looking beyond clever marketing

[technodoll]

when i say i hate those petfood companies who fool the public into believing they're feeding a good food to their pets when in reality it's total crap, this is what i mean...

take for example the infamous "Meow Mix" dry catfood. Been around the grocery-store shelves since forever, so whatever they're doing works. what they say about their "original recipe" dry food:

Balanced Nutrition
Packed with wholesome grains, proteins, and other High Quality ingredients for High Digestibility so more nutrients go to work inside your cat. Meow Mix offers your cat Complete and Balanced Nutrition for strong bones, healthy teeth, shiny coat, and lots of energy.

Cats Savor Every Bite!
Meow Mix® Original Choice combines Fun Shapes and Crunchy Bites in a Delicious blend of Chicken, Turkey, Salmon and Oceanfish flavors. Your cat is sure to meow for the tempting taste!

oh... how cute and if this is all you read, you'd think "wow great food, it's proven, it's easily available, it's cheap and convenient and it's so good for them because look, they say it has High Quality ingredients"... how many people then take the time to not only read the ingredients, but to research on what they actually are? I mean, you would trust what they say, right? they wouldn't LIE to you, right?

Wrong. Here's what they're actually peddling:

Ground Yellow Corn, Corn Gluten Meal, Chicken By-Product Meal, Soybean Meal, Beef Tallow Preserved with Mixed-Tocopherols (Source of Vitamin E), Turkey By-Product Meal, Salmon Meal, Oceanfish Meal, Brewers Dried Yeast, Phosphoric Acid, Animal Digest, Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Chloride, Tetra Sodium Pyrophosphate, Calcium Chloride, Choline Chloride, Added Color (Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 2 and other Color), Salt, Taurine, etc etc

It's beyond terrible... mostly low-quality corn and corn by-products, soy, meat by-products, unidentified food sources, yeast, artificial colors, flavors, you name it there is not one single "High Quality" ingredient in this slop (salmon meal, you can bet it's the lowest-grade leftovers full of pcb's and mercury...).

So this is why I'm steamed at the deceptive marketing and sneaky tactics of certain petfood companies (mostly the big conglomerations) aimed at scr*wing consumers with their blatant lies. And let's not even go to the issue of Vets pushing such crap-in-a-bag (different brands, same ingredients).

End of rant for tonight... but the indignation will always remain until this terrible practice stops... "when fish ride bicycles" eh?

[heidiho]

I mentioned that is another post,Purina has a great advertisement campaign right now,have you seen there ads,almost bring you to tears,it has to be one of the best dog food commercials i have ever seen.And up until 2 years ago when i got my gsd i never knew anything about good food,bad food etc,well after coming here i do now,i showed my boyfriend the other day the ingredients of store bought to the good stuff we have now,he didnt know either,he thought same as i did science diet,iams etc were the good brands,which is confusing because why do vets sell it and not the stuff that really is good?I mean they are vets!!!!!!!

[Prin]

mmmm.... Animal Digest... mmmm...

Remember the rhyme?
I want chicken,
I want liver,
Meow mix, Meow mix
Please deliver...

hehe, more like:
I want Fluffy,
I want Skipper,
Meow mix, Meow mix
Please deliver...

[heidiho]

No way!!!!!! Animal parts in animal food!!!!!!

[technodoll]

yep... anytime you see "animal digest", "meat meal", etc... those are anything and everything you can possibly imagine... road kill, euthanized cats and dogs, farm waste, cancerous body parts, even dead zoo animals and rodents. it's not a joke and it's not a myth, it's what the industry of Rendering is all about.

[heidiho]

Okay that is just sick and isnt that against the law??I would think that should be illegal.......My poor girl the first month i had to feed her crap.

[Prin]

They're just dogs, and just cats, Heidi.

[technodoll]

for those who have a strong stomach, you may want to read this excellent and very interesting "underground reporting" piece on the industry of rendering...

http://www.preciouspets.org/rendering.htm

[heidiho]

Oh yeah thats right,dogs have only went to wars and saved lives and cats well i know they did something way back when in the egyptian time..Oh yeah and dogs find mass amounts of drugs,help the disabled etc etc ,But they still are just animals...

[technodoll]

heidi i think prin meant that as "tongue in cheek"... meaning we know the opposite is true but for alot of people.. they just don't care like we do :sad:

[Prin]

lol Techno, I think Heidi meant it as tongue and cheek..

We all feel the same way. Too bad the big companies don't feel the same way. :sad:

[brandynva]

I was sucked in by the fakey fake advertising. For years, even when I didn't have pets, I thought Iams and Science Diet was the best on the market. I had never even HEARD of the holistic stuff, much less raw. So you have to consider that most of the population doesn't know either. They walk into the store, look at a price tag or advertising and think they are feeding quality. It is sad our vets don't offer the holistic at the very least as an option. My vets were like, you're feeding Ol' Roy, sure that's fine! Your dog looks healthy.

[sissani]

I think a lot has to do with education - a lot of people just dont know what igredients are considered good and which are bad, so even if they do read the label, they dont know what they're looking for. Makes them easy targets. Only very recently have I learned what to look for; before that I was one of millions who believed Purina and similarly commercial brands were of better quality. But after doing some research (and with much appreciated help from this forum) I have learned my lesson!!

[technodoll]

sissani, that is exactly what i'm talking about. there has to be a trigger for people to want to research petfood, and most people will never get that "tap on the shoulder"

and is anyone else here sick and tired of those freaking petfood commercials on tv these days? pedigree this, iams that, whiskas this, purina that!! it's like they've doubled their attack on the population

[Prin]

The new pedigree one makes me cry. "I know how to sit. I know how to roll over. What I don't know is how I ended up here..."

[rainbow]

I can remember when Iams was one of the top brands out there back in the late 70's. Along with Eukanuba, Pro Plan and a couple of others I can't think of right now.

[technodoll]

i'd be curious to read the ingredient lists from those 1970's formulas, to compare... does anyone know where to get this information?

[rainbow]

Do you think they've really changed much?

[Prin]

Well, I have a pet care book from around 1985 that has a training section that would make you cringe...

[technodoll]

Do you think they've really changed much?

actually yes... but i'm not sure if they would be better or worse than what they're peddling now (purina, iams, hills, etc)

oooh check out the 1970's purina commercials! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYOMPU18QjA

[brandynva]

The question is how to get the info out there about the bad dog food. Like many others, before this forum I was ignorant. I see people chucking Ol' Roy in their carts and I want to tell them they are not doing their dog any favors, but I would probably get laughed at or eyes rolled at me. Especially since my town doesn't offer a store that sells any premium kibble. It's about 30 minutes away to the nearest store that does.

One thing about the Pedigree commercial; I wonder if it has caused more shelter dogs to be adopted. And if so, what is the rate of people returning those dogs because they don't know what they are getting into, or don't realize the commitment and expense... Just a thought to ponder.

[rainbow]

Yeah, I remember that commercial.

[Prin]

I remember that too!

I love the "three meaty tastes"- not three MEATS, three TASTES.

[rainbow]

Originally Posted by technodoll

actually yes... but i'm not sure if they would be better or worse than what they're peddling now (purina, iams, hills, etc)

But, they were the best of what was available back then. And, some people who can't be bothered to educate themselves, probable still think they are.

[technodoll]

zactly, rainbow. "it's been around forever, it must be good..." and there you go, a classic catch-22 situation

[Dogastrophe]

Looking at the ingredient list for Meow Mix makes my head hurt. What the hell is 'Ocean Fish'? Pretty bad that they have to lump all of the fisheries by-product catch into a generic category because they don't have a clue what they are actually putting into the food. Mmmmmm .... ocean fish.....

[technodoll]

yep. they do that cuz when the price of corn or soy goes up, they have to lower the cost of other ingredients so this is their way out (variable-cost production). kinda like the sea's equivalent to roadkill :footinmouth: imagine what the floor sweepings of a fish processing plant looks like... yep... that is "ocean fish"...

[OntarioGreys]

Originally Posted by rainbow

But, they were the best of what was available back then. And, some people who can't be bothered to educate themselves, probable still think they are.

Some of the foods were actually better,some started off as independant companies but got bought out by companies like for eg nestle, who started adding scrap waste from human food production into the foods to reduce the production costs once one company started others did the same so they could compete, soy farming only became popular toward the end of the 70's when it was realized that it had a high protein content, so itif course got added to dog foods to cut meat content, the ever continuing demand to cut meat costs and increased human demand meant the crappy cuts that originally went into dogfood were then used to make process meats like spam, weiners, sausage etc, while the producers of dogfood started using meats from rendering plants instead.

It was a breeder of great danes that realized something was seriously wrong, when she started seeing the decline of average lifespan of greatdanes in North America drop sharply, while in Europe it remained the same, that lea her to traveling to Germany to see if she could figure out why and she learned about how dog food was prepared there, it had slippedthere out of greed but 10 to 15 years early they had already seen the effects and change their methods to a more holistic approach and she came back to the US to see what the difference was here, and was shocked by what she seen happening, so she decided to create a food using what she had learned and she launched Solidgold the first holistic styled food available in North America back in the late 70's, it was close to 15 years later before it even started becoming available across North America by then other companies were also jumping in, it was almost 15 years later before Canada started to see the introduction of holistic styles. A lot of the population 30 and upwards that have grown up with dogs had fed the cheaper foods from the grocery stores most would not even realize other brands even existed if it wasn't for the superstores like Petsmart, as a result there has been a gradual shift to better foods and slight more interest in better foods it still has a long way to go, as the super chain petfood stores don't carry the super premiums so the general population does not even know they exist, a big percent of the population still want foods that are convenient to buy, they don't want to be shopping at 10 different stores, attractive packaging and commercial advertising helps to confirm in their minds that the foods are good quality so why waste time and gas going elsewhere to shop for a food that is priced $20 more, and as long as their dog is doing fine they see nothing as wrong, It it when the dog starts having health problems and they start spend large sum on prescription foods and are still having problems or because they are scared about their dogs health that they seek out forums such as this, and it is forums like this where they start learning about foods.

My guess is 80% of owners feeding a high quality food are doing so because they had a pet that had health problems(the number one reason) or they bought a dog from a responsible breeder who educated and insisted only high quality foods be fed, or they learned from a close friend who fed high quality food or from belonging to a pet forum) So it is not so much that people don't want to learn, most simply do not realize their is a difference

[heidiho]

I did mean it as tongue and cheek,meaning all they do for us and i didnt see if someone answered as to why vets sell crap food when they are well vets??