Have you ever scanned the ingredients in a commercial dog food and thought, "How can this be healthy?" Unfortunately, if your dog eats ordinary, processed dog food, your dog probably eats things that are a whole lot worse than what you might find him chewing on in your backyard each and every day.

Most dog foods available in stores today are so highly processed and full of preservatives and chemicals, that they aren't any better for our dogs than potato chips are for humans. In fact they are a whole lot worse.

They contain cheap ingredients, unhealthy fillers, unhealthy preservatives or poisonous chemicals. Many dog foods advertised as "preservative-free" do, in fact, contain preservatives and poisonous chemicals. Manufacturers don't have to list preservatives that they themselves did not add.

Many preservatives make their way into dog food at rendering plants before the meat is even sent to the manufacturer. An analysis of several dog foods labeled "chemical free" or "all natural ingredients" found synthetic antioxidants in all samples.

Although you won't 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 dog food. EQ is the most powerful of all preservatives and may be the most toxic.

Rendering plant workers that have been exposed to it denoted side effects similar to those of Agent Orange:

* A dramatic rise in liver or kidney damage

* Cancerous skin lesions

* Hair loss

* Blindness

* Leukemia

* Fetal abnormalities

* Chronic diarrhea.

In animals, EQ has been linked to:

* Immune deficiency syndrome

* Spleen, stomach, and liver cancers

* And a host of allergies.

"The "animal" or "meat by-products" in dog food are biodegradable wastes that we don't want to eat ourselves. These are parts that Americans rarely consume as they are not intended for human consumption. These parts come from animal carcasses, and include animal heads, bones, blood, organs and feces.

Their origins include catering waste (all waste food from restaurants, catering facilities, central kitchens, slaughterhouses and household kitchens). It might also contain parts from sick or dying animals that can come from slaughterhouses or euthanized animals from animal shelters.

The city of Los Angeles alone, for example, sends some two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a pet food plant every month.

The worst is that dog food companies don't stop with pets, your dog is also eating euthanized animals from zoos, animal control and putrid, decaying road kill.

Before these animal parts and by-products are shipped to the rendering plant, the by-product is "denatured." This means that crude carbolic acid, cresylic disinfectant, or citronella, is sprayed on the product.

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!!

Before these poisoned animal parts can be used to poison dog food, they are taken to the rendering plants where they grind the meat by-products and ship the meal to dog food processors.

Next, the manufacturers combine the meal with carbohydrates such as corn, thickeners like guar gum, vitamins, minerals, food coloring and preservatives. By the way, dogs are color blind so the food coloring is there to appease the human eye not the dogs.

To make wet food, this glop is then heated in a pressure cooker and canned or sealed in a pouch.

For dry pellets, all of these dead animals, and other ghastly materials, are then processed until the portion left over for dog food production is a brown powder, which consists of 25% fecal matter! The stuff is then heated, cut into tiny pieces, dried, and then wrapped for shipment.

The high end brands tend to have fixed formulas, while cheaper brands often change recipes to include ingredients that happen to be selling cheap at the time of processing. (They might decide to replace corn with wheat, for example, if wheat prices were especially low.)

The New York State Food Laboratory reported that it found aminopterin in food from the palatability studies. Director Daniel Rice said aminopterin was a cancer drug about 50 years ago in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency later banned the use of the toxin as a rodenticide in this country.

Federal law does not mandate the frequency of inspections or premarket approval of foods under FDA jurisdiction, unlike the meat and egg products under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. The FDA regulates much more of the food supply with much less money than the USDA, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, stated that regulation of human and animal food doesn't differ substantially.

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires that foods be pure and wholesome and that they contain no harmful or deleterious substances, all though the act does not specify how manufacturers should ensure safety.

The agency has limited resources for inspecting animal food and drugs, so it focuses inspections on manufacturers of drugs and of feed for food-producing animals, not for dog food. Usually an inspection is only conducted when there has been a complaint, such as the recent dog food poisoning of the suspected batch of wheat gluten from China.

Note:

* If you want to quit feeding your pooch

poisoned dog food, learn to make your own

healthy, homemade dog food.

* Don't assume that your dog should eat what humans eat "People food"

such as chocolate, grapes, raisins and onions can be difficult for your dog

to digest and toxic to his system.

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© 2007, June Parker.