I do this in my store. For years now I have refused to sell a single food with any amount whatsoever of these ingredients because 1) they are unnecessary, 2) they are not nutritious, 3) these byproducts are very poorly regulated for safety and 3) most every pet food recall in history can be blamed on these cheap raw ingredient sources.

And somehow I manage to offer aisles and aisles of various brands of pet food within the same price range as, and in some cases more affordable than, the other brands. Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense if vets decided to reject brands containing those unsafe ingredients in favor of more wholesome ones? All they need to do is what more and more consumers are doing, these days…learn to read and understand the ingredients panel.

I can’t exactly say I predicted the pet food recall, not to the magnitude it turned out….but I did know that grain and rendering waste were unnecessary and potentially dangerous ingredients. And I knew that, since they make up the bulk of most pet foods, when/if they were adulterated at the pre-mix stage, it would be a significant event.

But because none contained any amount of corn/wheat/soy or their glutens, not a single brand in my store was involved in the 2007 pet food recall.

It’s not a perfect solution but I think the least people who sell pet food can do is try to educate themselves about raw ingredients and how the industry collects, manufactures, regulates ad labels them.

Nothing was mentioned about the journalistic abilities or ethics of anyone at petconnection.
Not a single word.

If , be generous and say 90%, of a profession acts like jerks, then that profession looks bad.
Getting the tar off the vets who covered themselves with something that does not smell like roses? Gonna be a dirty job.

Props to the , be generous-say 5-10% of vets who did the right thing.
Really, good job , thanks, wish there were a lot more good vets, we all wish that.

But if 90% of vets sell pet food, were silent about the poisoning and the screwing the pet owners are getting and has lips firmly planted on PFI butt cheeks (the percentage was much higher than 90%) that pet owners noticed is no surprise.

No one has said that here. No one.

Were it not for veterinarians, sharing and asking for help through the Veterinary Information Network, chances are pretty good that the thousands of deaths would never have been considered more than rare, isolated incidents not related to food at all. It was the veterinary community that put the pieces together. And it was the veterinary community, though VIN, who pushed for the real numbers to be known, when the FDA was saying less than 20 pets had died, instead of thousands.

What veterinarians are doing selling food is perfectly legal, and that they feed the products they sell to their own pets says a lot about how much they believe in them, whether that’s right or wrong.

Now, I’ve long argued that retail products don’t belong in a medical practice. MDs have long been legally prohibited from many of the trade practices routinely found in the veterinary practices. (And yet, the regulations haven’t exactly kept ethical concerns at bay in human medicine, has it?)

We’ve all pretty much agreed that the average veterinarian relies too heavily on corporate-sponsored “nutrition training” in school and in continuing education.

But there are and continue to be changes. In the last few years I’ve seen many more veterinarians volunteering to write script, and even tell clients where the prescription can be filled for less money. This is very recent. The move away from annual vaccines (NOT RECOMMENDED) to annual physicals is also recent, and a noteworthy development.

The shake-out after the pet-food recalls is still ongoing, and it’s too early to know how it will eventually play out in veterinary practices.

Kicking retail to the curb and focusing solely on medicine in veterinary practices are reforms that would help pet-owners be informed care-givers and trusting, educated and questioning partners with their veterinarians, able to make better choices on behalf of their pets. (It does need to be noted, at least in passing, that removing the retail income will have to mean that medical costs will get higher.)

Removing retails would also (I believe) be a good move for the veterinary profession, in terms of enhanced credibility.

But to say that veterinarians covered up or continue to cover up these problems is just plain wrong. Just as with what I’ve been writing about horse-racing, there’s a lot of soul-searching and quest for reform coming from within.

Bad vets? Lazy vets? Greedy vets? Oh sure, they exist. Bad, lazy and greedy journalists, too (just not here!).

But don’t tar them all with the same brush.

That your vet was supportive in home cooking is likewise good, and rare. I guess a good vet does not really need to pimp pet food to pay off the school loans, maybe this fabulous news should be made available to everyone who says that vets must be excused from ethical concerns on economic grounds?

There were a few, very few, vets who acted during the recall, and since, in a way that does not disgrace the entire profession.
The rest of the vets (99.9) _did_ disgrace the entire profession.

Some vets insist on disgracing the profession daily, by being dismissive or insulting to pet owners who have concerns about commercial pet food.
Looks real bad for the entire profession.
Come to think of it, there is just a whole long list of things the vets have let slide that look really bad for the entire profession.

Vets are being paid big money, today, by people who have pets still suffering the effects of the poison and if that vet is _still_silent,
then it is blood money.
The interest on blood money is high.

http://www.reuters.com/article.....7120080515

and some more comments about it..
http://www.reuters.com/article.....7120080515

When I told my vet I wanted to home-cook, she gave me recipes, and advice on where to buy the ingredients that don’t come standard in human food. Does she deserve your sweeping and all-encompassing contempt too?

Do you remember the popular “Can’t be the food, you let your pet get into something.”
Do you remember the deafening silence of 99.9% of the vets?

Some of us will never forget.

No matter how politically correct you want it said, what the vets did, and failed to do, was, all of it, not right.

Vets lost a ton of the respect pet owners had, as in past tense, for them this last 18 months.

BooHoo.

Bone up on ethics and boot the poisoners out your clinic door, then get to saying mea culpa for not getting up on the hind legs and standing up for the pets and the pet owners. Until then, I can’t hear anything a vet who was silent during the recall has to say.