Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats Read Online Free PDF

insta-system is much better than the old haphazard way of eating. In fact, you’d do best to eat only Insta-Meal the rest of your life.
    But would you? Certainly you’d refuse such a diet, even if there were a “natural” variety, free of artificial additives. Not only would you long for the taste of a varied and natural diet, but your body would know something was missing.
    Most people would soon be climbing the walls in frustration, desperate for a salad or some fruit—anything whole and fresh. Or just different! And while lying awake at night, you might wonder about the true meaning of some common Insta-Meal label ingredient terms like bakery by-products, poultry meal, and (shudder) sterilized restaurant by-products.
    I have nothing personal against the makers of processed foods for pets, nor do I seek to put them out of business. They’re probably doing their best to provide nutritionally balanced products at reasonable prices, making use of materials that might otherwise go to waste or just be used as fertilizer. It’s just that I don’t believe any version of completely cooked, dried, canned, or frozen prepared food constitutes an optimal diet for the good health of either human or beast. I believe all of us—humans and animals—should have a variety of fresh, wholesome, unprocessed food included in our daily diets.
    At first many Americans are surprised at the idea of feeding pets what they call people food. It doesn’t seem proper. However, Europeans feed their dogs much more naturally, minimizing the use of commercial foods. Many breeders have commented to me that such European dogs are far healthier than American dogs. No diet that we can formulate from least-cost products and process for convenience and long storage can ever rival those mysteriously complex fresh-food diets offered for eons by Nature herself.

    OBJECTIONS TO COMMERCIAL PET FOODS
    The many objections we can make about the nutritional quality of animal convenience foods fit into two categories. First, they don’t contain some things we wish they did : adequate quantities and qualities of proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals, as well as the more intangible qualities unique to live, fresh foods. Second, they do contain other things we wish they didn’t :
     
Slaughterhouse wastes
Toxic products from spoiled foodstuffs
Non-nutritive fillers
Heavy-metal contaminants
Sugar
Pesticides and herbicides
Drug residues
Artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives
Bacteria and fungi contaminants
    When you feed your pet convenience foods, you unknowingly help to create another problem: The presence of various toxins and pollutants actually increases the body’s need for high-quality nutrients necessary for combating or eliminating these same contaminants. When the overall nutrition is already lower than it should be, we are inviting trouble.
    “But wait,” you say, “my cat loves this dry food and won’t eat anything else!” I have heard this statement many times. But here’s the thing to understand: Animals don’t know any better. When a food has the right smell and taste, like those they have become used to over the last several millennia, they will eat it. Have you ever heard an ad for pet food in which the statement is made about all the research that has gone into the making of the food? Have you every wondered about how much of that “research” was discovering that irresistible flavor?
    So far, we have considered a couple of important factors: the issue of how commercial pet foods are labeled and how misleading that can be in determining their value, as well as how feeding the same processed food over and over again clearly cannot support the same level of health that follows a natural diet. Now let’s turn to the quality of commercial pet foods.
    THE QUALITY OF PET FOODS
    Pet food makers make a big effort to produce competitive, consistent products manufactured from a fluctuating market of least-cost ingredients. Using