Looking past the recent vegan drama, have you ever wondered why your pet might not like particular foods? Have you ever actually tasted the food yourself?
I have, and some taste more like a chemistry lab than actual nutrition.
I used to hitchhike, and one day, got a ride with a trucker hauling blackened animal organs to be turned into pet food (they were blackened as a mark to show they were unfit for human consumption at the place where they were mass harvested). It was the worst smell I’ve ever smelled in my entire life. I remember gagging for a few minutes as the driver laughed and told me what the deal was.
Still not the worst road story I have lol.
But be aware of what your pet’s food is made from. Or make your own, if you’re worried about it!
There’s typically warning against eating pet food on the bags for that very reason.
Wow…
Still not the worst road story I have lol.
You’re not just gonna leave us hanging are you?
Yes.
(sorry)
I have too many to fit them into relevant posts.
This is funny, I asked my wife this morning “have you ever thought of tasting the cat’s canned wet food?”
We’ve never done a taste test, sad to say.
Understandable. I’m not suggesting everyone just go out and eat their pet’s food, but if my pet refuses to eat a particular food, I find myself curious why?
If my dog or cat refuses to eat it, and I can’t even swallow a small bite myself, there’s gotta be something seriously wrong with it.
I was going to ask WTF… but they like everything I feed them. (Cats) Hard food by an independent company that is no carb all protein. (Edit, young again pet food, my older cat had diabetes until I started this food, now he doesn’t!) Seafood Reveal cans, all pure fish. And not sure what’s in Friskies Temptations… but they want those like it’s crack.
I bought some fancy biscuits for my dogs from a local company. Ingredients are basically oats, cheddar, bacon, rosemary. I could 100% kill this whole bag if my dogs didn’t look so devastated when I ate their special treats.
My 13 years older sister gave me a chocolate piece when I was a kid, and asked afterwards if I liked it. I did. She gave me more, and didn’t tell me they were dog “chocolates”.
Tried one a few years ago - not as good as I remembered, and wouldn’t ask for another.
Dog chocolates are so waxy it’s crazy
Probably because it’s not chocolate. Chocolate is toxic to cats and dogs
Fair, but it still tastes like a candle.
I have tasted the “gravy” in the wet food. Not disgusting, but definitely not interested in trying it again. When I worked at a pet store one of those birthday biscuits came in broken so my manager has written it off. He offered me to try a piece and those were honestly not bad. A less sweet cookie basically.
I’ve just returned to Lemmy after a while so I’m OOTL. Can anyone give me a gist of what happened with the recent vegan drama on here? Or maybe link to a post I can read?
The company Wild Life claims to have created a nutritionally complete vegan cat food, even though it’s common knowledge that cats need meat proteins and nutrients in their regular diet.
https://lemmy.ca/post/27549478
I am no expert in the field, maybe they’re onto something, maybe not. 🤷♂️
Edit: Guess they dropped the link ☹️
Proteins are just amino acids. You can find the same proteins in plant foods as meat. There are other details about what different types of basic foods contain, of course, but it’s theoretically possible to create something that contains all the same nutrients as meat out of plants.
When I briefly skimmed over the original article, they made a point to mention their food contains taurine. You know, like one of the things they put in Monster Energy drinks…
I’m no animal nutrition expert, so I don’t know how that does or doesn’t help with kitty nutrition, but I’d just as soon feed my kitty actual chicken or tuna and call it a day.
Well, check it out: https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/taurine-in-cats
Taurine is an amino acid that’s an esssential nutrient for cats.
I feed my pet things that I eat, too! Collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, various squashes, fresh blueberries, etc.
Except for his bugs. I don’t like cockroaches or worms very much. But he seems to like them! So he gets those, too.
Generally I feed my dog either Gravy Train Chicken Flavor, or kitty kibble (he’s a small dog, only like 19 pounds).
He prefers the soft food, but will eat the hard food if he gets hungry enough.
He also likes chasing fiddler crabs, but he’s smart enough to not bite them LOL!
But dog biscuit treats around here taste like nothing but chemicals, and he won’t touch them.
I used to put my cat’s kibble in a bit of water so it’d get soft (and it’d trick him into staying hydrated, too). It’s great for picky eaters and elderly pets!
Animals don’t taste the same way we do. For example, cats don’t have the receptors for tasting sweet things…so they can barely detect sweetness at all.
Dogs only have 25% as many taste buds as humans, so most things have a very mutes taste for them. Plus, every dog I’ve ever had absolutely LOVED cat shit covered in kitty litter, so I never put much faith in their sense of taste.
Yeah, they’ll have flavors they like more or less, just like us, but even we can’t trust our sense of taste as a metric for nutrition…if we could, we’d all be addicted to brocolli and spinach instead of processes foods and sugar.
Guess what?
If my dog refuses to eat what’s supposed to be a dog treat, and I try it and it tastes like a chemistry lab, then I think me and my dog both agree it tastes more like chemicals and more toxic than garbage.
Even if humans and animals have different taste buds, if the food tastes wrong, ain’t nobody gonna eat it.
I’d say I love spinach just as much as sugar and processed food chomps on corncob pipe
How do you know that the only reason you don’t like cat shit is because you have a cultural revulsion to it?
My wife fucking loves coagulated blood. Like just big old chunks of blood which was packed into casings and boiled until it became a massive chunk of scab. Meanwhile I legit cannot be in the same room with it. As far as I’m concerned it might as well be cat shit
I recall seeing in a special card at a Chinese restaurant “Pigs Blood with Mixed Vegetable”. Sounds awful to me but some people must like it.
I also wouldn’t know what my dog thinks of the taste of cat shit, as that’s not on his menu. Not sure where that thought came from even, that’s not even food.
I’m referring to actual food products for pets. If the pet doesn’t like it, there’s probably a reason why, and that reason is likely that companies tend to make substandard foods not suitable for human consumption for pets.
lmao nobody feeds their dog cat shit. but they try to eat it anyway because they are dogs and they’ll eat a dirty diaper if you don’t throw it away out of reach. smh
Man y’all got some dumb dogs out there apparently.
I always taste test my pet’s food to make sure it’s not poisoned.
Dog food and treats, cat food and treats, rabbit food, fish food, I’m sure others; i was curious, they were terrible.
Milkbones taste like an unsalted pretzel. I was a bit stoned and teasing my dog.
i worked at an animal hospital for a few years in my 20s (late 90s). I was also broke af punk kid living in a filthy punk rock house, barely able to afford my part of rent. So i’d bring home the pet food sometimes. It wasn’t really inventoried, and it’s nutrition. Do not recommend though, its a great way to get a bacterial gut infection since pet food regulations are very minimal.
it ranges. some cat food is indistinguishable from canned tuna. the science diet I/D canine prescription tastes exactly like canned corned beef hash. the cheap stuff (kibbles&bits, fancy feast, etc) tastes exactly like you’d expect: bone meal, corn starch, and ash slag. cause thats the filler trash the cheap stuff is made of.
generally though, most kibble just tastes like if you soaked grape nuts cereal in beef broth, and most wet food tastes about the same as canned horse. which is unpleasant.
some cat food is indistinguishable from canned tuna
This might be saying more about canned tuna than about cat food… (and I love canned tuna).
i’ve always assumed that whatever meat didnt pass qc for human canned tuna would just become cat food.
I’ve always assumed most of the “food” we get from the big liquid dumpster we call sea wouldn’t be sellable (to humans or other animals) if anything remotely resembling quality control applied to it… if anything, I’d assume the least worst bits go to the cats, since they’re much pickier eaters than us, and have less tolerance for toxins…
lol what a weird take. all the problems of overconsumption and ecosystem collapse aside, theres not much inherently worse about seafood than landfood.
cats arent more picky than us. they gladly eat all kinds of trash and raw dead meat. they’re picky about what we feed them. The respective tolerance for “toxins” between us and cats is, again, relative to the environment we put them in and the specific set of toxins.
Cats are obligate carnivores with an excellent sense of smell, evolved to eat freshly hunted meat and little else, who’ll have to be very hungry before they eat anything remotely past due date.
We’re omnivores who’ll eat pretty much anything including stuff that’d kill most other animals that’d try to eat it (seriously, look up the long lists of “normal” foods you can’t feed your pets because they’d kill them); we call deadly toxins that plants have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to be as inedible as possible “spices” and “drugs”, and consume them for fun. We’ll let perfectly good food rot and ferment for months before we eat it because it somehow makes it better for our tastes.
No, we’re most definitely not the picky eaters here, not even when compared to dogs, much less when compared to cats.
As for the ocean, everything in it comes with concentrations of mercury and other heavy elements and industrial waste that are harmful even to us, extremely high percentages of microplastics, and a vast variety of parasites that require anything we get from the ocean to be flash frozen before it can be considered safe to eat (if we ignore the heavy metals and plastics and other shit).
Plus, of course, every bit of crap ever produced on the planet ends up there… if homeopathy was real ocean water would be a fucking universal panacea, the amount of shit it’s got dissolved in it.
I tried peanut butter biscuits for dogs once. Needless to say, dogs are getting ripped off. Tastes nothing like peanut butter.
As a kid, think toddler, my parents said I used to eat the dry dog food with the dog. Not like a lot, but a bite sometimes. They said the dog would give me weird looks as I’d take a bite.
Yep. I’ve tasted kibbles and baked treats / cookies. They’re generally not great, but the ones that taste ok are also my dogs favorites. Usually just like a sugar free human snack.
I do a lot of dried sardines as snacks and a couple Chinese coworkers tried them, they said they taste just like their version but without the salt and spices.
I feed my pets raw, so haven’t tried those. They seem to love it though.
Cool cool 👍
Someone donated some dog biscuit treats for our recently adopted dog Brownie, but he wouldn’t eat them. I tried a bite, but it didn’t taste anything like nutrition, it just seriously tasted like a chemistry lab… ☹️
He likes soft Chicken Gravy Train though.
it just seriously tasted like a chemistry lab…
Have you ever tried your pet’s food?Have you ever tried your son’s chemistry lab?
I was the son, and yes I tasted half the chemicals. Lucky I’m still alive.
