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April 11, 2007

Pet foods not on recall list; more info, pet food recipes; Egyptian geese-herding cat

The Pet Food List: Pet foods NOT on the recall list.

Pet Food Tracker: Pet foods that have been recalled.

Pet Connection, source of a weekly column syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate, and staffed by media savvy pet pros, leads with this blog post right now (Pet-food recall: Get the food off the shelves), with links to their recall-related pages, a request for volunteers to help get recalled food off shelves, and links to other good sources:

Every day since the first recall was announced on March 17, we here at Pet Connection have been informal members of a team of Web sites whose owners wanted to help. None of us ever heard of the other before, but we all somehow found our niche and together, we provided more support than any one of us alone could have. Itchmo, Howl911, PetFoodTracker and more — we’ve all pitched in together to get the information out there...

The Pet Food Recall Help Page at pet blog Itchmo has a current chart of recalled foods.

More pet food recipes:

Stream Valley Veterinary Hospital in Broadlands shared recipes for homemade cat and dog food with the Loudon (Va.) Times Mirror. It's salmon, chicken heart, beef kidney, turkey breast, chicken liver, sardines, virgin olive oil, 1/4 cup broccoli and spinach, plus vitamins and taurine. Sounds like quite a restaurant dish.

Far simpler, Concerned pet owners share their homemade food recipes at the Arizona Republic sounds more like home cooking. Two recipes, each with four ingredients. Meaty Loaf is baked ground beef, grated carrots and celery and cooked brown rice. No word on taurine there.

Scared of Poisoned Pet Food? Here Are Homemade Pet Food Recipes at the Toronto daily News has more simple recipes.

This expands the recipe collection begun April 3 in this post.

While there are warnings from many vets about the nutritional balance of home cooking, that concern is not universal. From AP,

Dr. Donald Strombeck said the Amazon.com sales rank for his book "Home-Prepared Dog & Cat Diets: The Healthful Alternative" jumped from below 60,000 to about 1,000 after the recalls.

The retired professor of veterinary nutrition at the University of California, Davis, challenged the common assertion that owners should not feed their pets table food.

When he began practicing veterinary medicine in the 1950s, he said, most pet owners fed their pets scraps from the table, keeping the risk of contamination low.

"The pet food industry doesn't want people competing with them," Strombeck said. "An animal can basically eat the same things we eat. They're not going to develop a deficiency."

In ancient Egypt, lore has it that cats ate scraps left by grateful villagers grateful for their rat-hunting. But art shows it might also have been their skill at geese-herding:

This is from Pat's Cats, Australian teacher Pat Shaw's Arts and Crafts Activity page, part of a curriculum on cats. Don't miss the Egyptian mummy cats in the Research section.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:55 AM | Permalink