What Even is “Dog Food?”
A History of the Commercial Pet Food Industry
Ask your average dog owner what they do to make sure their four-legged friend’s nutritional requirements are met, and you’re likely to hear they feed a “complete and balanced” dry kibble–perhaps even a sheepish admission to occasionally feeding their dog table scraps against their veterinarian’s recommendation.
Unlikely will you hear the owner pose questions regarding the contents of what’s inside that bag, and even more unlikely would they consider themselves any sort of authority on the complex world of dog nutrition. But why is that? To begin to understand dog nutrition, you first have to understand the commercial dog food industry.
The Early Days
Prior to the advent of the first commercial dog food, our canine companions were generally fed a combination of whatever their humans were eating and whatever they were able to forage from their local environments–for city dogs, this meant rummaging through trash, and for rural or farm-dwelling dogs, this meant scraps, raw meat, raw eggs, or raw milk.
This all changed in 1860 with the introduction of “Spratt’s Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes,” the brain-child of James Spratt and his partner, Charles Cruft. The cakes consisted of wheat meal, vegetables, beetroot, and beef blood. Their invention inspired copycats and marked the true “beginning” of the commercial pet food industry.
By 1922, the popularity of cakes had fallen due to the rise of the first canned diets, which mostly consisted of horse meats, as the technological developments made during WWI had rendered horses obsolete in the context of war.
Consumers were skeptical of this new way of feeding their dogs, but as the economic collapse of the 1930s pinched the American people’s wallets, canned food began to market itself as the cheaper alternative to feeding human-grade food.
By 1941, over 90% of commercial pet food was canned–but just as soon as it dominated the market, the onset of WWII transformed one essential ingredient of the product from abundant to coveted: aluminum. In response to the United States government urging the population to sacrifice aluminum and other metals for war efforts, consumers began to see the first forms of dry dog food.
Mass-produced kibble was applauded across manufacturing industries.. It allowed for the utilization of what was once considered to be waste. The operators of mills and grain sellers were now able to profit from grain hulls and grain mill sweepings. Slaughterhouses were now able to sell meat and other by-products unfit for human consumption. And as for consumers, they now had an inexpensive and convenient way to feed their pets. Although at this point in history the general public still knew fresh meats, fruits and vegetables to be the pinnacle of nutrition for both humans and animals, they had now at least accepted that their dogs could also maintain good health on this type of diet. It wouldn’t be until several decades later that consumers began to believe the carefully cultivated lie that their pets actually require these ingredients in order to be healthy.
The Modern-Day Commercial Pet Food Industry is Born
The practice of using inexpensive, low-quality ingredients spelled big profits for pet food companies. By the 1950s, the majority of pet foods were synthesized by combining the by-products of the meat and grain industries and cooking them at high temperatures for days on end in order to kill off the bacteria and disease contained within the ingredients, which yielded a stable product with a shelf-life previously unheard of.
Taking notes from the way in which cereal manufacturers were able to produce their signature crispy flakes, the Purina Company refined the practice of kibble-production with extrusion. This method of production combines ingredients and cooks them under high-pressure into a liquid form, where they are then pushed through a tube, expanded, baked, and fluffed into the kibble we know today, which was lighter and larger than the industry standard pellets at the time.
Although veterinarians had endorsed this new form of pet food since its inception, the practice only became pervasive in the 1960s. Claims made by authority figureheads such as the editor of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association or Dr. Kronfeld D.S. PhD DSc MVSc from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Veterinary Medicine, began to claim that all meat-based diets were incomplete for dogs, that too much protein is harmful, that some carbohydrates are just necessary for canine health, and that table scraps pose dangerous risks to your dog’s health. Throughout the decade, The Pet Food Institute campaigned this information through articles in popular American magazines, air-time on at least 91 radio stations, and press-releases to over 1000 newspapers across the country. The 1960s also saw the inception of kibble cut into shapes or colored with dyes that were appealing to the consumer, as well as the popularization of “gravy” made from the food itself.
All kibble began to come in brightly colored packaging and labeled as “complete,” advertising that no additional food or supplements were necessary. Inundated with a world filled with rapid technological advancement, consumers saw these new standards as just another innovation in their way of life.
The first diets developed specifically to treat kidney and heart disease were created all the way back in 1948, but their popularity didn’t surge until Dr. Mark Morris D.M.V. founded Hill’s Pet Products, better known today as Hill’s Science Diet. This was the first time that prescription foods became commercially available to the consumer… but not without the recommendation of a veterinarian. This marked a turning point in the industry’s history–for the first time, consumers began to regard dog nutrition as complex; something better left to the experts.
Regulation Wars
When it comes to determining what goes into a pet food, two organizations get to call the shots: The National Research Council (NRC) and The American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO).
By definition, the NRC produces reports that shape policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering and medicine, whereas AAFCO holds responsibility for providing the official guidelines for both livestock and companion animal feeds, although ultimately the responsibility of ensuring those standards are met falls on the pet food manufacturer. Interestingly enough, AAFCO was organized by the pet food industry itself.
Until 1974, the NRC was the governing body responsible for establishing which practices would be used to determine the nutritional values of pet food. This is when AAFCO began to establish new protocols that amounted to less thorough and far shorter testing periods. The practice of using live dogs in rigorous feeding trials gave way to simple chemical analyses which by design produced data that served no function in terms of what type or grade of food was used, let alone it’s digestibility in canines. In response, the Animal Protection Institute (API) released an article lamenting that the pet food industry now was left to police itself.
In 1985, the guidelines laid out by the NRC were revised in an attempt to provide consumers with vital information, such as how the nutritional value of a food changed after aggressive cooking and processing. However, to this day, there has been no attempt to integrate the proposed changes made in 1985 into industry practice.
Set on finding new ways to profit from the same products, the 1980s also saw the introduction of “premium” diets, marketed to niche categories of life stages or lifestyles, such as puppy food, senior diets, maintenance diets, and even performance diets.
As the US population began to enter the renaissance of their health-craze and reading the ingredients on food became commonplace, concerned consumers began to once again question what was in their pet’s food. Public outcry eventually drove the pet food industry to eliminate the use of harsh chemicals in their foods, replacing preservatives with “natural” alternatives such as Vitamin C and Vitamin E. This gave the pet food industry the clever idea to introduce “natural” diets, which generally consisted of unconventional meats (fish, venison, etc) that were human-grade or organic and bragged of containing “no harmful by-products.” However, unbeknownst to the consumers, these foods were still just as processed and contained the same grain-based fillers as their predecessors.
here i want to touch on the recalls (such as the phenobarbital found in multiple pet food brands a few years back) but i don’t even know where to start honestly, there are so many recalls per year and so many of them are so salacious… if anyone wants to help out, here are some great links to browse
