"No Animal Products in Feed"

[Brian]

I have to say that I agree with Miss Prissy and Sea Chick. Sea Chick's comment about formulating feed being a guessing game is right on. It reminds me of what humans do...adding back nutrients to grains we have stripped down in order to make a better looking loaf of bread, and in the meantime, losing fiber as a result.

 

[Nichole77]

I buy feed w/o animal products because I am vegetarian. The store just got in organic veg feed so I bought that instead of the usual purena layer pellets. The meat products in other feed isn't good meat. I don't even like feeding that sort of meat to my dogs and cat. My girls free range so they eat grass and bugs. I also give them scraps but those are vegetarian. I want them to be healthy and live as closely as possible to the natural chicken lifestyle. (Ok except for the Doritos and hugs and kisses). I think that housed hens with no free ranging need to be fed animal protein because that is their natural diet. But personally I would give them good quality organic scraps with a veg feed. But thats just me.

 

[twigg]

With chicken feed, the concerns are about the transmission of Salmonella and Lysteria.

With Beef, BSE

Sheep, Scrapie ... etc.

Fishmeal appears to work well in all animal feeds.

Yeah, and I don't much like the idea of chicken eating chicken ....

 

[SeaChick]

Brian, have you read Michael Pollan's elegant new book "In Defense Of Food"? If not, I highly recommend picking it up at your library or book store. While not quite as delightful and easy a read as his "Omnivore's Dilemma" (which is just fantastic!) it's really well-written, thoroughly researched, engrossing and fair. For eveyone who thinks about what they're eating, these should be must-reads!

Stacey

 

[greyfields]

My chickens certainly get a portion of my compost bucket, the portion that the piggies don't get first. But, I'm very very very careful not to put pork or chicken in there. I don't have an issue with the chickens pecking the last bits of meat off a t-bone steak or the pigs getting some lamb riblets to gnaw on. But, I raise essentially all our own meat, and I know it's grass fed and never given antibiotics.

There are also some issues with cat/dog meat making it into the chain, where most were put down by vets and there are measurable ammounts of the drug was found in the 'meal' made from them.

The pig worker thing really freaked me out. They blast every bit of matter off a cracass using air and water, through a drain in the floor. Then, all the water is pressed out and you are left with "porcine meal". I mean, I don't want to see things go to waste, but to take that much effort to get spinal column tissue seems not quite right.

 

[chcknrs]

I have a concern with the animal products in feed due to the products they use to render the meat. Most large pet feed companies buy second rate meat, not fit for human consumption. That meat is then treated so no human would want to eat it. Ethylene glycol is one of those products (antifreeze). I noticed my dogs were having skin problems, so talked with my groomer. She gave me a copy of the article about it and I switched to an all natural food. Skin problems not only went away, so did Hatcher's frequent, and very nasty gas problem. I grew up with a guy who picked up dead cows and other animals for a living. He took those carcasses, often rotten, to a plant that processed the meat for dog food!