Ann N. Martin

Being the pet nutrition geek I am, I didn't learn a whole lot I didn't already know about pet food quality and ingredients from this book. However, I did learn a whole lot about how terrifyingly unregulated the pet food industry is, how pet food is actually made, and a lot of other very important and interesting things involving the pet food industry. The author also touches on a lot of other very important bits of information both related to pet nutrition and entirely unrelated but important to animal welfare. While I did have some gripes with a few parts of this book, overall it was a very good and eye opening read and I would highly recommend it to anyone with a cat or dog.… (meer)

Though it contains some interesting information that I had not come across before, this book was largely a disappointment.

Throughout, this third edition text was riddled with errors and repetition. My suspicion is that the first edition may have been better. Contrary to my thinking that this was the same text with a few added chapters, it appears that they've tried to mesh the new data throughout the book without proper editing. You'll run into lines that start and end with the same phrase, or even contradictions where the author will quote a number in one sentence, then later say that same number is unknown.

On the up side, there is a great deal of information on the pet food industry over the last couple decades. The inclusion of rendered cats and dogs, and thus the euthanasia drug sodium pentobarbital, into pet food was discussed. Also, it was briefly mentioned how the leftover rendered products end up in the human food supply. In addition to these topics, there were discussions of other generally poor ingredient choices, Chinese sourcing, the industry response to the 2007 recalls as well as suspected problems and lawsuits in general, and animal experimentation. All of these topics are important and were fairly well documented. Unfortunately, the entire text was very dry. It was hard to stay focused on bland fact after fact, no matter how passionate I am about the subject matter.

To cap it all is an inclusion of short discussions on cooking for cats and dogs and some recipes. While perhaps Martin felt that, after a long listing of "what not to do", there needed to be a balance of positive nutritional guidance, her advice is largely off-base and ends up detracting from the book rather than adding to it. Yes, she has achieved longevity in her own animals with this framework, but I would argue that one could do better and that with so little space devoted to nutrition here, those wishing to follow her lead would begin with a foundation of questionable value at best, especially if their pets don't fall into the nice little box she's laid out.

In summation, as much as I wish the average person knew all of the information in this book, this is not the format with which to give it to them. I would only recommend this book for the determined reader. It should also be only for those interested in seeing behind the curtain of the industry-Oz as there are other better books for the "nutritious recipes and healthy food choices" the cover advertises. This book still has reread, or at least reference, potential for me, if for no other reason than that it does have some valuable information on the current industry even if it isn't in the most useful layout.… (meer)