Picture taken from from www.wallpaperbase.com
Thursday, April 17, 2014
From the desk of Sharda Baker.
Hi and welcome everyone!
This is Sharda with a wonderful newsletter about commercial dog foods.
Dog health and diet is important for the longevity of your canine pal.
Understanding the nutritional and dietary needs of your pet, along with reading the label on the pet food and knowing what to look for, will be of great benefit.
As mentioned before in passing, lower quality dog foods will, more likely than not, lack many of the higher quality ingredients that provide the more digestible and usable items for the dog.
It is the premium dog foods that will be the ones that cater to the nutritional needs of the dogs through better ingredients, and greater care with processing.
There have been problems with many of the lower quality dog foods and the ingredients that are used that have been brought to light in the early part of 2007.
Speaking of problems with dog food will of course trigger the memory of the most recent devastating loss of canine and feline lives due to contaminated food.
This was horrifying and widespread and opened the eyes of consumers about what was really in the food they were feeding their dogs.
Various reports indicated the numbers of affected cats and dogs hit the 39,000 mark across the country.
Animals became extremely sick or died due to the contamination of commercial pet foods with an industrial chemical melamine, used to make plastics and fertilizers.
This chemical was found in more than 100 brands of pet food that were recalled in Canada and the USA starting in mid-March.
The major culprit was identified as rice protein concentrate (otherwise called rice gluten), NOT brown rice. Then in June, concerns were raised about reports of acetaminophen (Tylenol) being found in dog and cat food, followed by salmonella poisoning in others.
The second chemical also found with the melamine was cyanuric acid – deadly when combined. Both were found in the cat and dog food recall in March 2007.
Cyanuric acid is commonly used to slow the breakdown of chlorine in swimming pools and hot tubs. It has NO place in pet food!
It was speculated then (and some still hold the same opinion now) that those two chemicals were in dog food because it was a sneaky and unethical way to increase the reported nitrogen content.
This staggering dog food recall was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to discovering what was actually in the dog food people were feeding their pets.
Other things came to light for instance, many of the cheaper commercial dog food brands were nothing more than inferior meat meals, cheap grains like corn and soy, fillers, by-products, pesticides, preservatives and toxins.
By the way, soy is one of the top cited allergens by Vets, which causes severe allergic reactions. Reactions can include coughing, sneezing, runny nose, hives, diarrhea, facial swelling, shortness of breath, swollen tongue, difficulty swallowing, fainting, and anaphylactic shock.
I hope you learned a lot from today’s dog food newsletter.
I will be back for more!
Warmest regards,
Sharda Baker