Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Thursday, September 11, 2008
early evening
SuperZoo ‘08 - And the food, treat, toy, accessory, and company reviews begin…
We “shopped” until we dropped, literally. Well, almost. Lots of terrific companies and people donated to our li’l Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary, and this is where we begin to thank them. Each year we get enough food donated to help feed the kids for weeks, sometimes months, depending on which dogs get the food. Dante & Eli can wipe out a whole bag of raw nuggets in a day, and they’d last Phoenix & Cricket a week. It makes it much easier to feed the little dogs incredibly fabulous foods; and on the other hand, it’s difficult to feed the 100 pounders as well. The best part about the food we get from companies at SuperZoo is that they’re all high quality products - no one from Brand X company is there promoting their floor scrapings of undetermined body parts (“Chicken by-products include head, feet, entrails, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, liver, stomach, bones, blood, intestines, and any other part of the carcass not fit for human consumption,” writes Henry Pasternak in Healing Animals with Nature’s Cures. Meat meal can contain the boiled down flesh of animals we would find unacceptable for consumption. This can include zoo animals, road kill, and 4-D (dead, diseased, disabled, dying) livestock. Most shockingly, this also can include dogs and cats. That’s right, your pets could be cannibals. Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser writes, “Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so. A Canadian company, Sanimal Inc., was putting 40,000 pounds of dead dogs and dead cats into its dog and cat food every week, until discontinuing the practice in June 2001. “This food is healthy and good,” said the company’s vice president of procurement, responding to critics, ‘’but some people don’t like to see meat meal that contains any pets.”) that you wouldn’t want your pet to look at, much less eat. I can’t believe that anyone ever thought it was okay to feed dogs & cats to other dogs & cats. Gross!
The first snack sample we tried was simple, but delicious according to both the dogs and the cats. Since it’s September 11th, I’ll be all USA USA USA - so the first snack I open was Ameri-Treats, which is 100% human grade dehydrated chicken slices. As soon as I can find the website for them (not on the business card, nor on the package - we always think domain name first, but maybe it’s just because we enjoy the process of coming up with the names), I’ll link ya up. The cats were trampling each other to get little pieces from me. The dogs, fortunately, were a lot calmer, but I suppose that’s because they didn’t have a bunch of other animals around trying to get to the treats first. Also, from my perspective, the “pet owner”, the chicken smells really good!
Stay tuned for reviews of the bones that look like treats, but are a fully balanced meal, the doggie potato chips, the multitude of raw frozen food that we picked up from several different companies (we even have a large chest freezer that’s totally packed to the top with raw chicken, lamb, beef, rabbit, duck, and buffalo - both the dogs & cats are thrilled), the zillions of new treats, some old favorites, and some cool gadgets. And a bunch of really really nice people.
