by Janet Farricelli CPDT-KA

Created on: February 04, 2009

As a loving and caring owner, you try your best to keep your pets healthy and happy. You provide them with yearly vaccinations, you have them spayed or neutered, you test their stools annually and you even brush their teeth every couple of days. Yet, there is this one thing you do on a daily basis that can prove very harmful to your pet's over all well being: you feed them.

After the pet food scare of these past years, more and more pet owners are questioning how safe it is to feed their pets commercial pet food. With hundreds and hundreds of fatal outcomes, owners are enraged and on the look out for alternative food to feed, many trying to feed raw as nature intended.

As a pet owner, you must be informed of what your beloved pet's food contains. Of course, commercial pet food producers will never really tell you. No pet food company will ever want you to know that some substances found in your dog's or cat's food may be harmful. However, there is one easy way that owners may get to learn part of the truth; by simply learning to interpret food labels.

While advertisements and commercials may be deceiving, truth is, food labels cannot lie. They must list by law what the pet food contains. While pet food companies may still be able to hide some of the ingredients and substances used by listing them under vague names, by learning how to interpret such labels one can get some sort of idea. Today, you will learn what meat by products and fillers really are, and why they can be harmful to your pet.

Looking at a food label for the first time, one must look at the order of the ingredients listed. The ingredients are listed in order of the percentage used. For instance, if corn meal is listed first, it means that this ingredient plays the biggest role in the food. The last ingredient, therefore, will be the least used in the make up of the food.

What pet food really contains:

Meat byproducts:

People read the word meat and therefore think it is good for their pets. But most people do not realize what the word byproduct actually means. A chicken by product for instance, may mean nothing more than the fact that the pet food will contain: feathers, heads, feet, brains, livers, stomachs, blood or any other part of the bird that is normally not fit for human consumption.

Meat byproducts often contain viscera and blood from animals along with the saw dust found in meat packing facilities. Such presence of sawdust is not accidental, rather it is accepted as long as it does not compose

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