Disclosure: worked at Mars a few years ago.
Just that these "your pet is a wild animal!" emotional insecurity brands slap an AAFCO tag on and call it a day or haven't been around for long enough to have any meaningful data.
Like...animals in the wild don't live very long, yo! Maybe pretending that your Boston Terrier is the king of the jungle isn't so good for him.
Just because the expensive brands get reported more doesn't mean the cheap brands are better.
Feeding your child chicken and rice instead of caviar and brie doesn’t mean you wouldn’t take your child to the hospital for treatments.
it's not always the recognition; in some cases it's an indicator of economic capability.
In other words : some people choose to feed their pets with cheap food because it is not economically feasible for them not to.
>Feeding your child chicken and rice instead of caviar and brie doesn’t mean you wouldn’t take your child to the hospital for treatments.
No, but the example can be made significant if you consider an extreme example.
If a family is incapable of providing a constant supply of food to their children and themselves due to economic hardship they're also less likely to pursue healthcare options due to the intrinsic costs of doing so. Travel, copays, time discussing social welfare options, etc. It all costs something.
In other words : the poor are in worse health than those that make more money.
There are still the big pet food issues like melamine contamination, but those seem to affect both large and small brands.
Now the vet has turned your pet into a recurring revenue source beyond labour-intensive checkups.
It’s kinda like Luxxottica: a lot of their brands are only available through brick and mortal clinics. You can’t buy them through an online provider because they won’t sell to them.
My vet told me to put my cat on it after he had stress-related urinary problems. The problems went away, but the food is stupid-expensive, I'm a little peeved at how the system is taking advantage of me, but I don't know what to switch to other than starting to give my cat tryptophan.
I tried several different types of shampoo (and a lack of shampoo), along with a spay on solutions. None of those helped. My vet suggested Iams, but that didn't seem to change anything, so I started using grain free dog food (at first Diamond Naturals) and he quickly improved.
Of course this was nearly 6 years ago, maybe now that he's older he'll be less sensitive.
If you're looking at the 3oz cans instead, they start around the same $0.45-0.55 range then migrate upwards quickly, so you're typically paying the same as Science Diet for anything except the cheapest of wet foods. At both sizes there are plenty of options that move up into the $2+ range.
It's remarkable to think about the profit margin there has to be on these, particularly when you look at the ingredient lists and find all the "meat by-products," "chicken by-products," "turkey by-products," "fish meal" and the like. For the price per pound of this stuff I might as well be buying them fresh fish, boneless/skinless chicken and the occasional New York strip steak or even a nice filet.