Researching pet food: mainstream companies perpetrate cruelty.

Over tire 13 years I've been investigating the commercial pet food industry, I thought I'd seen everything: the questionable feeding trials, the supposed analytical testing of particular brands and the rendered materials companies can legally use--including inferior ingredients from slaughterhouses, moldy grains and rancid fats. But it wasn't until early 2002 that I learned about another questionable aspect of this industry that truly stunned me--animal experimentation.

A student at the University of Illinois wrote to me expressing her concerns about nine dogs at one of the school's labs. Over the years, I'd heard of such laboratories using animals--primarily rats and mice--for research on human disease. This letter described a different scenario. These dogs were being used for experiments funded by a well-known mainstream pet food company. When the student questioned the purpose of the experimentation, the head researcher, an animal science professor, explained that he undertakes this research "because pet owners want dogs who defecate infrequently."

The experiment involved feeding the dogs poultry necks, backs and viscera, as well as ground-up feathers and bone meal. Lab technicians then implanted tubes in the dogs' sides to extract samples of digested food. The student wrote that the dogs were kept in cages in a windowless basement, deprived of toy's and forced to sleep on hard flooring with no bedding.

This situation is not an isolated incident. Before long, I found numerous reports of mainstream pet food companies--the same ones you see advertising on television and in pet magazines--experimenting on dogs and cats. This so-called research is, in most instances, too gruesome to describe, but I will say that the deaths of the puppies and dogs who were its victims ended their undue and unneeded suffering.

Indeed, after an investigator for the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) went underground to document on film what was happening to dogs at one research lab in Missouri, officials at PETsMART, the giant pet products company headquartered in Phoenix, said they were "absolutely horrified" by the mistreatment the film depicted. PETsMART's influence caused the pet food maker to terminate its relationship with the lab, although PETsMART still sells the company's products.

On June 10, 2003, PETA filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against this same large, mainstream pet food company, claiming that its ads were false and misleading. According to PETA, the company "deliberately deceives caring consumers into believing that animals used for its research enjoy the same lifestyle conditions as the consumers' animal companions." Instead, the PETA investigator found that dogs and cats were subjected to horrific living conditions and deplorable treatment, often ending in the animals' deaths.

Many research projects such as these are documented in the American Veterinary Journal of Research, the Journal of Veterinary internal Medicine and the Journal of Animal Science, all funded by various mainstream pet food companies.