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How Did Our Veterinarians Become Dog Food Salespeople?

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What you’re going to read here is my opinion and mine alone. I came to these conclusions in my research for THE DOG BIBLE and also in visits and presentations I made to veterinary students at Tufts, U.C. Davis and Virginia Tech. The opinions here are not those of HALO Purely for Pets and I deeply appreciate their willingness to allow someone as outspoken as me to share this forum for pet lovers who want to be informed and inspired in choices they make for the welfare of their four — legged family members.

Veterinarians go to vet school because they love animals and want to learn how to prevent, diagnose and treat disease, as well as how handle trauma and cure illness. However, somewhere along the way, some vets get co-opted into becoming purveyors of pet food, which they sell out of their medical clinics. How did vets get caught up in selling pet food? How did these doctors become promoters of what to feed pets?

Nutrition is not a topic that is given much time in veterinary school, any more than in human medical training. There simply is not enough time to incorporate it into the vast and complex amounts of knowledge and training that doctors (both animal and human) need to learn to prevent or treat illness. Those studying to become human doctors or future veterinarians may get no more than a handful of hours over a period of years.

In veterinary school, students draw their information and their philosophies about pet food based on textbooks, which often contain facts and studies underwritten by large pet food companies. The positive outcomes of studies of their own foods and formulas (which may or may not be reviewed by other scientists) can give veterinarians encouragement to recommend these foods to clients. In addition, at every veterinary college I visited I saw truckloads of dog and cat food that had been delivered as gifts by numerous pet food companies for the use of students and professors. Free food might influence a student’s attitude towards that product, especially if they were struggling to pay for many costly years of veterinary education.

Out in the world of practicing veterinarians, many of the commercial pet food companies also give veterinary clinics a monopoly on selling certain formulations of those foods, which is a financial boost as it covers some of the operating overhead of a vet office. All of this makes for not much independent thinking about pet food on the part of vets: it brings to mind the phrase “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I am not alone in believing this is an explanation why veterinarians may not question the ingredients or even the reliability of the science behind the formulations.

It should be obvious that the best food comes from the best quality ingredients — yet a great number of pet foods sold from vet offices contain an overwhelming number of the ingredients identified by The Whole Dog Journal and www.DogFoodAdvisor.com to be red flags of poor quality formulas. In my own experience, my veterinarians have not actually read the ingredient list on the foods they sell — instead they rely on the company’s claims that the foods are “complete and balanced,” which they may literally be, without being genuinely nutritious.

There is a worrisome similarity in the “missing piece” of nutritional education in the medical training for both human and animal doctors since we know that “you are what you eat” and good health begins with a good diet — while poor dietary habits can lead to illness. A documentary movie like Super Size Me proves this all too clearly for human eating habits. However, a significant difference between animal and human patients is that people would not think of asking their own doctors what they or their children should eat at every meal for every day for the rest of their lives! Yet pet parents ask their vets that question all the time and put an unfair burden on a veterinarian who may believe s/he should have that answer. Any veterinarian (or doctor for people) who is personally interested in the relationship between wellness and food needs to pursue it on his/her own and “connect the dots” using common sense that applies to their own individual needs. We each have to take responsibility to choose food for ourselves and our families that is made in the best possible way — which in the human or animal food aisles means reading labels and making wise and healthy choices.

I say let’s allow veterinarians to express their love and wisdom about animal health and illness by doing what they are trained to do, which is to be medical caregivers. And let’s inform ourselves about nutrition so that we can make the best decisions for our pet food ourselves — as we do for the rest of our family.

–Tracie Hotchner


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