On my first day of veterinary school, I opened the front doors and stepped into the foyer to be met by another student holding up a large bag of Science Diet dog food.
“Dog or cat?”, they asked.
I replied, “Cats, but I make my own.” I looked around and realized, I was the only new student not taking home a free bag of kibble.
“If you decide you want it, you can always find us down in the barn. It’s free!”
“Thanks anyway!”, I replied.
As I reached the top of the stairs to the main student lobby the Hills Science Diet banners were everywhere.
And so it began.
Let me preface this with a little background. I enrolled in veterinary school in 1994 and graduated in 1998. My underlying purpose for going to veterinary school in the first place was to obtain my doctorate and license to practice so I could go on and train in alternative modalities like acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy, and chiropractic. My goal from the beginning was to practice integrative veterinary medicine, a veterinary version of Dr. Andrew Weil is what I had in mind.
Before stepping into the veterinary school that morning, I had already been researching the field of pet nutrition, primarily through Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats and The New Natural Cat: A Complete Guide for Finicky Owners. My 2 cats had been eating a raw meat diet for the prior 2 years before that first day of school.
In the mid-90s, the infiltration and partnership between corporations and universities was well underway. Universities always need more money, especially in a teaching hospital that requires equipment like MRIs and CT scans, funding to attract amazing professors and experts in their field, educational programs, books, and computer labs, (this was the 1990s before laptops and smartphones). It behooved the largest pet food manufacturers to donate everything from money to pizzas to free stethoscopes to the veterinary school in exchange for having their names on big banners everywhere we looked.
Between Hills and Purina, my allotment of pizza and coke during 4 years of veterinary school was paid for. You may point out the hypocrisy that I was feeding my cats homemade raw food and eating junk food myself, but I dare you to stand at a surgical table for 8 hours, grab a couple of hours of sleep and then get up for an 8 am exam, and NOT reach for the free pizza and coke an arm’s length away.
So when did the actual class on nutrition take place, amidst an already packed four-year curriculum?
To be fair, a lot of information must be packed into the heads of veterinary students in a very short amount of time. We are, after all, not learning about one species, like human doctors, but about multiple species, spanning carnivores to ruminants, avians to reptiles.
The nutrition class, a one semester-long class, was placed in the third year, alongside the lectures and labs on small and large animal medicine and surgery.
This semester-long class covered various species from carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, hoof-stock, predators, birds from chickens to parrots, and don’t forget reptiles. Dogs and cats were tucked in there somewhere, a few days spent on each.
The pet food manufacturers made it fairly easy on us. All we really needed to learn how to do was to read a pet food label, understand a few calculations i.e. how to calculate calories needed based on kilograms, dry matter vs wet matter, and we were good to go. The pet food manufacturers did all the rest of the work for us, and why wouldn’t we trust them? They had been feeding us, taking care of us, gifting us things like good grandparents, all the way through school.
They even went so far as to label the food with the name of the condition it is used for: H is for heart, I is for intestinal, R is for renal, L is for liver, and on through the alphabet. Nutrition was one less thing we had to stuff in our already overflowing brains.
Where things became really fun and interesting was the nutrition laboratory sponsored by Hills Science Diet and the optional field trip to the downer cow slaughterhouse.
The Small Animal nutrition lab was a full afternoon, showing us the approved ingredients that went into making dog and cat food. I stepped into the lab and found mason jars filled with various items on the black soapstone counters.
Jar #1 broken pieces of Jolly Rancher hard candies.
Jar #2 flour
Jar #3 broken oreo cookies
Jar # 4 rice
Jar #5: chicken meal, etc.
What amazed me was they did not even pretend to make it look any different than what would be swept up off the factory floor.
The instructor came in and introduced himself as a Hills Science Diet sales representative and nutritionist. He started off his lecture talking about protein. I raised my hand and asked about quality vs quantity of protein and if they had anything on the label that indicated quality.
He replied with nothing but a quizzical look on his face.
I then asked him if it was true or not, whether they used 4D meat as part of the protein source in pet food. “4D meat” is meat derived from dying, diseased, disabled, and dead livestock that has been deemed unfit for human consumption per the USDA.
The quizzical look quickly became one of redness with smoke starting to come out of the ears and nose. At that point, I did not want to throw 2 and a half years of veterinary school away for getting expelled for asking too many questions, so I quieted down.
I do not remember learning anything about AAFCO, the FDA, how they ascertained the nutritional requirements of the average dog and cat, something we still do not know for certain, or the basic definitions of many of the ingredients, i.e. meat meal, meat by-products.
I do remember listening to Dr. Jean Dodds’ lectures at the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association regarding the addition of ethoxyquin, a preservative known to cause cancer, to dog and cat food. I still have her stacks of research papers on the subject. And who knows, they are probably still adding it to processed pet food.
So when you ask your veterinarian about nutrition and they point you to a bag of dog food they are selling in the waiting room, now you know why: that is what they learned in veterinary school.
Next installment: field trip to the Downer cow slaughterhouse to discover what sources of meat make it into pet food.
when i got a dog at 17, in the 80s, i soon after bought that edition of Dr Pitcairn's book. It has been a valuable source for me. Unfortunately, i bought the latest edition and gave away the first one. I do not like the latest edition b/c the recipes rely on a supplement that you have to buy from a specific website.
Lol….. sounds like the one semester medical students get for humans. 🤦🏻♀️