Someone by the name of Sean Green emailed me this morning:
Terrierman....
I am getting ready to start a pet food reviews website and wanted to see if you would be interested in doing some dog food reviews. I will be able to compensate for the reviews.
I would need something in this format:
http://petfoodtalk.com/dogfoodreviews/innova-dog-food/
Please let me know if you are interested...
Right.
Someone I do not know, who does not even know my name, is writing me (of all people!) to review dog food.
My reply back was rapid:
Reviews based on what science? What criteria? You have not asked me if I have a degree in pet nutrition or human nutrition or even biology or chemistry.
I suspect that will be the end of that correspondence!
As for Mr. Sean Green, I have been contacted by him before.
For those interested in last year's little exchange, you can read about that here: "No Evidence One Dog Food is Better than Another".
So there it is.
One more "expert" tooting about something they know nothing about.
But, of course, Mr. Green assured me in his previous email that he has really "done his homework."
Of course he has.
Look at the evidence: He wrote me!.
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12 comments:
Is there a really big demand for a pet food website? It seems pretty elementary to me, buy dry food - feed it to the dog.
With all do respect we encourage everyone to help us review dog foods brands. As everyone can see we have four categories we encourage people to rate dog food brands that are familiar with.
We do this for a number of reason. We want people to get not only get our teams view on Dog Food brands but the consumers view as well.
We allow everyone to voice their opinion, we feel the more people that participate the better the resource.
If anyone wants to voice their concern they are more than happy to review any dog food brand they want on our site.
To say I don't know your name is as insult. I first found your website back when I rescued two Jack Russells of my own. (Which was years ago).
I hope you have a blessed day...
- Sean Green
So Sean,
Just to reiterate, you offer to PAY anyone (which is to say EVERYONE) who will write a dog food "review"?
Hmmmmmm.
Where does all this money come from??
And these dogs food "reviews," -- written by ANYONE and NOT based on science and uninformed by actual knowledge of nutrition -- are part of the "research" you bring to the table, eh??
And you carefully selected my name because I had already demonstrated so much respect for your "say anything" web site in the past, is that right?
Riiiiiiight.
Give us all a royal break, eh?
As a general rule, this web site hopes to attract a higher class of thinker than that.
Or a better class of humor.
Pick one.
P
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Doug, you have it right. Buy dry food and feed it to your dog.
To which I might add this caveat: Buy dry food from a company whose food has seen a feed trial and which actually owns its own factory and so it actually controls production.
You ask if there is really any demand for a site like Mr. Green has built. The answer is NO.
So where does the money come from that Mr. Green is handing out to ANYONE to say ANYTHING?
No proof, but it's clearly a "pay to say" kind of place, so now the only question is "how much is he paying?" and to "say what?"
One clue can be found in the fact that Wellness and Solid Gold are given high numbers -- they are "the top" recommendations with .... wait for it... one recommendation each.
One??!!
Nope, not much demand for this kind of nonsense site. Point made!
OK so let's look at this "top" food. What is Wellness?
Wellness dog food is part of a big-business dog food consortium (the company makes glue and other industrial products) that has such a low opinion of its customers that it has never had its dog food pass a feed trial. No feed trials? No feed trials.
But there's more. This company does not even make its own dog food -- that is contracted out to 11 different factories, and they do not tell you who they are, or where they are located. So, to underscore it, you have NO IDEA who is making this food. All we know for sure is that they DO use some imported ingredients (they admit to that), their food has never passed a simple feed trial, and... wait for it... Menu foods (the dog poisoners) used to be one of their contract factories. Nice.
As for Solid Gold, the bat-shit crazy founder of this company (she thinks Cleopatra came down the Mississippi) went to jail and was cited for criminal contempt by the FDA. See >> http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1370/is_n10_v24/ai_9246902/
Solid Gold is simply another "lick and stick" company that does not bother with feed trials and which contracts out its food, this time to a company in South Carolina.
And these are the TOP picks!
Bottom line: You do not need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows here.
I do not need to go into the kitchen to know I do not want to order anything on THIS menu!
P.
We get offers every day at PetConnection.com for free samples of pet food and treats to "review" our response is always the same and is on out site for all to see:
"We absolutely do not review pet foods or treats. We are happy with what we feed our pets, and do not use them to test diets whose claims of quality we cannot independently verify."
I mean, duh. Without a lab to test ingredients (which is of dubious value anyway, as we know after the pet-food recall, since the melamine gamed the tests) or enough similar animals in controlled feed trials (which, again, discovered the lethal problem in 2007) all you're really testing is if the pet seems to like it the taste and if you like the packaging.
I actually get arguments with over this policy from the PR folks, but you know, my pets aren't their guinea pigs. FAIL.
@ Doug - There is a need for pet food related sites like this. DogFoodAnalysis is one of the biggest dog food review websites up and running. I can't tell you for sure how many people go to the site daily but it is probably over 3000 people a day.(This is being VERY conservative) Which means there is a need.
The search term dog food is searched over a million times a month. Here are some other dog food searches:
top rated dog food - 60,500 times a month.
best dog food - 60,500 times a month.
dog food reviews - 49,500 times a month.
dry dog food - 49,500 times a month.
To say there is no need for this information Doug would be ignoring the obvious.
There are forums dedicated to Dog Food. For example dogfoodchat.com/forum which is fairly new with almost 5000 members, 50000 post and 4500 threads. I would say half the talk is about Raw Feeding. (The forum members have a lot of knowledge about raw feeding).
Patrick-
You bring up some great points. Thank you. This is why we open our site up to educated people like yourself. The more information we can gather the better choices people can make when picking a dog food brand. Not everyone will feed their dogs a raw diet therefor there will always be a need for this information.
Have a great day.
Ok, so generally I try to stay out of these food discussions - I have my own experience and opinions, and we don't see eye to eye on this one.
But I did go back and take a look at the previous discussion and I came across this quote from one of your comments:
"And tell me when that dog food additive (or any additive made in America) was proven by science to be seriously toxic and only put in dog food. That will be public information too if it occurred."
And the easiest answer is...
Menadione
Illegal as a human supplement in America, banned entirely in Europe... due to toxicity.
Just sayin'. ;O)
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I got 105,000 people coming to this blog last month, but I hardly think that's "King of the World" material. It's worth remembering there are 6.7 billion people in the world and 65 million dogs owners in the U.S. alone. More that 60,000 people a month read the fine print on the bottom flap of a Kellog's box.
Patrick
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DogHouse, on this one you have it partially right, but mostly wrong.
Let's start at the beginning...
Menadione is simply a synthetic form of vitamin K, and is not only legal, it is vital to human and caine life as is provides a clotting factor in blood and helps calcium formation in bones.
Without it, we are all boneless chicken breasts ;)
Now, is too much Vitamin K (aka Menadione) a bad thing?
Sure.
Too much *water* is a bad thing.
The difference between a toxin and a vitamin (or a food) is dosage.
Menadione has never been a large ingredient in dog food and only exists in trace amounts.
Is it very toxic? I.e. is it easy to overdose?
No, not really.
Though only a trace amount is needed (a few parts per million is more than enough), it does not harm a dog when present at 1,000 times the needed level. Ditto for humans, might I add. So NO, it is not a "brittle" dosing issue with very narrow high-low perameters.
So why is Menadione banned in Europe and the U.S.?
Well, it's not.
It's banned in UNREGULATED SUPPLEMENTS only.
The marketing of unregulated supplements, here and abroad, is a tragic joke, with complete morons mixing things up in their garage and labeling it with a $200 thermal machine. It is seriously scarey!!
Here's the short story for the U.S. .... Thanks to Orrin Hatch (Utah makes about 95% of all supplements in this country), there is NO REGULATION of the supplements industry in the U.S. at all. The FDA has to prove something is toxic. The maker does NOT have to prove something is either therapeutic or is not toxic. Wow!! Unbelievable, right? You could scrape dried dog crap off a park bench, slap a label on it, and called it a "dietary supplement" and the FDA is powerless to stop you.
That said, they are trying to put up some thing fencing....
To cut the fly-by-night idiots off at the pass, Menadione was banned in all unregulated supplements sold in the U.S. to prevent overdoses created by idiots throwing in 5,000 or 10,000 times more than was needed.
Since Menadione is not needed in normal human diets, as vegetables provide us all we need, this ban was a simple thing to do.
But, to cut to the chase, is adding Menadione to dog food poison? No, not at all. If a food is largely meat, you need some Menadione. It is, as noted, a vitamin, and in very small doses it (or its naturally occuring analogs) is a necessity.
A paralle nutrition story can be found with with selenium in horse feed. A little is absolutely necessary for horses, but the idiots who compounded that "vitamin shot" for the Polo Ponies down in Florida last year did not know what they were doing, and a score of horses died as a consequence. I told that tale on this blog in real time.
Bottom line: poisons (including vitamins like Menadione) are about dosage and dog food manufacturers generally get dosages right (though Blue Buffalo is recalling some of its dog food right now because they got the Vitamin D levels wrong). Woops!
Diet supplements? Stay the hell away from ALL of them. Pure garbage. If you want a little Vitamin C or D, or a multi, knock yourself out. Anything else is more likely poison than help.
As for dog food, buy Purina or some other old-school company that does feed trials and owns its own factories. Stay away from the boutique crap!
P.
And yet companies continue to use the cheaper and less safe Menadione (known as K3, but actually a precursor to K2) instead of using a natural form.
Do they do this in human foods? Nope. Just in pet foods.
Menadione is less effective than natural K2 supplements, and far more toxic. The only reason it's used is because its cheap.
In fact, there are no studies on repeated dose toxicity for K3 because K2 supplements are considered safe - and yet K3 is not approved for use in human supplements.
Personally, I won't feed my pets unnecessary chemicals, and that includes menadione.
That's one of the most difficult things about finding appropriate foods for our parrots - just about all of them contain Menadione. It's unfortunate when, as you say, vitamin K is such an easy thing to get from real food.
Patrick-
When I claim 3000 going to a blog a day I am referring 3000 unique (not the same visitor from day to day).
I would have to say by your Alexa Rating of near 1,000,000 you have a couple hundred at most unique visitors daily.
Although this is impressive its not near the same level....
I am having a hard time finding a poor dog food reviews website that has higher than a 700k alexa ratings....
Sean, you seem to talk in generalities that are a bit hard to footnote.
;-)
I consider this blog very small potatoes, but it is ranked by Alexa (your tool, not mine) at 964,478 in the world by traffic rank, and 441,634 in the U.S.
There are 145 links to this site listed.
Small potatoes, as I said.
Your own dog food site is ranked 19,116,989 in the world, however, and has NO links to the site.
No need to debate in any case.
You clearly have a business you are trying to create based on creating dozens of web sites that are laced with nonsense where people might stumble across them, thereby generating a pitch you can make to advertisers.
I understand the "pay to say" game and the fraud implicit in it.
You are part of that.
I am not, and I have no interest in it.
Good luck in the malarkey and advertising business! My interest is not in revenue from ads -- it's in dogs.
P.
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