Kidney Health & Pet Diet | Natural Health Blog

Poisoned Pet Food, Aminopterin

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It’s now official. The New York State Food Laboratory has identified the presence of aminopterin in all of the samples of cat and dog food that appear to be causing kidney failure and death in what will likely end as several thousand cats and dogs.

What is aminopterin?

At one time aminopterin was used as a chemotherapy drug to induce remission among children with leukemia, but it fell out of favor because of its unpredictable toxicity — although, now in a more pure form, it is back in clinical trials for leukemia patients.

So how did a chemotherapy drug end up in pet food. As it turns out, it is also used as a rat poison in many countries outside of the United States, and it seems that wheat gluten imported from China was likely contaminated with aminopterin. This contaminated gluten was used by a Canadian company, Menu Foods, that private labels pet food for a number of major brands. As of now, over 60 million cans and soft packs of pet food are being recalled, and the likely number of pet deaths, although officially only 17 at the moment, is unofficially well over a thousand and climbing.

  • Recalled dog food
  • Recalled cat food

That said; I have an entirely different question to ask.

Why do all of these cat and dog foods contain wheat in the first place? Cats and dogs are carnivores. They don’t eat cooked wheat — or grains of any kind for that matter. Their digestive systems are not designed to handle it. Have you ever seen pictures of wolves and lions sitting down to a bowl of Creme of Wheat? Cats are pure carnivores in physiology. Dogs can tolerate a wider variety of foods, but do best when eating a minimum 40% raw meat or fish. In the wild, wolves will eat some fruits and vegetables as a minor part of their diet, but do not eat grains — cooked or raw. (Grass is eaten on occasion to cleanse the digestive tract.)

The bottom line is that cooked grains are really no healthier for cats and dogs than they are for humans. If used at all, they should be a minimal part of the diet.

And finally, please remember that pets are not humans…as much as we like to think of them as such. They simply cannot tolerate many of the foods we eat.