I've been working on my latest Dog World column, this month concerning the controversial vet checks at Crufts. I haven't rushed to write anything here because, to be honest, I've had mixed feelings. And well, I finally posted them yesterday on an Internet canine genetics list I'm on, as follows:

"I think most of us--at least those who don't own the high-profile breeds--initially nodded and thought, "Good move--let's make them stop breeding those snuffling bug-eyed droopy-faced  caricatures--for the  good of the dogs!"  Yet all it takes is a look at one's own breed to wonder  what's next. Looking at the next group of watched-breeds, I see Borzoi with "too much rear angulation" and I wonder what dreaded discomfort that will cause; I  see Sloughis with "underweight" and wonder who determines how thin or fat a running sighthound must be. Then I think ahead of giant breeds, with decreased longevity, and realize that a size and weight limit may be next; toy breeds,  with their propensity to patellar luxation, and off they go; deep-chested  breeds; we'd better get rid of them because they're predisposed to bloat---short-legged dogs, either because of back problems or because they simply can't enjoy running as fast as other dogs---and on and on until we're  back to wolves or pariah dogs. Right now the exams were rightfully only on the  basis of current (or past--and I'm not sure I agree with that) evidence of  disease/discomfort, but how long before it advances to predispositions to  disease/discomfort? Then why stop there--let's move beyond physical features to  breed-related hereditary problems such as heart problems because Dobes or Cavs  or whatevers are predisposed to DCM or MVD and there's no DNA test for  them...

"I  agree, no dog should be purposefully bred to live a painful or struggling life,  but I am not sure that actions such as the Crufts one are not throwing out the  puppy with the bathwater in an effort that seemed to be a good PR move, but  ultimately I believe will prove to be just the opposite."

It didn't get much attention, although a couple of members did respond. One reads this blog, so I'll let him have a go at responding via the comments (be sure to read what Rod says). Another focused on the fact that Borzois with too much bend of stifle have an overly steep pelvis and are not efficient gallopers. That may be true, but at that point aren't we getting back into judging function, not health?

Unrelated to my post, one of the members opined that in the scheme of things, if a dog needed to have its eyes tacked because of entropion, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, especially compared to serious disorders such as bloat. And he has a point; I'm surely not one who would purposefully advocate breeding dogs that needed eye tacking, but in the grand scheme of animal cruelty--with all the horrors we see even inflicted upon dogs, not to mention other animals--really? A couple of stitches under anesthesia? Why, nect thing you're going to be saying is dogs should never be spayed or neutered...oh wait. Animal rights activits tell us that is painless and justified and in fact, should be required. So if females need surgery to remove their reproductive organs, and males do too, does that mean neither sex should ever pass a vet check? Or if they fail, they shouldn't be spayed or neutered? I'm getting confused...it's late...

But anyway, given my Westminster Whine post, I figured some of you would be surprised.

Visit to Hill's, part 2: I could tell you all about  nutrigenomics, which is really pretty cool, or all about ingredients and  safety...I could even tell you about the laboratories, the in-house veterinary  facilities, or the credentials of the scientists, veterinarians and animal techs  who work there, blah, blah, blah---but when it comes down to it, it's all about  the animals. And we all want to know what goes on behind closed doors at an  animal research facility. I mean, we've heard stories...dingy cages, forlorn lab  animals, unfeeling caretakers---after all, pet food companies are out to make money, and that is BAD.


And Hill's is out to make money, but---they also look to  be spending it hand over fist when it comes to dog and cat facilities. Heck,  they might have done better just to throw dollar bills in the runs and use it  for bedding, cost-wise. Grind some up for kitty litter. Oh wait, they had some other kind of special kitty litter. 

But they foolishly instead had a new building designed about two years ago. You enter the animal areas through a long corridor---that sounds ominous already, kind of like that long corridor Dorothy et al had to go down to meet the Wizard once they got in the building. Or Wicked Witch. Something with a W. Whatever. No, that's not it...Anyway, down the corridor we went. On one side the wall was lined with pictures of employees---I think it was everyone from the president to the janitor---each with their pets. I think if you didn't have a pet you couldn't get your picture on the wall. Or maybe they made you borrow one.  Or buy one.  Or maybe you couldn't get a job. It seemed to be a prerequisite for working there. In fact, one of the head guys at the plant said (the next day) the most common reason their employees give when applying for a job starts with, "Well,  I have a dog (or cat) and I really love him, and I thought it would be really neat to work here..."  
 
Well, rosey posed pictures are one thing, but when would we get to  the real thing, the lab dogs, obviously sequestered away---hold on, what's this? The entire  right side of the corridor is glass, and on the other side is...Beagletopia!  Beagles running, Beagles fetching, Beagles friggin' cavorting. As far as you could see, Beagles and people playing in grass-covered yards, complete with little obstacle areas and gravel paths. It looked like about five or ten per yard. It  turns out this was their daily "Bark-Park" playtime, and each group had one or  two people in there playing with them---the Kansas version of Beagles Gone Wild.  I was waiting for one of them (the dogs, not the girls) to pull its shirt down,  except, you know, they were already naked (the dogs, not the girls).

Onward we trekked down this hallway---which I might add,  had to be the world's longest glass hallway---until we passed the grassy area and came to a smaller yard of astroturf bounded by concrete. And Beagles bobbing  up and down at the window, heads appearing and disappearing as they bounced and  barked. Their buddies ignored them (there's a token suck-up in every bunch), some snoozing in the sun, others playing  with toys, some wrestling amongst themselves and others ambling back inside through a doggy door. 

Now, it's true that the folks at Hill's could have staged  this. The techs did look suspiciously like models. Or Stepford Wives. Stepford Techs? And the bouncing Beagles could have been cleverly designed  automatons---only in that case, Hill's really needs to go into the business of  selling those instead of dog food, because there is a fortune to be had there.  
 
But automaton or real, why Beagles? Beagles eat anything;  how can they do any taste discrimination testing? I first tried a bag of Hill's  on my dogs about 35 years ago; I recall the bag label stating something like, "Put  the food down, and when he won't eat it, put it down the next day, and when he  won't eat it, he'll probably choke it down by the third day" or something like that.  I think I went about one day before it became seagull food, and even they were spitting the stuff out. Well,  duh, if they taste-tested it with Beagles! It could have been gravel and the taste-bud-challenged dogs would have been scarfing it up. 
 
Turns out Hill's has a had big change of heart when it  comes to taste. The top guy there admitted that years ago, their philosophy was  that taste was of minor importance compared to nutrition. But as anyone knows,  you can have the best nutrition on earth, but it does the dog no good if it  remains in the bowl or goes down the disposal. So they say they now have placed a big emphasis on palatability, and in fact much of their research deals with taste preferences. Yeah, still with Beagles. I plan to give it a try myeself---or, well, let the Salukis try it---for the ultimate test. I'll report back.

They do admit they need to bring in some more breeds. But that will take some time since they have about 485 Beagles, and the place only holds 500 dogs. And we all know that feeling of  just one too many dogs on the bed...

By this time I was ready for them to show me the sleeping  suites with king-sized beds that the techs spent the nights on with 20 Beagles to each bed, the hapless tech bracing herself from being pushed off the sliver on the bedside allotted her by the "hand on the floor" technique.  You know what I'm talking about.  But no, turns out each Beagle gets its own Beagle-sized bed within a Beaglish-sized cubbyhole. 

Here's the set-up: The dogs live in packs of 20, made up of dogs of all ages. Each pack has its own room, which is about the size of a double-car garage. Lining each side are five or so stalls, each about the size of half a single bed. One each side of that and in the rear are resting platforms. Beyond the rear platform are two cubbyholes recessed into the wall so each dog has its own little cave to sleep in if he wants privacy.  During the night, and in two hour
shifts during the day, two dogs are closed in the stalls for rest time. They used to let all 20 dogs run loose all day, but they said the dogs exhausted themselves because everyone kept everyone else all wound up like kids at a
carnival; they said that now they separate them into two groups of 10, so while one group plays for two hours, the other group rests. The group at play has doggy door access to a sun porch outside, and from there to the yard that has astroturf in it. 

Feeding time: Since this is what they're there for, they don't just get a bowl of food shoved at them. Each dog is microchipped, and when it's food time, he runs into a little stall that reads his microchip, which opens a door to his food bowl, and records every bite he takes out of one or often two, bowls. Each dog is allowed to eat a precise amount of food to maintain its weight; when he has eaten that much, a tone sounds and then a puff of air blows on his face, so he backs out, the door shuts, and feeding time is over. When everyone is done, they go out and play. The bowls are switched and sanitized; each bowl has a barcode on it to ensure it is filled with the correct amount and type of food. It takes about 4 1/2 hours to feed all the dogs there. They only eat once a day. Because, did I mention it takes about 4 1/2 hours to feed all the dogs there?

There were cats, too. They also lived in pods (prides?) of 20. Their room had lots of beds and toys and perches, including two large overhead platforms, as well as a plexiglass dual-level kitty passageway that led them past another cat room to an enclosed sunporch.  Outside the sunporches are birdfeeders for their entertainment. 
 
Their feeding trials work slightly differently. Instead of distinct feeding times, the cats can free-feed throughout the day from one of several stations. Each cat has a microchip between its shoulder blades; when it enters the feed station the chip is scanned and a door opens allowing the cat access to the food. When the weight sensors under the bowls indicate that cat has eaten its daily allotment, the door closes when the cat backs off and won't open again for that cat. Meanwhile all that cat's eating data has been recorded  for the day.  

And again, there were people in there playing with cats,  playing with kittens, grooming cats, clicker training cats---and again, you know, I guess this COULD have been an elaborate hoax, but if it was, they should all go to Hollywood. 

So---as difficult as it was for me to endure the horrors,  here is my undercover expose' on the cruelties of pet food companies and their  animal testing. These poor dogs were forced to eat dog food! And to play, and  exercise, and have buddies, and people, and climate-controlled sleeping quarters. I've been to other animal labs; while the Hill's facility is top of the line, it's far from the only one that cares about its animals and does everything it can to enrich their lives while still maintaining control of their health and nutrition.  Here's a surprise: Yes, dog food companies are in it to make money. But most people who work to produce dog foods take pride in their product, have animals of their own who eat the food they develop, and work with animals because they actually really like animals.

If you are wondering, yes, I do feed my dogs commercial food. I also cook for them (it hasn't killed them yet) to flavor it up. I don't feed Hill's, but was impressed enough that I will give it a try---at least the diet food for my fat Russell Terrier. I have no quams about pet food companies making money---profit does drive the world. And I caution those who think raw food advocates DON'T make money to do the math---sell 100,000 books, self-published, at a profit of $10 a book---you make money.  That, too, doesn't make it a bad thing...

It wasn't exactly a golden ticket to the chocolate
factory---but to a dog writer who writes about dog nutrition, a trip to tour Hill's research lab and manufacturing plant was the next best thing. 
So I donned my ruby slippers and set off in a whirlwind (get it? huh? get it? Yeah, I hate when people say that) to Kansas!


I'm going to skip the part about research and development and cats and dogs and kittens and puppies ---we'll come back to them in a later post---and get to the part that really fascinated me: making the stuff.  Because I've seen research and cats and dogs and kittens and puppies, but I've never seen dog food made. Actually, if you know my cooking skills, you are probably shouting, "And you've never seen human food made, either!" which I think is really pretty mean of you, and wrong, too. I have many times watched the sandwich artists at Subway make human food. Artists. But I digress.


By the time of the tour, we'd already discussed the
ingredient list, and how the ingredient vendors are chosen on the basis of various tests and quality controls and ingredient requirements; how dog food manufacturers must meet all sorts of regulations and pass all sorts of inspections; and how chicken is the same as chicken meal before said chicken has all the water sucked out of him but chicken, not chicken meal, looks better in the ingredient list.  So Hill's brings their chickens in pre-dehydration; I was pretty sure the chickens had already passed on to a better place before embarking on their trip, but just in case, I wondered if they would be subjecting them to little sweat boxes. 
 

Just to be clear, I am not one who enjoys knowing what goes into my own food. If it looks anatomical, I don't eat it. I prefer the illusion that all my food grows on trees or in microwaves. So in anticipation of trucks dumping loads of chicken heads or sheep guts into immense boiling vats, I ate a light breakfast of fruit. Can't go wrong with fruit. Well, except for the part where I was starving, but...

At the plant---which looked suspiciously like Emerald
City in the distance---I donned rubber steel-toed shoe covers, hair net, safety goggles, hard hat, and lab coat. More visions of sloshing through animal entrails while dodging errant body parts danced through my head. But I was tough, I could do this. We made our way to the unloading area. I prepared for flies and slop and mayhem; what I found was...


One truck, inside an enclosed bay, with one employee and one truck driver, both hair netted as they watch the truck dispense rice into a bay, from which the rice was sucked up into a storage area. This wasn't the truck's first stop; it's load had to pass an inspection
station located well away from the building. It had to drive inside the unloading bay and have the outer building doors closed before it could start unloading. Computers regulated where the materials went; all ingredients, I learned, were bar coded and their containers were also bar coded so that only certain ingredients could be placed in or removed from the appropriate bins. Without the correct match, the bins refuse to open, so there's no chance of an ingredient mix-up. The ingredients aren't stored in silos, as I'd expected, but instead stored inside to protect them from moisture and other environmental factors.


OK, so the unloading area was a letdown. No flies, no
gnats, not a friggin' bollweevil. No blood, no guts, no smell. But there was still the processing part.  This is
where I would surely see the vats of animal parts, heads bobbing, stirred into a porridge by workers who kept losing shoes, dentures and excess body parts in
them.


But first, we had to pass through an air lock. And walk
through a shoe sterilizer. And wash our hands. Wait---an air lock? Turns out the building is really three buildings; they separate the building where raw materials exist from the building where the materials are mixed and sterilized and processed from the building where they are bagged and shipped. And from building to building there's an airlock, with the air always flowing from the more sterile building to the less sterile building (you can feel it when you go through the door). Nothing--- food, tools, trolleys, nothing---goes from less sterile to more sterile unless it's been sterilized. They even maintain separate maintenance rooms and tools for each building; whoever thought of a hammer as a potential pathogen vector, the dreaded Typhoid Toolbelt of the hardware world? Who knew?

But back to the vats of stewing parts. 
 
Um...there weren't any. The ingredients were mixed in a separate place, with computers and machines doing the work, not workers or oompa-loompas. No vats. No measuring cups. No singing. No people! After being
heated to, um, I forgot the actual temperature but let's just call it "hellfire hot" and pushed into a tiny passageway at, um, I forgot the actual psi but let's just call it "squashed" the pathogens are all, um, let's call it "really dead." Then the food is extruded, dried and enrobed (my favorite new term, fancy for "covered in flavorants" as in "She was enrobed in chocolate.") All untouched by human hands. Or oompa-loompa hands, watch hands, or (probably) even the hands of God. I had a feeling I wasn't in Kansas any more...except, you know, for the part where I was...

 Finally, a worker emerged! I'd started to suspect this
was all a vast front and no actual people or dog food were actually involved. He let some of the food escape and took a batch for testing--fresh and hot from the extruder! The nuggets were tested for size, moisture content, this, that--I forgot, so let's just call it "a bunch of stuff," and it was taken to a lab where all sorts of computer screens were reading out all sorts of stuff---this did not look like any kitchen I'd ever seen. Testing occurs at various levels of production every half hour. In other words, it pretty much never stops anywhere on the line.


So, now the food is dried---not too much, not too little.
If it's too much, the texture is bad. If it's too little, it could encourage mold growth in the bag. So it's tested again. It's whisked to the next building, where it's automatically dispensed into bags. The bags then go through a metal detector to make sure no foreign metal parts have somehow made it through and into a bag---if that were to happen, other instruments could be used to isolate the single kibble that may contain it so the source could be traced. And regardless, random bags are opened and the food tested yet again. 
 

Okay, so all my preconceived notions about dog food
packing were, um, let's just call them "wrong." The dog food plant makes my kitchen look unsanitary by comparison, and if you know me, you know I have a  clean thing going on when it comes to food.


But we weren't finished. The bags then went to the
warehouse, where they spend an average of five days. Finally, the oompa-loompas! There were people with forklifts and more people and more forklifts and food going here and up and right and left and the building was about the size of Cobo Hall, and certainly larger than where they had the AKC Invitational this year (the whole place is 585,000 square feet). But still, no singing. I really think there should be singing.


Finally, my tour was over and I was treated to lunch that had been brought in from a local eatery. I somewhat reluctantly ate it, my mind going longingly to the bags of dog food I'd just seen---because I had no idea where the food on my plate had come from, but I KNEW the food in those bags was clean!