Hi, my name is Karla, I am a country born and bred animal lover. As a small child I lived on a sheep ranch in Idaho. I remember the Basque sheepherder’s dogs vividly. What stands about that now is that these dogs worked hard every day and yet they were old dogs. It was then that I feel in love with Aussies. For years now I have been an Aussie breeder. I got to wondering what the difference was that my dogs weren’t living and working to the age the dogs did from my childhood.
As an adult I have worked at a couple veterinary offices over the years, I noticed that it seems to be taking more drugs to euthanize a pet. There seems to be a lot more skin issues and even joint issues in family pets. I started to question why, which lead me to look at what we are feeding our dogs. What I found was startling!
The products used to make our dog food is not as healthy as we think, it may even be poisonous. The manufactures of pet food will add chemicals and preservatives. They use the by-products of slaughtered animals (by-products equal anything they cannot sell for human consumption), carcasses of euthanized pets are often included (pets put down due to health issues with sodium pentobarbital) along with fillers, wheat flour and corn by-products. The pet food industry denies that they use euthanized animals, proof that the practice continues to surface.
The CVM explored the most likely cause of animals becoming immune to the drug. They reported that our pets had been eating food with trace amounts of sodium pentobarbital for years. The likely source of the drug in their food is euthanized animals. In 1998, the CVM went about testing dry dog foods containing the ingredients meat and bone meal, animal digest, animal fat, beef and beef by-products to find the levels of the drug in parts per billion for each food. They found the drug in 31 of 37 foods tested. One of the tested dog foods was found to have 32 ppb (parts per billion) sodium pentobarbital. If the dog food manufactures are not using euthanized animals in the product, then how did it get there?
"Is Your Dog a Cannibal? Think Again.."
Your dog's food may contains dead pets, mostly cats and dogs! The city of Los Angeles alone, for example, sends up to two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a pet food plant every month.
Not only is this immoral and disgusting... it's deadly.
The true horror is the drug used to kill these stray and abandoned animals, Sodium Pentobarbital, is not broken down by the manufacturing process and is still present in active form in your dog's food!!
And dog food companies don't stop with pets, your dog may be eating euthanized animals from zoos, animal control and putrid, decaying road kill.
All of these dead animals and other ghastly materials are processed until the portion left over for dog food production is a brown powder, which consists of up to 25% fecal matter.
Author and research investigator, Ann N. Martin
"It is not uncommon for thousands of euthanized dogs and cats to be delivered to rendering plants, daily, and thrown into the rendering vat—collars, I.D. tags, and plastic bags—to become part of this material called "meat meal."
Reference sites:
Talking to three different veterinarians about dog food, they all agreed that the research indicates we are shorting our dog’s life span, with the preservatives and additives currently found in commercially produced dog foods. When was the last time you read the ingredients list on your dog’s food?
To keep dog food fresh, they add preservatives and here are some examples:
Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) (also used in jet fuels, rubber and embalming fluids)
Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) (The National Institutes of Health considers BHT reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.)
Propylene glycol (also used as automotive antifreeze)
Ethoxyquin (EQ) (a quinoline-based antioxidant used as a food preservative and a pesticide)
Although you won't always see it on the label, since it is often added at the rendering plant and not by the manufacturer, ethoxyquin (EQ) is used to preserve most dry pet food.
EQ is the most powerful of all preservatives and may be the most toxic.
The use of EQ is permitted in pet food.
...factory workers exposed to it exhibited side effects similar to those of Agent Orange:
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a dramatic rise in liver or kidney damage,
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cancerous skin lesions,
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hair loss,
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blindness,
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leukemia,
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fetal abnormalities, and
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chronic diarrhea.
In animals, EQ has been linked to:
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immune deficiency syndrome;
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spleen, stomach, and liver cancers;
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and a host of allergies."
The natural antioxidants tend to be short-lived, so synthetic antioxidants are used when a longer shelf life was needed. For more information, please visit http://www.avianweb.com/ethoxyquin.htm
A list of chemicals that can be added to your dog food:
Coloring agents
Drying agents
Flavoring agents
Lubricants
Nutritive Sweeteners
Texturizers
Wheat, corn and soy products are often common allergens for dogs. Skin disorders, hot spots, feet chewing, or chronic ear infections are attributed to these ingredients in dog food, canned or dry. Added animal or poultry fat may contribute to heart disease and certain types of cancer.
Dog food companies heartlessly exploit loopholes which allows them to add a very cheap form of protein that has almost zero nutritional value to a dog instead of essential animal protein your dog needs to survive.
Before you try my home-made recipe on your pets, you need to realize that any change in diet can and often does cause digestive upset. This can cause loose stools, vomiting, and sometimes a bit of a tummy ache. I recommend you make this a slow adjustment and only use this as a supplement, thereby reducing the amount of commercially produced food your pet consumes.
Why I use this in combination with dry food:
This home-made dog food is not high enough in proteins to be a sole diet for a normal healthy and active dog. You can adjust that by increasing the meat to vegetable ratio.
The correct dry dog food improves dental health - http://www.thepetcenter.com/imtop/bestfood.html
How to add this homemade dog food into your pet’s diet:
I have found that the best transition from one dog food to another is to mix the foods together. This process should usually take about 10 days, but you can increase the transition time if you have a dog with an easily upset stomach.
Day 1 to day 2 – add a small amount of the homemade food to your dry food.
Day 3 to day 10 – increase the amount of homemade food every day until at least half of your regular feed is now the homemade food.
If at any time during the transition, your dog experiences gastro-intestinal upset (diarrhea), keep the ratio of new to old food the same for several days. This will allow your dog to adjust to the new ratio before you incorporate more of the new food. Expect a change in your dog's stool even after the transition period. A hard stool is not any better for your pet than it is for you.
How much you feed of the homemade depends on the size of pet you are feeding. I am feeding my 15 to 20 pound dogs, 1/3 to ½ cup for breakfast with 1/3 cup of regular dry dog food. Then they have dry food only in the evening.
A friend of mine has very large dogs and feeds about a 1 ½ cups a day with the dry food. This feeding rate has helped his over weight dog lose weight, now the dog is more active, hence loosing more weight.
Not all dogs have the same nutritional needs (Please visit Website )
Cost to feed your dog may go down while his life span and quality of life increases!
Friends of mine spending 25 to 30 per week on dry and canned food reduced the cost in ½ also having healthier happy and more active dogs and losing weight.
Don’t buy into the marketing campaigns:
Pet food companies sell you high protein feed in pretty packages for your puppy and charge you more. If you think about how puppies are raised in the wild, you will realize that the dog food companies make puppy food to take more of your money. A mother coyote doesn’t go to the store for puppy food, she just brings pups all they want to eat.
They make food for your senior dog that is reduced in protein and nutrients, and charge you more. Now think about that for a bit… an old coyote just eats less because he catches less to eat.
Weight control foods are the same deal. If your dog is over weight, first get a thyroid check at your vet, if you have no health problems then you either need to increase the amount of exercise or try adding our home-made formula.