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Canadian Food Inspection Agency
DOGGIE DIET: Raw food advocate Laural Eacott says raw food is the best way to feed her pets. She feels the ongoing commercial pet food fiasco could have been avoided if there were strict rules monitoring the content of pet food.
Vet and dog groomer disagree on feeding
Motivated by massive recalls of dog and cat food products across North America, groomer Laural Eacott is making a stand for raw food, but not without opposition.
"I have a dog and a cat and I feed raw, definitely," she said. "There are no rules for commercial pet food. There's nobody that monitors their contents."
The most popular version of the raw diet is the bones and raw food diet, or BARF for short.
"I started feeding raw because a friend of mine was doing it and her dogs were so healthy. My dog was 14 years old and she was dragging her butt. It just turned her into a puppy again."
Eacott doesn't have a grinder powerful enough to handle animal bone, so she buys her food frozen from a manufacturer. The ingredients on the raw food label reassure her; bone, yams, apples and celery don't ring the same alarm bells as propylene glycol and ethoxyquin.
"Dogs are omnivores; they eat fruit and vegetables," she said. "They do not eat grain, they do not eat corn. But look at most labels, it's cornmeal and corn byproducts."
She said she could tell what people are feeding their pets by the condition of their skin and hair. Pets fed on the raw diet come in looking healthier, she said.
According to Eacott, commercial pet food is slowly killing pets. "Pet food's only been around for 25 years. We used table scraps before then. They only reason they made pet food is because the larger companies had to find somewhere for their byproducts to go."
Brian Barnes, a local veterinarian, disagrees. "Raw foods have been around for a while and they've always been promoted as the diet, but people are forgetting dogs in the wild weren't living to the ages of domestic dogs," he said.
Barnes said raw food also presents concerns of bacterial contamination; pets can become infected with E. coli and salmonella and act as conduits to transmit the diseases to their owners. "Raw food, being organic, sounds good until you look at it from a scientific perspective," he said. "Look at dog food companies. They are the ones that are spurring the research for animal health."
Barnes said the Westview Veterinary Hospital has been flooded by faxes from companies issuing updates and releases on the recalls. From the releases, it seems most big companies are putting strong safeguards into place.
"They test the ingredients before they go in and then hold the manufactured diet until they get the analysis," he said. "This has caused a multimillion-dollar problem in the industry and it's a real wakeup call."
The recalls, which began last month, were fueled by reports of renal failure in pets. The recalls were initially associated with the consumption of wet pet foods, made with wheat gluten, tainted with industrial chemical melamine from a single Chinese company. A voluntary recall began with Ontario's Menu Foods, North America's largest maker of wet cat and dog food, pulling its products off store shelves when an internal test showed sickness and death in test animals.
To date, several major companies have recalled more than 100 brands of pet foods among fears of melamine contamination.
The recalls have put pressure on the federal government to regulate the pet food manufacturing industry and Ottawa has asked the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to review the matter.
DOGGIE DIET: Raw food advocate Laural Eacott says raw food is the best way to feed her pets. She feels the ongoing commercial pet food fiasco could have been avoided if there were strict rules monitoring the content of pet food.
Vet and dog groomer disagree on feeding
Motivated by massive recalls of dog and cat food products across North America, groomer Laural Eacott is making a stand for raw food, but not without opposition.
"I have a dog and a cat and I feed raw, definitely," she said. "There are no rules for commercial pet food. There's nobody that monitors their contents."
The most popular version of the raw diet is the bones and raw food diet, or BARF for short.
"I started feeding raw because a friend of mine was doing it and her dogs were so healthy. My dog was 14 years old and she was dragging her butt. It just turned her into a puppy again."
Eacott doesn't have a grinder powerful enough to handle animal bone, so she buys her food frozen from a manufacturer. The ingredients on the raw food label reassure her; bone, yams, apples and celery don't ring the same alarm bells as propylene glycol and ethoxyquin.
"Dogs are omnivores; they eat fruit and vegetables," she said. "They do not eat grain, they do not eat corn. But look at most labels, it's cornmeal and corn byproducts."
She said she could tell what people are feeding their pets by the condition of their skin and hair. Pets fed on the raw diet come in looking healthier, she said.
According to Eacott, commercial pet food is slowly killing pets. "Pet food's only been around for 25 years. We used table scraps before then. They only reason they made pet food is because the larger companies had to find somewhere for their byproducts to go."
Brian Barnes, a local veterinarian, disagrees. "Raw foods have been around for a while and they've always been promoted as the diet, but people are forgetting dogs in the wild weren't living to the ages of domestic dogs," he said.
Barnes said raw food also presents concerns of bacterial contamination; pets can become infected with E. coli and salmonella and act as conduits to transmit the diseases to their owners. "Raw food, being organic, sounds good until you look at it from a scientific perspective," he said. "Look at dog food companies. They are the ones that are spurring the research for animal health."
Barnes said the Westview Veterinary Hospital has been flooded by faxes from companies issuing updates and releases on the recalls. From the releases, it seems most big companies are putting strong safeguards into place.
"They test the ingredients before they go in and then hold the manufactured diet until they get the analysis," he said. "This has caused a multimillion-dollar problem in the industry and it's a real wakeup call."
The recalls, which began last month, were fueled by reports of renal failure in pets. The recalls were initially associated with the consumption of wet pet foods, made with wheat gluten, tainted with industrial chemical melamine from a single Chinese company. A voluntary recall began with Ontario's Menu Foods, North America's largest maker of wet cat and dog food, pulling its products off store shelves when an internal test showed sickness and death in test animals.
To date, several major companies have recalled more than 100 brands of pet foods among fears of melamine contamination.
The recalls have put pressure on the federal government to regulate the pet food manufacturing industry and Ottawa has asked the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to review the matter.
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