Advocacy Project: What Are You Feeding Fido?
For week 5, we were assigned new groups in class based on our HCP topics and advocacy interests. As my HCP revolved around canine cognition and cognitive ethology and I plan on writing about puppy mills and the genetic/health issues and emotional distress they can cause in dogs, I was placed in a group with James and Tony, who are interested in similar topics. While James and I have near identitcal plans in terms of what we wish to advocate for in our AP, Tony had an interesting focus in which he wanted to write about dogs in testing and cruelty toward dogs, if I remember correctly.
With these new groups, we had to come up with a group advocacy issue, and seeing that our group's topics revolved around dogs, we decided to advocacte for the end of dog food consisting mainly of ingredients unfit for human consumption and unhealthy to dogs. Through our research, we have found that big name brands such as Purina, Beneful, Iams, and more utilize meat byproducts, restaurant grease and spoiled foods, and rendered mixtures that are made from livestock from the 4-D category (dead, diseased, disabled, dying) as well as euthanized dogs, cats, and zoo animals. Often, pet food contain preservatives dangerous to not only animal, but human consumption, and irresponsibly use vitamines and supplements that either contribute to vitamine deficiencies or overdoses. Additionally, pet food companies utilize gains and other non-nutritional, hard-to-digest ingredients as fillers for their foods, ultimately creating cheaper and less healthy food for our pets.
We seek to encourage UCI dog owners to boycott cheap dog foods that contain such highly processed, unhealthy ingredients and actively read the ingredients on the labels of their pet's foods. Likewise, we hope to encourage our audience to actively make a difference by calling the FDA if their pet has fallen ill or has died as a victim of these unhealthy foods and by filing complains and keeping up-to-date on recent FDA recalls.
