No, the man in China put to death was not the person connected to the food scare. He was taken backhanders from the pharmaceutical industry to allow manufacture of questionable prescription drugs. Adding melamine to imitate a higher protein content in pet feed is not a pharma activity and has been ongoing in the food industry for a very long time in SOME corners in China. I read an article on exactly that topic months before the pet food issue even arose and when that stpry broke it all sounded very familiar. The price and quality of the food brands had nothing to do with this scandal either. Price however has been affected post the scandal as China was a less expensive source of some ingredients which now have to be sourced elsewhere. Domestic prices for these ingredients is going to be much higher.
Many quality brands remained totally unaffected by the food problems (Royal Canin being one -- their affected food was a separate brand and manufacturer they own that produces special diets) and many low quality brands WERE affected. It had nothing to do with low or high quality of the food. It had to do with the source of ingredients that nearly all manufacturers use and also where the food was manufactured. Some plants received tainted shipments and others did not. Almost no European brands were affected even thugh they use the same ingredients because they did not buy ingredients from China (Royal Canin sources domestically in the EU) or not from the same source. The European brands affected as fas as I understand were all foods imported into Europe from the affected Canadian and US sources.
The fact that some low quality dog brands like Pedigree did not shift significantly in price is down to one thing: it uses so few quality (higher cost) igredients in the first place. In other words it is primarily filler and very litle quality meat protein. I would never feed a food like Pedigree -- I have seen what happens to my dogs when being fed it at kennels, which is they get gas, their stools get larger and sloppy and increase in smell, and I get gastric problems in Lily, my dog who is prone to problems, that last for days afterward. She has no such problems on quality brands like James Wellbeloved or Royal Canin, raw or homecooked diets. So I board them with their own food and won't allow them to be fed Pedigree.
Corn is NOT of itself a poor quality ingredient or a bad ingredient, nor is wheat or other grains/carbohydrates. While they DO cause allerges in a very small number of dogs (just as they do in a very small number of humans), you must have some sort of binding agent to make kibble! (and oddly many of those who won't use wheat/corn in a kibble feed commercial treats all the time that use, yes, wheat/corn). You cannot simply form kibble from meat and bake it. It would be like making a cake or cookies without any flour -- some sort of starch has to hold it together. Corn and rice and wheat and sometimes potato are used as binders for kibble. They all add very useful fiber content as well and help slow absorption of nutrients and offer easy to digest carbohydrates, also useful to cats and dogs. One thing that does make me laugh sometimes is people getting worked up over whether corn is something dogs would 'naturally' eat, yet they are giving them fish oil and herbal supplements, kelp extracts and who knows what else. I posted the ingredients list a while back from a kibble that offers itself as being close to a natural diet for wolves -- yet there are ingredients on it no wolf has ever seen but a lot of human diners at expensive restaurants would have.
I posted before on a similar thread that the major causes of allergy in dogs are according to UCD Vet SChool: beef, chicken, milk, eggs. After that comes things like corn and wheat. I have never understood the obsession with removing corn out of a dog's diet from people adding yoghurt, egg, and chicken regularly to dog diets, and offering rawhides and bully sticks (beef based treats), or any of the many canned foods or dog biscuits or supermarket kibbles with, say, *sugar* (start reading the ingredients lists and see how many have sugar!!). Much commercial dog food also has beef in some form or another. Crap foods like pedigree use 'meat products', 'bone meal', meat derivatives', 'fat' and other vague products wth no specific protein source which means it almost certainly is rendered protein from mixed sources including, yes, beef and chicken. So dietary problems are always far more likely with poor quality foods and are far more likely to be caused by the MEAT PROTEIN SOURCE than grains.
It's important to add that chicken, beef, eggs and dairy are HEALTHY good quality ingredients for food for the vast majority of dogs.
I feed all of these, all the time. It is just that IF you have a dog showing signs of allergy it makes sense to try 12 week elimination diets for these common ingredients to see if the dog improves. But it is more imortant to eliminate the protein sources listed than the grain sources!! And as processed meat in kibble/canned offers NO fibre content (in the way raw meat diets would) dogs NEED fibre from somewhere and grains can be a good source of this, often the ONLY source for many domestic animals.
Bottom line: do research, learn to understand nutrition, don't believe what 'someone' says on a board or list with absoutely no scientific reference point. Remember most dogs, as most people, do best on a varied and complete diet and allergies and food intolerances are not very common. Also: you get what you pay for. I like medium range foods whose ingredients lists I have examined carefully. Cheap foods are going to use fillers and cheap protein. Expensive foods may just be lots of hype and hyped stylish ingredients. Use your noggin to research these topics and find what suits you and your dogs best.
If you want to read one of the best and most practical discussions on how to feed a dog and all the silly myths out there on ingredients, read:
http://woodhavenlabs.com/dogfoods.html
Also a good general explanation on dog food ingredients, how to understand labels, and why cheap supermarket foods are low quality choices:
http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/
And yes, nearly all dog food brands, just as nearly all human food brands, are generally owned and operated by a tiny handful of conglomerates. The same issues that affect dog food can easily affect human food. Pedigree is owned by Mars/Masterfoods, the single largest pet food brand conglomerate. Pedigree has had recalls of foods before -- for example in 2004 in the Philippines.
PS None of our food prices changed at all here in Ireland.
