Thoughts on pet food and recalls

What's in those bags?  I read the ingredients listed on the bag. I read the guaranteed analysis, but really, a company can make it look like just about anything by how they portray ingredients, either as a whole or as pieces of the whole. 

It's my belief that pet food companies are reading the same things we are reading about what's good and what's bad and what to look for on the ingredients list and they are then tailoring their ingredients list to suit marketing needs.  They aren't really printing falsehoods, they are just using broad brushes to paint pictures of foods that are highly processed and probably just fine for our pets to eat and just as nutritious as highly processed "human-grade" food is for us to eat.  The fact is that unless you raise, butcher, and blend your own food, you have no idea what exactly is in that bag or can of food.

The recent Diamond recalls brought to my attention the fact that even the super-premium foods are mass produced somewhere.  I was discussing this with a rep for a pet food company and the idea of "family-owned" processing plants came up as maybe a safer alternative, but I'm not so sure about that either.  Perhaps a smaller family-run business doesn't run into the wide scale product problems that the larger companies do, but still if you are not mixing it yourself you don't control the ingredients. 

This argument strongly supports the idea of a homemade diet.   My hunting buddy feeds his dog a home cooked diet consisting mostly of meat and oatmeal with a dash of calcium phosphate.  His dog really looks and performs well on this regime.  If I had the time and a real kitchen I think that I would probably do the same.  Whether cooked or raw,  home prepared out of ingredients you control is probably the best.

I know lots of so-called RAW or BARF feeders and they really love the way that their dogs are doing.  At my normal pet food store they sell pre-made RAW products. I'm not sure that I trust those products either.  Once a product is produced by someone else to make a profit then the incentive is there to use less than optimal ingredients.  What are good ingredients though? 

What"s good to you and me is quite different from what dogs might find to be good.  My dogs relish eating some really gross things with no harm to their systems at all.  Do they do it daily? No.  But they do love dead, stinky stuff when they can get access to it.  The fact is that dogs survived for centuries without commercial or homemade foods.  They were scavengers who lived on whatever they could easily hunt or find near human settlements.  Not that long ago, dogs lived on leftovers and scraps thrown to them without thought based upon what families were eating at the time.  Were those dogs better off or worse?