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Dog Health Food – Can The FDA Keep Your Dog Safe?

By Mark Syme

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 16Nov2009 Word count: 518 Viewed: 268 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

If you’ve been watching the news and have a dog, you might have noticed that dog health food is becoming more and more popular, and you’ve almost certainly seen the dog food recalls over the last few years. These recalls are quite a concerning trend as often the ingredients that cause the recall are quite toxic and could cause death or serious harm in a very short space of time. We all want to know that we are giving our best friend food that is not just nutritious but also perfectly safe!

Now there’s a whole range of reasons for dog food to be recalled and some of them are exactly the same reasons as why some human food recalls occur. In at least one case there was a fungal infection on the production line, which contaminated the food. This would make me ask the question: What sort of hygiene procedures are in place that allowed this to occur?

The FDA is responsible for keeping tabs on the dog food industry, which is enormous and growing at a staggering rate. And so we’d like to think that dog food conforms to the same standards as human food, but all too often this is far from the truth.

The FDA is growing increasingly under funded and understandably puts most of its resources into ensuring that human food production is kept to the required hygiene standards. This said, products still slip through the gaps and there are often recalls of different products from different manufacturers at your local super market. So where does that leave the pet food industry?

Well, the lack of official oversight means that they are mainly self-regulating. While in a perfect world this wouldn’t be a problem, I have my doubts when it comes to the sort of money that is being made from dog food today. To my mind, it is all too likely that in the trade off between profits and quality, profits win every time.

And who could forget the wide-ranging pet food recalls in 2007? This was eventually traced back to contaminated rice protein and wheat gluten produced in China. Again a much cheaper way to source ingredients that are of questionable nutritional value in the first place. So even if the quality procedures of the US manufacturer are top notch, if they use imported ingredients that are toxic, then what good are their standards?

So we need to asking the hard questions of where our dog food really comes from, what’s really in the food that our best friends are gobbling up and what are the long term effects on their health going to be?

Many pet owner are turning to some form of dog health food as a practical way to ensure that their pets get not only the best nutrition but also keep them safe from any pet food company blunders. It is ultimately our responsibility to make sure that our pets are getting safe and nutritious food and unfortunately we can’t always believe what the big pet food companies are telling us.

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