Would You Drink a Little Anti-Bacterial Spray Every Day?! So Why Feed it to Your Dog…
Then I found this webcam of a Mc Donald’s burger – “Possibly the most boring, uneventful web cam on the planet”. I think not!!! The story goes that after the economic crash in Iceland McDonalds decided to close their diners in the country. The day before it closed down (October 30th 2009) Hjörtur Smárason bought a burger and chips and left it on his garage shelf. Three years later he opened it and quelle suprise, it looked the exact same. He since donated it to the national museum in Iceland where it was in storage for a year before being moved to a hotel where it has sat, unchanged, for the last three years! Do you think the delicate microflora in your gut (of which you have around 1.5kg of in your intestines alone) appreciate all this anti-life?! All washed down with a nice glass of water with chlorine in it!
Think of your gut microflora as a field of lush green grass, and you are spraying it with round up every meal!
Avoiding the ingestion of anti-microbials is just one of the reasons we are advised to eat fresh food. Yet it certainly doesn’t curb our intake of dry pet food. Still today 9/10 pets do not receive any fresh food items.
Dry food is made many months ago, in a land far, far away. Royal Canin for example is made in 12 factories around the world, France, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and China. Wherever it’s made the ingredients used can come from anywhere. That’s a lot of shipping, a lot of temperature and an awful lot of storage. Thus there’s whole host of anti-life used in dry dog food so it doesn’t look green and smell rotten after travelling thousands of miles in the belly of a warm ship, sitting on the warm shelf of your pet shop and then sitting open for weeks in your cupboard, almost all of which doesn’t even make the label.
Mars Pet Care Employees Suing Over Exposure to Pesticides (Phosphine Gas)
It can’t be that bad surely?! Well there’s an interesting court case coming up Jan 2nd 2017 that’s about to show dog owners just how nasty the chemicals are that are used in dry food, but not over the effects these chemicals have on dogs but the employees making the stuff. The lawsuit is being taken by multiple former employees of a Mars Petcare kibble manufacturing facility in Joplin, Montana against Mars Petcare. The claim is Mars Petcare was ‘negligent and careless’ in preventing employee exposure to pesticides and other toxins used in the pet food product.
Here’s the actual petition for damages.
The crux of the claim is over phosphine gas, a rodenticide and pesticide. You know, the stuff used in World War I in chemical bombs to kill people?! Phosphine monitors in the factory (why are there phosphine monitors inside a food factory?!) normally sound a warning alarm at 0.2 parts per million. Company records indicated that
on two days there was a personal monitoring reading of 5.85 ppm
Almost 30 times higher than safe levels for employee exposure.
The story was first broken by Susan Thixton of The Truth About Pet Food, in which she speaks to some of the employees. We hear claims of false signatures used to say levels were zero. The local paper (The Joplin Globe) also found evidence that
the company’s record for mould sampling…showed that airborne mould concentrations exceeded the measurement range…on multiple days at various locations in the plant
This isn’t the first time Mars have been dragged through the courts, needless to say, recently they were forced to pay out over claims their dry food made dogs live longer!
Everything Dogs Eat Now Comes From a Packet…
Isn’t that strange? We’re all told to eat fresh food but all your dog’s food, all his treats, his raw hide chews, pigs ears, dental sticks and even some of their chew toys, come in packets and as such are loaded with anti-microbials.
And when your dog gut grumbles in protest you take him to the vet where you are sure to receive….ANTI-biotics.
Conclusions…
A previous post I wrote highlighted how we desperately need to re-think how we all view our relationship with bacteria. You have more bacterial cells in your than human cells. In a way you are more bacteria than human, you are barely you at all!
They run the show. Your digestion. Your immune system. Your mood. You want them happy. You need them happy.
In the very least you definitely need to stop poisoning them.
Feed dogs fresh food. Here’s how!
https://www.dogsfirst.ie/raw-faq/everything-about-raw-dog-food/
If your dog has stomach / IBS / colitis issues, it’s this!
https://www.dogsfirst.ie/health-issues/colitis-in-dogs/
