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| Another Old Canard about Pet Food Posted: 26 May 2009 12:33 PM PDT
Often a canard is repeated so often by seemingly credible sources that it is mistaken for fact. The existence of WMD's for instance or the notion that our current economic woes can be cured with more tax cuts. In short, a canard is a time honored device used to sell an agenda or a product when actual facts are in short supply. Pet food has its share of canards, too. ... "You can't buy a decent product in the grocery store" is an example. The presence or absence of a particular ingredient is used to sell a variety pet foods. No corn or no soy are common examples of this specious argument. Another of my favorites is the good old "fixed formula" canard. This one dates back to the mid eighties and it was a way for some relatively small pet food companies to disparage larger, more successful companies. According to this argument large, evil, profit driven pet food manufacturers routinely sacrifice quality and maximize profit by altering their pet food formulas based on short term fluctuations in ingredient pricing. These willy nilly changes in formulation can have a negative effect on the pet's digestive tract according to this canard. All good canards have some believable element to them, and you can, in fact, Frankly I hadn't heard this one in a while until Yvonne found one of my own dispensing this outdated and unfounded information on a local Detroit television outlet's website. Why would a vet dispense such bogus information? I don't know. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just repeating something a sales rep had told him in an attempt to get him to sell or recommend a particular brand. As with many canards, the more thought you give to the idea, the less feasible it seems. Well-run pet food manufacturing plants are big, efficient machines. They are designed to run smoothly without a lot of starting and stopping. Ingredients are purchased under long term contracts often months or more in advance of any production run. Ingredients have to be stored in close proximity, readily available and the whole operation runs on consistency. That is the way a successful pet food manufacturer maximizes profit. Any sudden change throws the whole system out of whack and everything comes to a grinding halt. Besides that, there is a lot invested in a pet food formula. All the packaging must reflect the formulation and packaging has to be ordered and produced months in advance. The nutritional adequacy statements found of pet food bags are dependent on feeding tests of the original formula and would be invalidated if the product was constantly changing. And finally, a successful company depends on producing products that are consistent in quality. How long do you think a pet food manufacturer would be around if each month's production was the result of a different formula? Wreaking havoc with your customers digestive tract is not a recipe for success for a food producer. Constant changes in formulation based on ingredient pricing changes would be a recipe for disaster in terms of both profitability and product performance and quality. Purina wouldn't do it and I don't know of any pet food manufacturer that does. This old canard should be on its last quack. |
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