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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 01 2018, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the 19-meters dept.

An exasperated Amazon customer has posted a video of 62ft of wrapping paper snaking through his house - that was used to "protect" dog food.

Nick Taylor said the box used to deliver the bag of food was "big enough to live in" and claimed the food didn't need to be packaged at all.

Nick laid out the 19-metres of packaging paper in his home in Bath and posted the video to Amazon's Facebook page.

The trail starts in what appears to be a utility room and leads in to a dining area before entering the kitchen itself.

From there the paper enters the hall, where the dog food can be glimpsed in its heavy plastic packaging.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/exasperated-amazon-customer-films-62-12259048


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Reziac on Monday April 02 2018, @03:44AM (2 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Monday April 02 2018, @03:44AM (#661323) Homepage

    No, it doesn't. Feather meal has to be listed separately. So does bone meal beyond the small amount that normally gets into meat or poultry meal, which is only a couple percent. "Byproducts" means stuff like livers, necks, undeveloped eggs, gizzards, and lungs, and is actually more nutritious than chicken meat.

    Contrary to popular misconception, these ingredients are very strictly regulated, and cannot contain random trash. All the specs are somewhere on the USDA.GOV site, tho they've moved and PDF'd everything and offhand I can't find it, but this will do:
    https://www.feedipedia.org/node/214 [feedipedia.org]

    Also, that dog food advisor site is funded by one of the specialty pet food companies that sells overpriced crap to yuppies. (I forget which one but at some point in the past I tracked it down. Most of their "advice" is complete BS.)

    [Canine professional here with a background in biochemistry, and I used to manufacture dog food.]

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 02 2018, @08:56AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 02 2018, @08:56AM (#661376) Journal

    I won't argue what the law or regulations may say. I can only say that I've hauled bone meal and feather meal between plants, and that the purchasing customers were in the business of making dog and cat food. Of course, the same plant generally produces multiple brands. Ol' Roy comes from the same sources that Dollar General stores get their dog foods. Maybe WalMart's premium brand is made with one recipe, and El Cheapo store brand has another recipe. I never looked that closely, to be honest.

    Feed for cattle seems to be more strictly regulated, after the mad cow diseases made the news. Hauling anything to a feed mill for cattle and other ruminants requires a certification that you have not hauled any animal proteins or various chemicals in the trailer, or that the trailer has been washed.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Reziac on Monday April 02 2018, @02:21PM

      by Reziac (2489) on Monday April 02 2018, @02:21PM (#661468) Homepage

      Most plants don't make just pet food. Feather meal goes into chicken feed, and is excellent for that. And yeah, the same plant makes different formulas for multiple labels (and just as often, the same formula for multiple labels).

      Contrary to what they now claim, Iams started as a split from ANF, which was originally a mink food company that sold some of their product as dog food, because that was more profitable. I remember when Iams didn't even have a pelleting plant (and apparently hadn't yet figured out this contract label thing) and was selling bagged unformed meal (better stuff than it is now, but a nuisance as the consistency was like corn meal. The entire ingredients list was :"meat meal, corn meal, animal fat, supplements").

      Ol' Roy (originally a Purina HiPro/Chow clone) used to be made by Doane's, which only did contract feed (no label of their own) but about 15 years ago they were acquired by Mars (Pedigree), and what had been good quality became at best highly variable, and sometimes downright shit. It's since stabilized somewhat, but still isn't what it used to be. The last batch that came into Tractor Supply under their house label looks like it came from an old Gaines plant.

      A significant majority of "premium" brands (and Costco's private label) are made by Diamond. If it contains flaxseed meal or you see "Meta, Missouri" on the bag, it's Diamond, and usually you can get the exact same thing at half the price under a Diamond label.

      The mad cow craze affected pet food too. For a while you couldn't even buy meat meal, let alone bone meal, unless it was going into fertilizer. And while poultry products are slightly more nutritionally dense, the amino acid balance isn't right for carnivores. (And lamb is taurine-deficient even for dogs, which turns out do need a little in the diet.) Last time I talked to Baker Commodities they were working on a way to mechanically strip out spines so they could market beef products in the U.S. again. The stupid thing, they told me, was that they were allowed to export meat and bone meal to Asia, and that feed manufacturers could then import it from Asia, but because of the mad cow regs they weren't allowed to sell it in the U.S., except for fertilizer. I should check with 'em again -- tho their nearest plant is in Spokane and that's a 600 mile haul from here. Used to have one (actually, three) in my back yard but the NIMBYs moving in from Commiefornia got it shut down. Excellent quality product.

      Oh, IIRC the company backing the "Pet Food Advisor" site was Wellness. Seriously overpriced crap (largely barley-based, and barley comes out about like it went in), but a great marketing department.

      The ONLY company I've ever seen publish pet nutritional research untainted by marketing or agenda is Purina (tho that came to a halt when they were acquired by Nestle), and they didn't always follow their own advice. I remember when their magazine pubbed an article from their taste-tests on what dogs like in a protein source: meat was #1 by a wide margin; chicken came in dead last, and some dogs preferred to starve. On the very next page was an ad for their new premium brand, "with the great taste of chicken that dogs love!" Clearly their research and marketing departments had never met.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.