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]