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Pet Food Labels

Pet food labels. These are the current regulations. They can change from time to time. But, these are the current regulations that are required. They absolutely require this information on the bags. When you buy a pet food, this is what’s going to be there.

Product name. Obviously, that’s really kind of important because you don’t want to buy cat food for a dog and dog for a cat, vice versa, because they do have different requirements, nutrient requirements and it’s a problem. The net weight because you want to know what you’re buying. Is it 20 lbs? Is it 40 lbs? It’s really interesting to me, sometimes, they’ll go 44 lbs and try to make a better deal for you, I guess. But you’re going to have to watch out, know exactly what you’re buying because the price and the weight are what you’re looking at as a comparison. The name and the address of the manufacturer. If you ever run into problems with your food, it doesn’t look right, the animal refuses it, doesn’t want to eat it, it's nice to be able to have that there so you can contact them and say this has been a problem, what can we do about it? That’s why that’s required.

Guaranteed analysis panel. There’s four nutrients that are required here, protein is one, fat is another, fiber is another, moisture. Those are the four things that are required to be on that panel. They’re going to give you some idea of the value of the food. Although, I’m sure as you’ve learned, it's not going to give you the whole story of everything you’re going to want to know. Those are the things that absolutely have to be there, by law. They’re important from the standpoint of...say, if you’re buying a kitten food versus a cat food or a puppy food versus a dog food. You’d know right up front that the protein levels for the growing animals should be higher, so you’ll know that and the fat levels will probably be higher too because they need more energy to grow. But, those are just some things to consider. Moisture levels should be about 10%, 10-12%. If it’s any higher than that you probably don’t want to buy it.

List of ingredients. These are actually listed in descending order by weight. If, for example, on this cat food, one of the first ingredients listed is poultry by-product meal. We’d assume that probably is, by weight, the biggest part of what’s in this food. But we will talk a little bit about how that may not always be the case. But they all have to be listed. Everything that goes in has to be there. Like I said before, the words dog food or cat food and you may think that’s kind of funny, but you really need to be sure what you get because there is certain things that cats absolutely have to have that dog foods may not have. The one thing that comes to mind is they have to have taurine which is an amino acid, has to be in cat food because it's one of the requirements they have. Dog food, it doesn’t really matter. Because of that you can’t feed a dog food to a cat and have them do well.

Statement of nutritional adequacy or the purpose of the product. And this can actually be made in two ways. What they’ll tell you is, that this product actually went through a feeding trial and it was shown to be adequate for the dogs they sent through the trial. They’re actually telling you up front that this food really does work for your dogs. They’re making that statement. Feeding trials is actually the best way to find that. There is another method...with what they’ll do is they’ll do a calculation method. They’ll actually go through and calculate what should be contained in the product, crude protein, the energy levels, the fat, the minerals, the vitamins, what should be there and say well these all come up to minimum standards, so it should be a good food. If you were to look at these two, which would be the best? Obviously, the feeding trials is going to be the best way to go. I’d be more comfortable buying a food that actually said they were doing a feeding trial of their product on dogs.

And then, feeding instructions. What they will do, as in most products, they’ll give you on this dog food, what it will say, say for 50-75 lb dog, you have anywhere from 2 ¾ to 3 2/3 cups. It's what you feed them. That’s what they say you should do. And so on down is the smaller dogs, smaller amounts. Those may indeed be accurate, but it’s really good if you can go through calculations to find out if it is or not. That’s part of the problem that we run into with having animals fed too much, we’re not quite sure what to feed. Hopefully, we’ll find out a better way to do that and get an idea of how close they’re actually coming to telling us the truth. One thing, I’m not trying to make the dog food manufacturers look bad, but, obviously, they’re trying to sell their product, right? They want you to feed as much as possible, so you buy more. It’s just good for you, for consumer, and for the health of your animal to know how close they actually are.

Some optional information. I wish this would be made, be in the law. Maybe it’ll get passed someday. Actually stating what the caloric density of the food is because it has so much to do with the energy level of the food you’re going to be feeding and that gives you a better idea of how much you should be feeding. What they’ll actually do, some manufacturers, and both of these Purina products actually do tell you what the ME, the metabolizable energy of their product is. I think the dog food is about 3,700 ME kilograms, MEs per kilogram and the cat food is about 4,200. Those are, those are ballpark figures for dog and cat foods. But, they’ll actually state what it is. Many times they will not and you really don’t know. The pull date, which is telling you the freshness of the food, how long it’s been out. And, obviously, you don’t want to buy a food that’s past its date and giving some old food to your dog or cat. Remember, these are just optional, they’re not always there, but sometimes they are. Guaranteed analysis may go further than just the four that we talked about which could include ash, linoleic acid, taurine and magnesium. Those are some things that will actually show up on the list. For instance, for the Purina food here, its listing includes the four we talked about, the protein, the fat, the fiber, and the moisture. Then, you have linoleic acid, you’ve got arachidonic acid which, by the way, cats must have because they cannot manufacture that themselves, dogs can. Calcium, phosphorus, selenium, vitamin A, vitamin E, taurine, which I said is very necessary. Two things for a cat...if you want to look on a cat food label that really, in a reputable cat food manufacturer should have on is taurine and arachidonic acid because those two things cats have to have, they can’t make themselves.

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