brain matter in diet? - Page 1

Any risks or nutrition value in brain matter in a dog's diet. I don't find much online for or against.

 

My dogs aren't so fond of meat, they eat the grossest things first.

Unless the animals is small, fish, rodents and such, most animals do not eat the brains they are left in the skulls to rot.
I've collected cow skulls with brains still in them, and plenty of vultures about.
Plus Prions are found in brains, AKA "Mad cow disease"

Many nations prohibit the use of brain matter from mammals in the food chain .. even for animal feeds due to prion related disorders such as scabies and mad cow. Prions are not easily destroyed in processing and are still being fed to US livestock including dogs and cats eating commercial dog foods. Beef meal and meat meal can and often does include brain matter in the USA .. there is no control and no way to know as it is not labeled. Prion related diseases are known to exist in many mammals. Because a pig can also be fed commercial feed containing meat meal the entire food chain for mammalian food animals is likely contaminated in the USA as well our friends who don't need labels to sell their meat in the USA ( Mexico and Canada ).

Not scabies Bubba its Sheep Scrapie : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie
This caused Mad Cow when British cattle were fed sheep scraps including brains. And was later transferred into humans.

...best served with fava beans and a nice Chianti. Well, if it works with liver why not brains~~courtesy of Hannibal L.

Yes .. my bad .. scrapie in sheep. Meat meal can include anything in the USA including road kill and there are prion diseases in the wildlife population as well as food animals. Meat meal and beef meal used to feed animals can come from any country in the world and it all ends up in our human and pet food chain directly with pets and indirectly with food animals. Feeding food animals parts from 4D food animals and road kill is a very bad idea and some meat meal is made from shelter pet bodies so your dog may be eating dog bits brains and all with a side order of the drugs that were used to kill the shelter animals. Never buy dog or pet food with meat meal as an ingredient. The Greyhound racing kennels use unprocessed 4D meat raw to feed their animals which may actually be better as they feed primarily muscle meat from 4D cows and don't get the dead possums, shelter kill, and dead seagulls that goes into meat meal sometimes .. any type of meat meal is a mystery mix.

The difference between meat meal and meat byproducts again??

 

I think all would have to agree that premium  pet food is of extremely high quality and information in all pet foods is widely available to those that bother to seek it.

 

There is little excuse to be feeding a poor diet these days other than laziness, ignorance or financial constraints.

The pet food industry has few rules and almost no regulators or inspectors enforcing the few rules written into law. The pet food industry is "self regulating" and is overseen by itself ... what could go wrong??  The only time any regulations get enforced is when people start dying or getting sick from disease carrying or contaminated pet food.  The states do almost all of the inspection or enforcement of pet food plants and laws and as we have seen it is easy for companies to buy political favors as in the case of Duke Energy and coal ash contaminated ground water in NC.  Pet food is neither guaranteed or safe  ... the US rules are more like China than Europe.

http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/euthanized-pets-dog-food/

Meat meal is what bubba described above. Meat byproducts and animal digest are everything from euthanized shelter animals, to waste products from processing plants such as hide, hoofs, feathers, beaks, chicken feet, etc. And the euthanized shelter corpses contain the chemicals used to kill them which consequently becomes ingredients in the pet food.
The reason poor quality pet food is fed by many people has nothing to do with 'lazyness' but is because of lack of knowledge and uninformed...can't tell you how many people I have tried to educate per ingredients in dog food.

Even if the pet food companies obeyed the few poorly enforced laws it is pretty much anything goes as far as what suppliers sell to the pet food companies as processed 4D meat. However the lack of enforcement or testing of pet foods means that even supposedly better quality ingredients are often not what they claim to be. The only thing on the pet food bag that can be tested for and enforced is protein, fat, carbohydrate, and fiber. A nutritionist made a mixture of shoe leather, motor oil, and sawdust that passed the AAFCO test for a dog food based on fat, protein, carbohydrate, and fiber. There is very little testing and most of it is voluntary which means the companies send in the test results they want the government to see.