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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Pet food is for the dogs (and cats)
EVERY DAY, they test more pet food, and every day, they find more weird and potentially dangerous things in the food: There's poison-tainted Chinese wheat gluten in the gravy and meatlike chunks, there's salmonella in the kitty treats, there's broccoli in the puppy kibble, there's fish feces in the gerbil pellets, there's gerbils in the dingo pellets and on and on.
HERE'S what I suspect: There's always been weird stuff in pet food. That's why it's called PET food. It's for animals who drink toilet water and eat dead rodents and lick themselves in places humans can't even reach. Most of the junk in pet food apparently isn't dangerous. Except for the rat poison in the Chinese wheat gluten. It has killed some dogs and cats. That's the downside of allowing any food products to be produced in countries that don't even have a Department of Don't Use Rat Poison Around Food Products.
In one sense you can applaud the Chinese for at least trying to keep rats out of the wheat silos. On the other paw, the dogs probably wouldn't have died if there had been actual rats in the dog food instead of rat poison. Today's dogs come from scavenger doggie predecessors, vicious dogs that roamed the plains in packs eating whatever creatures they could overpower. Rats would have been pupus for these prehistoric pups.
TODAY'S domesticated dogs are coddled but still have the predilection, not to mention the digestive track, to consume unusual entrees, like the neighbor's pet hamster or that Thanksgiving turkey you foolishly left too close to the edge of the kitchen counter.
We assume that commercial dog and cat food is relatively free of contaminants, but when you figure the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows something like five rodent hairs and 14 horsefly larvae per 200 pounds of hot-dog meat for human consumption, the restrictions on pet food are going to be even more zany. And that's fine. Because dogs and cats can eat fly larvae and rodent hairs until the cows come home. And then eat them, too, hooves and all. (If a wild dingo had a chance to stalk an American domesticated milk cow, he'd consider that a great day.)
It's called "dog food" and "cat food" because only dogs and cats eat it. (Old people on Social Security used to eat it, but it got too expensive so they've gone to, I believe, birdseed and gerbil pellets.) So it's likely that a lot of the weird stuff inspectors are "suddenly" finding in dog and cat food has always been there, and the pets ate it anyway. Lots of it. Have you seen typical house cats lately? They're the size of cocker spaniels. And cocker spaniels weigh more than Shetland ponies. And they didn't get that way eating canaries and broccoli.
Buy Charles Memminger's hilarious new book, "Hey, Waiter, There's An Umbrella In My Drink!" at island book stores or
online at any book retailer. E-mail him at
cmemminger@starbulletin.com