Is Your Vet a Sellout?
You have to wonder about the deep down ethics of some people. We feed our cat a holistic diet. None of her food contains animal byproducts. You also will never find corn as one of the first ingredients in her food. I fed my dogs this way as well.
My attitude changed once I met a man who owned a pet health store in Gainesville, Florida. He has a degree in animal nutrition and he explained to me that feeding your pets something like Purina is not actually going to kill them, but it is akin to you and I eating three meals a day, every day, at McDonalds. You would slowly destroy your health if you did that.
Once PI switched my animals to a holistic diet, their health improved in too many ways to even list. Echo’s hot spots went away and her skin became healthy. Angel’s sore legs stopped bothering her as often. Chloe, the cat, can jump up on the beds again.
Anyway, the point of my little story is that we boarded Chloe at the vet while we were gone for my grandmother’s funeral. We brought some of the food we feed her so that she could continue to eat what she is used to.
Do you know what the office staff at the vet told us when we picked up Chloe? They said we needed to stop feeding the Eagle Pack food to her, because it is “poor quality”. Instead, they said we should feel her Purina One or Purina Ed, or some other Purina product. And guess what? They said the product they most highly recommended had to be purchased from them.
Smell the rat yet?
I went online to look up the ingredients for the Purina One and the variety they asked us to purchase. Chicken byproducts were either first in the ingredient list or close to the top. It should not be in there at all! Plus, the stuff was just chock full of corn and other fillers.
Gross.
Do you want to know the first ingredient in the Eagle Pack we feed Chloe? Anchovy, sardine and salmon meals. That’s a far cry from corn and chicken byproduct.
So, now I am convinced that the pet food companies have bought our vet. What a sellout.
You’re absolutely right. I used to work for a pet food company and some of the companies do “buy” vets. They generally get a kick back for food sold, or else they will buy the vet expensive equipment for selling so much stuff. I’ve never heard of Purina doing that, but it doesn’t surprise me. I worked for Nutro which is a good food, no by-products and no ground corn, and they wouldn’t do things like that, so a lot of places wouldn’t carry them. It is really irritating when all you want to do is the best for your animals and you can’t even trust the words coming from your vet.