41. FEEDING PETS AS NATURE INTENDED

This chapter will reveal what nutritionists, veterinarians, and regulators are not taught, and what pet food manufacturers would prefer you didn't know. Unlike the standard information about animal nutrition, I will not talk about percentages of nutrients. You know, the tired old stories about how calcium is good for teeth and bones, vitamin A is good for vision, essential fatty acids make a smooth and glossy coat, and so on. After all, why pretend as if the road to health is a matter of playing the nutrition percentages game? It hasn't worked to prevent all the degenerative diseases plaguing animals (or humans), so why give it credence as though it did? Instead, let's look at pet feeding as if thinking matters.
 
Most premium pet foods appear polished, official, safe, and regulated in their enticing packages. It would appear there must be good science and know-how behind them. Although the previous chapter should have put that belief to rest, consider this little tightly held pet industry secret: Anybody off the street (even you) with some money and ambition can go to any of dozens of manufacturers across the country and have them make a "new improved" pet food in short order. No special license or credentials are needed. There is not certification, no governmental oversight of what goes in the package, and even a second grade education will do just fine as long as you have the start-up money. You could set up your office in the corner of the bedroom, think of how to spin your 'new and improved' story, send it to a graphic artist to create brochures and labels, and you'd be on your way.
 
Private label manufacturers (manufacturers for hire) have all kinds of standard formulas on the shelf ready for use. These stock formulations have already been tweaked for palatability and 'balanced' with vitamins and minerals to make them '100% complete.'
 
Let's say you decide to do this. To make your product stand out from the pack, you want the label to say "all natural filet mignon, rack of lamb, and caviar." No problem. Just sprinkle a tiny bit of these ingredients in, carefully metering so as to not cut into profits too much. Heck, you're not lying. Gullible and trusting consumers will not even do the math and discover that there is a slight problem with your product selling at 50 cents per pound and caviar selling in the grocery store at $200 per ounce. If they are taken aback for a moment, it will pass when they just reflect on the marvels of modern technology that must be going on in pet food manufacturing plants. Your secret (scam) is safe because people like to believe what labels say and shopping is not always the most muscular moments of inquiry for excited consumers looking for easy solutions and convenience.
 
You can even advertise about how bad all of the pet foods are that don't contain caviar and rack of lamb. There is no better motivator than fear, so you can also put something like, "no corn, soy, grains, or chicken fat" on the label. Then tell people that these nasty ingredients cause allergy and cancer. You can verily raise yourself to sainthood by declaring that your product contains "no by-products, road kill, or euthanized pets." That will work really well. People love myths. The more sensational, the better.

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To lend credibility to your pet food company you can cut small checks to some local veterinarians. Ask them a couple of questions and give them samples to feed. Now you can say, "designed, approved, and fed by veterinarians." No fibbing there.
 
You are on your way to becoming yet another pet food mogul, rising to power on sheer confabulation. Even though you know no more than the average Joe who learns nutrition from reading the back of cereal boxes, you now become a pet food nutrition expert. The unthinking consumer doesn't mind so long as you capture and keep their attention with some clever
 
marketing and advertising pizzazz. Particularly beguiling are claims about
 
being "healthy," "natural," "raw," "organic," "holistic," and how your products leave out all the supposed nasty things all the other producers put in.
 
The pet food industry abounds with such companies. At the helm are homemakers, breeders, movie stars, used car salesmen, bankers, investors, lawyers and profit seekers from every imaginable background. Conspicuously absent in the leadership positions are people with expertise, like food scientists, engineers, holistic nutritionists, and health professionals. Not that such credentials guarantee product merit or healthy motives, but at least such people would be starting with basic tools of knowledge.
 
This is not to suggest you, movie stars, or plumbers don't have every right to enter a business where there may be profit. But isn't nutrition a serious health matter? Shouldn't consumers concerned about health scrutinize the credentials of those at the helm of companies claiming to be able to make "100% complete" and healthy pet foods that are to be fed exclusively? No claim should be taken at face value. You wouldn't trust brain surgery to car salesmen, actors, and plumbers. Don't trust pet food feeding to car salesmen, actors, and plumbers.

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At best, pet food companies are displaying willful ignorance; at worst, they are engaged in moral fraud. Those strong words can be said because producers attempt to convince consumers to feed processed foods at every meal. They attempt to divert attention (knowingly, and even worse, unknowingly) with their special ingredients and absence of boogeyman ingredients, from the disaster of feeding one food at every meal.
 
What common perilous feature is held in common by all processed foods? Fire. Although it is an enigmatic quirk of human nature to overlook the obvious, think about it. Why do we fear fire and pay taxes for fire departments, but unleash it on our foods? Fire may create flavor, may sterilize, may make tolerable that which is not, but it is the consummate enemy of nutrition.
 
Food is made up of infinitely complex and fragile biological elements, not stone and ore needing a blast furnace to yield their contained bounty. It will at once be clear then that if we light a fire to anything biological (food, by definition is biological) it is destroyed, not improved. You or your pet cannot survive for any length of time if body temperatures exceed 118º F. Neither can food. All conventionally processed pet foods are subjected to temperatures far above this threshold.
 
Pet foods are baked, extruded, retorted, fried, and dried, often repeatedly so. Consider, for example, the processing of the most popular dried kibble form: Some ingredients are precooked, then precondition cooked, extrusion cooked, and then again cooked and air blasted to get dried. It is pressed at over 600 pounds per square inch, and reaches temperatures from 200 to over 300o ­F four different times before reaching your pet's dinner bowl. It is all done with impunity because the sacred nutritional percentages needed to make the claim of 100% completeness can practically stay the same practically no matter how much the food is brutalized.
 
If producers want to make money selling pet foods all over the world—which they understandably do—the cheap and easy way to do it is with fire. Fire turns perishable food into nonperishable cardboard-like food artifacts. It destroys germs present in contaminated and rotten ingredients, permits fabrication and molding into every manner of cute shape, and enables production at the rate of many tons per hour. Nutrition and health are not the true objectives in these manufacturing food torture chambers.
 
Food, by rightful definition, is naturally fresh, not torched. Animals in the wild eat everything raw and would never think of cooking it, even if they could.
 
Do we really think we can reinvent nature without her noticing and calling us to account? Commercial deception, the desire of consumers for ease, and the shifting of responsibility to 'experts' have a Faustian price: loss of vitality and resultant disease. Pets and humans pay the price of heat processed food with the panoply of modern degenerative diseases. Such diseases are not just in the cards or one of those things over which we have no control.
 
Surely a pet's body will notice if we thumb our noses at nature and pour vitamin-fortified, compressed and scorched food artifacts in the feeding bowl meal after meal. Animals were designed for natural foods, so health will be best achieved by feeding natural foods. When scientists succeed in making animals in their laboratory—they can't even make a single cell—then they can feed them foods made there.
 
But alas, pet owners throw their hands up in dismay thinking that pet feeding principles are different than what common sense would dictate for them and their children. Is it reasonable, as nutritionists would have everyone believe, that the only way we could know what lions, or bears, ants, elephants, or robins should eat, is to cage them and perform placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover scientific feeding studies? Should we not reasonably say, "What? I already know what they should eat. It's what they're already eating out in nature!"
 
We don't need a nutritionist to tell us how many milligrams of vitamin B6, international units of vitamin E, or grams of protein creatures need. They obviously get what they require by eating their raw, whole, natural foods. The simplicity of this truth is overwhelming, yet it is essentially passed over by the entire food industry, medical community, and the public.
 
So then, to the question of what do pets need to eat? The answer: What they would eat if released into the wild. Granted, today's companion animals cannot be turned loose, but that does not mean we should not model their diets to retain as much of the character of the archetypal pattern as it is possible to achieve. The best pet food is clearly that food which animals are genetically adapted to, the food of the pre-modern "550 miles" as previously explained. For cats and dogs that would primarily be prey—whole prey, uncooked, including their viscera filled with vegetation and probiotic matter.
 
Modern, cooked, carbohydrate-based pet foods are a far cry from that, even when they call themselves super-premium, organic, human-grade, and natural. Armed with this understanding we can begin to take charge and sort through the abundant pet feeding fables and lore. Don't assume that a high priced food solves this problem just because it was recommended by a veterinarian, breeder, or pet store clerk, or because it claims to be natural. Claims are cheap. Uninformed recommendations abound where money can be made. In fact, it is usually the high priced 'premium' foods that have the most lore and nonsense attached to them. But perception is everything and profiteering pet food marketers know this.
 
Use the same intuitive sense you should use when feeding yourself and the family. You know that fresh, whole, natural foods eaten in variety are healthy. That's not nuclear physics. But people will subject their pets to something they would not ever tolerate for themselves—eating the same fired and lifeless processed food at every meal for a lifetime.
 
Since we cannot open the door in downtown Chicago or New York to let the pet out to seek its own natural food, we must bring the proper food from nature to them. That means fresh raw grocery foods, at least in part or in rotation. The most healthy foods are those an animal can eat and digest without requiring cooking. This would include, meats, organs, bones (raw bones are not dangerous, obviously, or carnivores would never survive in the wild), and some fruits, veggies, dairy, eggs, and nuts.1
 
Conventionally processed pet foods and supplements can be used but are a compromise and therefore require discrimination. Manufacturers should be carefully scrutinized to determine whether they are truly committed to health first, and whether they have the competency at the helm to achieve it. Feeding a variety of well-made processed foods in rotation with raw grocery foods is not a problem. But note the words rotation and variety. Feeding anything day in and day out, regardless of its health merits, creates a dose that can be a poison.
 
Fresh and dried raw packaged foods are also now commercially available and combine convenience with raw. Caution is advised with regard to fresh frozen pet foods since about anyone can produce these in their kitchen and introduce them into commerce. The potential dangers of food-borne pathogens are greater with such products. Additionally, many freeze-dried foods are not really raw since they have been heated above the 118o F threshold that destroys many important food elements.
 
Discernment is critical since there are now marketers who say their products are just like raw because they contain "no grains." Examine closely and you will discover that they have merely
 
substituted another starch for the grain and are in fact cooking their dried and canned foods just like everyone else in the industry. Some, as mentioned in the previous chapter, try to cash in on the 'raw' idea by simply sprinkling a few molecules of raw something or other on the product after it is cooked. Important words—like raw—are not regulated at all. You must be smart enough to flush out the pretenders and charlatans.

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No matter how good meals are, variety is critical. That means variety from meal to meal, day to day, not a smorgasbord at one sitting. Every essential nutrient does not have to be fed at every meal. In fact, fasting a day here and there to mimic the natural fasts forced in the wild is beneficial as well.
 
Think about what pets would (could) eat in the wild and try to mimic that as much as possible. What to feed will then become self-evident. But don't make the project so tedious that you give up and go back to the cruel and non-thinking practice of pouring "100% complete" pseudofoods in the bowl every meal. Understand the principles outlined here and do the best you can.
 
That closes the pet section. But let's not end it on such a serious note. Pets can bring so much joy to life, so here is a more fitting conclusion that brings pets, Adam, and God all together in one big happy family:
 
In the beginning God said unto Adam, "Behold, out of love for you I have created Dog. Regardless of how awful and self-centered you will be at times, this companion will accept and love you in spite of yourself. And because I have created this animal to reflect my love, his name will be a mirror image of my name." And it was so and Dog was pleased and so was God. And Dog showed his love for Adam by wagging his tail. And it came to pass that God saw Adam's heart harden with sinful pride, as he thought himself worthy of adoration and worship because of the obedience and love of Dog. And God said, "Behold! Adam now thinks he is like me and worthy of worship. I must go down and make his pride fall and confound and humble the man to save his soul." So God created Cat. And Cat taught Adam his true place in the universe, and that man's voice is puny, his wishes a joke, and that there are those superior to him. And God was pleased with Cat. And Adam was brought down from his high place and humbled before Cat. And it was good that man had a companion that taught him that he was inferior. And Cat became worshipped by Adam's begetted Egyptians and to this day Cat has not forgotten this. And Dog is still happy and wagging his tail. And Cat really does not care one way or the other.*

*After L. T. Pilgrim and M. Lee Young