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Comment by throwawaywrench | Hacker News Reader

I wouldnt assume that "quality protein" has any correlation with being healthy.

>Owners can also feed their pets lower-quality proteins, as dogs and cats can happily chow on meat byproducts, such as marrow, kidneys and spleen, left from processing meat for humans.

Us humans don't choose what parts of animals we eat based on any kind of health-centric metric. It just based on what parts we deem distasteful to eat. So the bits that are deemed undesirable/low quality are not necessarily any worse for the consumer. Some amount of organ meat may even be beneficial to health. Arguably meat eating humans would do well to include some amount of kidney, liver, marrow etc in place of some of the muscle tissue that we tend to eat a lot of.

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I think you’re totally right in your assumption re: quality == healthy. However, I really doubt the vague assertion of this article that implies there’s a large population of pets being fed ‘high quality’ food.

There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal.

I won’t pretend to know what proportion of pets are fed standard, ‘low quality’ food (ie. food made from corn, grain, and what most would consider as low quality meats and byproducts) but if I had to guess I would wager its >90%.

> There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal.

Maybe modern industrial agriculture is efficient, but modern food consumption isn't. Over a third of all available food is wasted in the USA. How much of that food waste would be OK to be re-processed as pet food?

I think this is a great point. I don’t know how the logistics of such a re-processing would work, but food waste is certainly a major problem.

I don’t mean to sound like an apologist (or even a fan) of industrial agriculture, but I think its important to acknowledge the reality that while its an imperfect system, it is also a modern marvel that enables us as a society to feed an enormous amount of people at extraordinarily low costs to the consumer.

> I wouldnt assume that "quality protein" has any correlation with being healthy.

I don't see why not, with a correct definition of "quality". See below.

> Arguably meat eating humans would do well to include some amount of kidney, liver, marrow etc in place of some of the muscle tissue that we tend to eat a lot of.

Sure, if those items are all processed with the same level of care and attention to detail, cleanliness, etc. But because they are treated as "by products", they're not.

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