Is dog food making our pets sick?

The great dog food debacle of 2024

This year may go down as the year that the veil came down surrounding Big Dog Food. In case you did not realize, Big Dog Food is and has been a thing just like Big Pharma. Corporations have been buying up much more than land, housing, and small businesses. They set their site on the pet industry years ago: pet food companies, veterinary hospitals and clinics, pharmacies, diagnostic laboratories, etc.

The dog food industry alone is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, primarily deriving profits from selling industrial waste products from agribusiness turned into food. The pet food companies that use rendered ingredients in their food provide a much-needed service by disposing of all the agricultural waste that they have nowhere else to put. And they get to make a profit from it as a bonus, a profit of billions of dollars.

Last December, Kelly Bone, who started a Facebook group after her therapy dog died from food tainted by excess vitamin D from the vitamin/mineral premix utilized by Hills Science Diet, began noticing patterns of pet parents reporting sick and dying dogs in the group.

She is a very astute, intelligent woman who has gone down this road before. She vetted the cases, checking them out for comorbidities, and other toxins that may be poisoning the pets. The one thing these cases had in common was the food, either just buying a new bag, the dogs not wanting to eat it, and/or the animals getting better after they switched to a different food.

She brought it to the attention of her moderators and veterinary moderators, which I am one, to see what we thought. The big red flag that got our attention were the cases of multiple animals in the same household or rescue who were coming down with the same signs. This crossed species as well and did not present as the typical infectious disease. A cat rescue had 26 cats all get sick at one time. They were eating out of the same bag of food. Households had 2, 3, and 4 dogs all become ill. Many of the cases appeared with internal bleeding in the intestinal tract.

So the alarm bells were sounded. No one wanted to see more dogs and cats get sick or die.

The first brand of food found to be related to all of these cases was Purina. Within a week, almost a dozen brands of food were being implicated as well. Food samples are being analyzed and results are pending.

This whole situation is occurring because of the centralization/globalization of the food manufacturing process. Many ingredients that go into kibble are sourced from a handful of suppliers. So if an ingredient that is used by multiple companies becomes contaminated with a toxin, it could potentially show up in multiple brands around the country, even around the world.

Purina has not only refused to admit something is wrong, they adamantly insist nothing is wrong, without testing or looking into it. At least the FDA said they were looking into it, whatever that means. That is their historical standard operating procedure. Many of the past recalls took months to get instituted and in the meantime, far too many animals died before they pulled the food off of the shelves.

Susan Thixton wrote a thorough summary of Purina’s historical response to food recalls. There never has been a response. Big surprise. Here is the full article which is well worth reading to gain a better understanding of how a company that sells more dog food than anyone else and makes 19 billion dollars a year responded to food that made dogs sick in the past:

“There are no health or safety issues with any of our products.”

A concerned pet owner brought to my attention a court case back in 1919: Dodge vs Ford Motor Company. It was this court case that is at the root of many of the problems we are seeing in these days of the mega-corporation.

In Dodge Vs. Ford company, in 1919, the Michigan supreme court ruled in favor of shareholder primacy, saying that the founder Henry Ford must operate the Ford motor company primarily in the profit maximizing interests of its shareholders.

In essence, a company's priority is to the shareholders/stockholders and not to the employees and not to the consumer. A corporation is only concerned about its quarterly earnings - that’s it, no matter what stories they tell you on television commercials or pretty product packaging.

And this goes for all corporations. Add in federal agency capture - that is where corporations get their own people to work for agencies like the FDA, CDC, USDA, EPA so they can control what gets approved or not. If you want more information about agency capture follow the current Presidential candidate who they will not allow on mainstream media or near the primaries, Robert Kennedy, Jr.

And sorry to tell you, those beautiful carrots, peas, and meat on the dog food package are not anywhere near the ingredients that went into that kibble. If you want a detailed description of rendered meat products, read my post here titled “The Slaughterhouse”.

As all of my clients will tell you, I have been encouraging them to stop feeding kibble for decades. I have seen rates of disease such as diabetes, Cushings, all the inflammatory conditions, and cancers increase dramatically over the years - except in animals on good quality, well-sourced diets. Luckily, most clients have listened to me so I did not have to make a bunch of phone calls telling them to switch foods.

There are more options today than ever before to be able to feed your animals a healthy, species-appropriate whole-food diet without contaminants in it.

Stay away from heavily processed food, i.e extruded kibble.

Stay away from food that uses synthetic vitamins and minerals.

Stay away from food that uses meat meals or by-products.

Look up my 2023 recommended food list here on Substack. Every food on there is safe. You will also be added to my email list - I promise I do not fill your inbox up with garbage, but you will get updates on educational programs I am running, including my signature preventative wellness program to teach you how to keep your animal healthy and out of the vet hospital that will be launching this spring.

For up-to-date information on this food debacle visit: Saving One Pet @ A TIme on Facebook