Ever since Alayne and I started this special place over 10 years ago, we have been concerned about what we feed our disabled dogs and cats. We learned early on how to read the ingredient labels and how to distinguish low-quality food from the high-quality brands -- and the only way to do that is ignore the packaging and marketing fluff and focus on the ingredients. We even bought the AAFCO manual back in 2002 to learn what simple words like “meat” really mean in the world of pet food -- and it’s not necessarily what you think. (AAFCO is the industry group that sets the standards for pet foods.)
But as we focused on the quality of the food, we also began to think about the source of the food -- about the animals who ended up in the food we were feeding our dogs and cats. Alayne calls it “animal in a can" and “animal in a bag” -- though most of us never think of it that way. It’s a lot easier not to think about it … just open the can or bag and serve it up.
For most of the past decade -- until 2009 -- I was a vegan, and for several years before that, a vegetarian. It troubled me as ethically inconsistent to be so concerned about what I ate, but not to give a second thought to what our dogs and cats ate. For a very brief period a long time ago, we even tried a vegetarian diet for our dogs, with many unhappy results. No matter what type of vegetarian diet we put in front of them -- commercial or home-made -- the dogs made it very clear they were not happy helping me work through this “ethical inconsistency.” I’d never seen dogs walk away from food before, but this they did. Not all, but too many of them. I quickly abandoned the effort, much to the relief of both the dogs and Alayne.
Yet the issue remained. Although Alayne was never a vegetarian or vegan, she always shared my concerns about the humane treatment of food animals.
The Animal Welfare Dilemma
A couple of years ago I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan’s excellent book on America’s food system. It seemed to me that those of us in the animal welfare movement face what I call the “animal welfare dilemma” -- we focus so much on the welfare of the dogs and cats in our care, but what about the animals we feed them? What about their welfare?
Best Friends, the nation’s largest animal sanctuary, has a wonderful slogan: “A better world through kindness to animals.” I think all of us in the animal welfare movement believe in the spirit and strength of that statement. But does it apply to the food animals we feed our pets? If not, why not?
That was the central question for us. How can we have one set of standards for the welfare of dogs and cats, and turn a blind eye to the welfare of the millions of livestock that go into our pet food?
For us, this is the animal welfare dilemma.
Now, there are plenty of dedicated nonprofit organizations focused on the treatment of farm animals; groups like Farm Sanctuary and the HSUS work hard to expose the cruelty of factory farming, where thousands of animals are crowded into filthy and stressful “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, and then slaughtered in high-speed assembly line fashion at the rate of several hundred a day. These nonprofits also promote vegetarian and vegan lifestyles as the answer to factory farming, and believe that it is unjustified to kill and eat any animal, under any circumstance. They do not seem to consider that “humane” farming is even possible.
But again, where does that leave our dogs and cats? Should we really force dogs and cats to become vegetarians, because that’s what some of us want to be? Yes, there are groups and websites that promote this very thing, though even the website Vegancats.org has, “after much soul-searching,” changed its recommendations on feeding meat to cats. (Hello?)
The simple truth is that dogs and cats are, by their very nature, meat eaters. To try and make them anything else is, well, downright unnatural.
Moreover, we know processed foods aren’t good for people, and what is more highly processed than pet food? So a few years ago, we started buying cases of ground beef from Costco and began home-cooking again. But each case was stamped with “Product of USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia & New Zealand.” That led us back to worrying about the conditions those cattle were subjected to in the industrial food system -- and how they ended up in the big tubes of ground beef we were feeding. (Not to mention all the “food miles” involved!)
So, What Do We Do?
The question for Alayne and me became, how can we take responsibility for the entire “cycle of life” here? How could we assure ourselves that the meat we were feeding our disabled dogs and cats came from animals who were raised as humanely as possible?
- We realized that the best way to do that was to raise them ourselves.
- We wanted to know exactly how they were raised, what they were fed, and most important of all, how they died.
- We were fortunate that we had the land, facilities and skills to raise cattle on a small scale, and decided this was the right thing to do.
We began this long journey in 2008 back in Montana with several heifer (female) calves, and in 2009 we got two more heifers, along with two six-month old young steers. Last summer here in New Hampshire our first five calves were born.
Why Now?
The reason I’m writing about this now is because a couple of weeks ago I took our first steer, Sebastian, to slaughter. I drove him over in our horse trailer to a very small, local, family-owned facility that processes three or four steers a day, not 400. I was able to walk through the entire facility with the owner, stood on the kill floor, and examined their entire process for how they do the slaughtering. It was quiet, clean, and as stress-free as any facility like that could possibly be.
When I first drove up I wasn’t sure I was even in the right place, because it looked nothing like a slaughterhouse. It was a converted barn, tucked into a residential neighborhood. The owner’s house was across the yard. There were no cattle standing outside in feedlots, deep in manure, bellowing with stress. There were, in fact, no sounds at all.
The owner, Bobby, and I unloaded Sebastian. We watched as he walked down the outside hallway and turned to go into the stall that was waiting for him. There, he got to touch noses with the two steers in the adjoining stall. There were four steers total who would be processed the next morning, and Sebastian was among them.
Was it hard to do this? You bet it was. When I reached through his stall window to let him sniff my fingers and say goodbye, it was really tough to pull my hand away and turn to leave.
But I knew what kind of life he’d had, and how his end would come. And I knew we really had done everything we could to begin ensuring that the food we would be feeding our dogs and cats was raised as humanely as possible.
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It obviously takes a lot of beef to feed 35 dogs and our handful of cats, and it will be another year before we will have a large enough herd to provide a year-round supply. So in the meantime, about half of the dogs started this week on a home-cooked diet using our own beef, while the other half will continue with their current diet and transition over as our supply increases. Because of our move last year, we gradually transitioned the dogs back to a commercial diet until we could get everyone on our own humanely raised food. We’ve been feeding Costco’s super-premium Kirkland brand -- virtually the same quality as the Innova brand we used to feed (just compare the ingredient labels) and much less expensive.
What else will they be eating besides the beef? Well, we want to source as much of their food locally as possible, and this includes potatoes from Peaslee’s, a local farm just a few miles away in Vermont. Alayne just bought 50 lbs of their potatoes to cook up with our first batch of beef. We’re also buying carrots and other veggies that are grown locally. This summer we will begin growing our own crops to add to the meat in their diet. Board-certified veterinary nutritionists at DVM Consulting developed the recipes we’re using, and we’re using their Balance IT vitamin and mineral supplement.
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One objection we’re no doubt going to get is this: “But you’re a sanctuary! How can you be doing this?!” Yes, we are a sanctuary … for disabled animals. And those animals need to eat. Is it better to just keep feeding them “anonymous” food -- “animals in a bag” -- and not care or worry about how those animals were treated? Or is it better to take responsibility for what we’re feeding and know it came from animals we humanely raised ourselves?
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Another objection we may get is that we gave our livestock names. People will ask how we could give them each a name, only to turn them into pet food later. We sure did name them. As Alayne told me one day, "it’s important that they live a humane life with dignity and identity." They’re individuals, so why shouldn’t they have names?
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I want to be clear on one thing. We are not saying this is what everyone should be doing, nor do we think it’s somehow “wrong” to feed commercial diets. Clearly we have been doing that for a long, long time, and still are. It’s just that we have a unique opportunity to address our concerns about humanely raised pet food and put our beliefs into practice -- and we can do so cost-effectively for this many dogs and cats because we can raise the food animals ourselves. Few people, and few shelters and rescue groups, have that opportunity.
However, if you are interested in purchasing humanely raised food for your pets, one option would be to contact small farmers in your area about buying directly from them. If you don’t have enough freezer space for a whole or a side of beef (and most people don’t), you might round up some friends with pets and do a group purchase. Consider locally raised lamb, chicken and turkey, too. You can find small farmers near you on Local Harvest, or go to your local farmer’s market. Be sure to ask them about their animal welfare practices; ask if you can visit the farm to see for yourself. Third-party certifications like Animal Welfare Approved and Certified Humane can give you some assurance of humane practices, but bear in mind that plenty of small farmers can follow these practices and not be certified.
And, if you want to do home-cooking for your pets, there are lots of books on the subject, as well as resources on the Web, that will help you get started. There are too many to list here, but do a search on Amazon and you’ll see plenty to choose from.
A couple of other resources:
What’s Really in Pet Food by the Animal Protection Institute (now BornFree USA)
Meat: How alternative protein is going wild. Bark Magazine, Summer 2010 Issue.
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The photo at the very top of this post is part of our herd that was still out grazing in late November here in New Hampshire. This next photo is Suzette, our queen bee and boss cow:
Here's Alayne feeding a treat to some of them ... that's Suzette's calf on the right, Suzanna:
Another view, with calf Sophia on the right joining Suzanna:
I will write more about our herd in future posts, but for now I thought you would like to see some photos of them.
