you decide what you should feed your pet called dogfoodanalysis.com. While I applaud the efforts of such websites to alert people about junk dog foods, they also seem to be just as misguided as the people they hope to help. Below is a critique that was offered by 'dog food analysis' regarding Lifes Abundance Holistic Dog Food by Dr. Jane Bicks. Some of the information is outdated, but even if it was current, it would be inaccurate. You will find the 'dog food analysis' comments in black and my comments in orange.

Dog Food Analysis Website Comments about meat
  1. The first ingredient in the food is a named meat product in meal form. There is a further meat product, fish meal, 10th on the ingredient list, but this is too far down to make up a substantive portion of the food. We note that while the manufacturers states that they do not add any chemical preservatives to the food, they do not specifically state the use of Ethoxyquin-free fish sources (ethoxyquin is a chemical preservative commonly added to fish destined for meal, and is believed to be carcinogenic). With only one real meat source, we cannot have confidence that there is an adequate amount of meat in this food.

The people behind the analysis website state quite clearly that they believe dogs and cats need "meat, meat, and more meat..." But, they also state on their site, "Until or unless the percentages of the ingredients are required to be shown on the ingredient lists or manufacturers disclose that information voluntarily, it can only ever be an educated guess or assessment, based on the knowledge that we do have." Basically then, their analysis only assumes that Lifes Abundance is lacking in enough meat because they cannot actually know (unless maybe they simply called us - just a thought).As far as Fish and Ethoxyquin are concerned, they assume that since their is no mention of being "Ethoxyquin free", we must indeed have it. Interesting. I guess this is due in part by their lack of true investigation of HealthyPetNet since, as they specifically state, "We make no assessment of their ethics, involvement in food recalls, animal testing, phenobarbitol 'scandals' or other practices, believing this to be a matter for the individual consumer". Incredible! Ethics makes all the difference in the world. That is one of the only true ways to evaluate a company or product. A simple phone call to Dr. Jane Bicks free national Q&A conference call on Wednesday nights would have informed them that our fish does not contain Ethoxyquin.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The dogfoodanalysis site is completely unscientific and does not give sound advice. If people need information about dog food they should ask someone with a PhD in animal nutrition or a veterinary nutritionist.

Marina