The truth about cat and dog food

Deadly toxins recently discovered in pet food raise the question: What, exactly, is in those bags and cans of processed meal we pour into Buster's dish every day?

By Kirsten Weir

Read more: FDA, Politics, News, Food and Travel

May 24, 2007 | Dick Van Patten eats dog food. At least, that's what the former "Eight Is Enough" actor will have you believe in publicity stunts for Dick Van Patten's Natural Balance Pet Foods, the company to which he hitched his falling star back in 1989. A tour of the company's Web site features photos of Van Patten, smiling stiffly alongside such celebrity notables as former 'N Sync singer Lance Bass and ex-"Baywatch" actress Traci Bingham, dipping their spoons into colorful cans of Natural Balance Eatables for Dogs!

Call me crazy but it's going to take a lot more than an endorsement from Hollywood's B-list to convince me to dig into a can of dog chow, and I suspect I'm not alone in that sentiment. In fact, given recent events, more than a few pet owners are wondering whether we should even be feeding pet food to our pets.

The mass media has certainly been on a pet food diet in the past few months, thanks to the reporting frenzy surrounding Menu Foods' recall, beginning in March, of more than 100 brands of pet food. The tainted products, which allegedly killed or sickened thousands of dogs and cats, ranged from cheap Wal-Mart store brand Ol' Roy to high-end labels such as Iams and Eukanuba.

This isn't the first big pet food recall to come down in recent years. In December 2005, more than 100 dogs died of liver failure after eating food manufactured by Diamond Pet Foods. The products contained corn tainted with aflatoxin, a toxin released by a naturally occurring crop fungus. Aflatoxin should have been detected at any number of testing points along the way from cornfield to finished product, says Donald Smith, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. "For some reason, something didn't happen in the testing process," he notes.

Unlike the aflatoxin outbreak, the latest recall involved chemicals that no one knew to look for. The products produced by Menu Foods contained wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine, a flame retardant and component of some plastics. Earlier this month, government officials reported evidence that the foods may also have contained cyanuric acid, a chemical often found in swimming pools. The chemicals apparently triggered kidney failure in dogs and cats that ate the tainted foods.

The Chinese companies that produced the wheat and rice proteins allegedly spiked the products with chemicals in an attempt to dupe buyers; high in nitrogen, the chemicals made the products appear to contain more protein than they actually did. It's safe to say that American pet food manufacturers didn't intend for melamine to wind up as an additive in their kibble. "The problem was a toxin," says Tony Buffington, a professor of veterinary clinical sciences at the Ohio State University. "If you put arsenic in someone's tea, it's not the tea's fault."

Maybe not, but the recalls have served to highlight vulnerabilities in the manufacturing of processed foods -- both pet and human foods. Weaknesses in pet food regulation may have contributed to the recalls, says Smith. Or, he says, it may have been a matter of luck that this time, the melamine ended up in the dog's bowl and not your own. "This has been a canary in the mine," he says. "It's a wake-up call."

Pet owners like Melissa Hull, a small-business owner in southern Maine, have certainly taken notice. Hull admits she and her husband "were definitely aware of potential scary things" in their cat Smokey's commercial pet food, even before the recall. But the incident drew new attention to the fact that so many pet food ingredients originated on the opposite side of the globe, in countries like China that "have no FDA," she says. "It definitely opened our eyes to just how poor the quality is."

Earlier this month, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut introduced legislation to upgrade the country's food safety system, both for humans and their pets. Among other things, the legislation would give the FDA authority to order mandatory food recalls and would establish uniform federal standards for pet food. As it stands now, pet food falls into something of a regulatory gray area.

Most states follow pet food guidelines published by the Association of American Feed Control Officials. These regulations touch on everything from labeling to contaminant testing to nutritional requirements. But the guidelines are only suggestions, and AAFCO itself has no regulatory authority. "Most of the routine day-to-day pet food regulation is performed by the states," explains AAFCO Pet Food Committee chairman David Syverson, and state laws and enforcement programs vary. At the federal level, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine requires that animal feed be "pure and wholesome" and "safe to eat," but there's currently no requirement that pet foods have FDA approval before they hit store shelves.

Another weakness, Smith points out, is the lack of a federal agency to monitor outbreaks of illness or disease in pets. The Center for Veterinary Medicine has received thousands of complaints from pet owners who believe their dogs and cats were poisoned by melamine. But tracking disease, Smith says, isn't part of the agency's mandate. Even if it were, it simply doesn't have the budget to do it. "We don't have an equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control in companion animals," he says.

While pets may not have their own CDC, they do have a place in our hearts. Sixty-three percent of U.S. households own cats or dogs, and people drop more than $15 billion each year on pet food. They're a loyal bunch, says Duane Ekedahl, president of the Pet Food Institute, a lobbying group that represents the manufacturers of 98 percent of the dog and cat food produced in the United States. According to Ekedahl, Pet Food Institute surveys found that consumers are more loyal to their pet food brand than to any other products in the supermarket, with the notable exception of soda.

So what, exactly, is in those cans and bags we pet owners buy so loyally, month after month? "Protein is really the most important ingredient in the nutrition of a carnivore," says Jean Hofve, a Denver veterinarian and former official liaison to AAFCO. But not all protein is created equal, and therein lies the problem.

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