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.

  • @nottelling
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    16 days ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      116 days ago

      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).

      • @nottelling
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        316 days ago

        i’ve always assumed that whatever meat didnt pass qc for human canned tuna would just become cat food.

        • @[email protected]
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          116 days ago

          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…

          • @nottelling
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            116 days ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              216 days ago

              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.