Most of us pet owners probably don’t choose pet food by reading the labels — instead, we figure out what our pets are most willing to eat and buy that, week after week, occasionally adding something different as a treat.
But we should take some time to compare our regular pet food to other brands, and see if we’re getting what’s best for our pets. That starts with reading the labels. The FDA, which enforces labeling rules, tells us this:
If pet food is labeled with the name of a meat (for example, “Chicken Cat Food”), it has to be, by weight, at least 95% that meat — except for the water used to process it, and “condiments”. (I don’t know what condiments are used in pet food — even the FDA puts the word in quotes.) If the names of two meats are used (like “Chicken and Liver”), it has to be a 95% combination of the two. Also, the first meat named must be the one there’s more of.
If the product name includes an additional descriptive word — “dinner”, “entrée”, “platter”, or “formula”, to give only a few examples, it only has to contain 25% of the named meat. So,one of the main ingredients may be something that’s not mentioned at all in the product name. The FDA warns, for example, that if your cat doesn’t like fish, you need to read the ingredients list on that Chicken Formula can to make sure there’s none in it.
Food labeled as “with” something — beef for example — only has to contain 3% of that ingredient. So your fish-hating cat might actually eat something “with salmon”.
When pet food is “flavored” with something — like chicken broth — it doesn’t have to contain a set percentage, just enough to be detectable. How do the companies know it’s enough? Specially trained animals test it for them.
You can learn a lot by taking a few seconds to read pet food labels.
