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Comment by neuroelectron | Hacker News Reader

I hope they remove them from animal food as well. Ol' Roy dog food uses tones of the stuff. Why?? So unnecessary.

Pet food is some of the most unsanitary "food" on earth. A lot of it is mass produced overseas with little to no regard as to the safety of the ingredients, and I would venture to say at least half of it is adulterated. We only find out about it when large numbers of pets start dying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

When I was a kid Ralston Purina owned a bunch of human food enterprises as well and that always disturbed me.

I mean the company that makes M&Ms and Kind Bars also makes Whiskias and Royal Canin. In the end I don't get why it matters. Do we not expect there to be good standards for both?

When I was a kid it was still considered normal for your dog to sleep outside. Most people drew the line at chaining your dog instead of having a fence, but that was about it. My dad built an insulated doghouse for our dog rather than let her stay inside. I thought that was weird, but I was the “weird kid” so who cares what I thought.

The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.

Why would it be weird to have a dog sleep in a shelter outside? Lots of people have dogs not just as pets, but to guard their property, and it's done all over the world.

My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.

Because they’re pack animals and you’re their pack.

That doesn't make dog houses weird, especially for dogs that were purpose-bred for work/protection.

In Smithfield Virginia there's a big Smithfield Foods pork plant, and right next door is Premium Pet Health, which is a Smithfield-owned pet food plant. I've only ever been in the Smithfield plant, and it seems fine. Very industrial, but similar to other meat plants.

One of the lesser known things about heavily processed dog food is kind of dark. People don’t realize that they use animals from shelters that have been put down in dog food. It’s been a while, but I had read a few years ago that they found three amounts of the medicine they used to put animals down in dog food. I also recall your before that reading that some shelters make money by selling the dead animals they put down to food processing companies.

That sounds highly inefficient and therefore unlikely. Just thinking about the logistics of slaughtering all these different breeds of dogs makes me doubt that it can be done profitably.

Where on earth did you hear that?

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