I would like to thank Barb for her link to the article "What's really in
pet food." I found it to be very enlightening, and would like to ad a
little something that I didn't see covered in there.  This is an excerpt
from a book called The Nature of Animal Healing by Dr. Martin Goldstein,
a vet in New York:
 
  "Poultry by-products are not simply the parts of the chicken you'd rather
  leave on the platter as it goes around the family dinner table.
  According to the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO),
  an independent group that issues guidelines approved by the Food and Drug
  Administration, poultry by-products 'must consist of non-rendered clean
  parts of carcasses of slaughtered poultry such as heads, feet, viscera,
  free from fecal content and foreign matter EXCEPT (my emphasis added) in
  such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice.'"
 
Dr. Goldstein wonders "how even a slaughterhouse determined to observe
'good factory practices' could remove all or even any of the fecal matter
from each of the thousands of chickens being slaughtered and processed at
its plant each day."  Some things to think about, how much chicken poop
your fuzzies are eating, ew.
 
debbi
 
p.s. As I've written to a couple people so far who had trouble with my last
post that mentioned PETA, yes, I know they tend to be a radical bunch and
I don't agree with a lot of their practices, but the fact is, their
investigative work HAS turned up horrific abuses at some labs and
slaughterhouses, resulting in these places being closed down.  They don't
just make stuff up, even though they spray paint on fur-wearing models.  I
bite my nails, that's my bad habit--if I told you my neighbors don't feed
their cat, his ribs show, and he comes to our house to chow down, would you
believe me, just because I happen to have some bad habits?
[Posted in FML issue 2993]