Exercise My Dog

Mad Cow Disease and Dog Food

I made burgers on Saturday and gave my dog Bronx scraps. Now there is recent news about a possible outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in the US. My dear husband immediately bans beef in the house and the kids are worked up about no more burgers and will Bronx have Mad Dog Disease?

Short answer is no. But in the face of no real studies being done, I tend to tread cautiously.

Here’s the scoop. Make your own call.

• Mad Cow Disease is a contagious disease also called BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). It basically causes lots of tiny holes in the brain and spinal column, making it ’spongy’. The cow then loses motor skills until it dies.

So far this family of disease has only been found so far in hooved animals (cows, CWD in deer and elk, scrapie in sheep) and in humans (vCJD or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.).

• There’s never been a reported case of a dog getting it. Additionally, the US FDA reports that there is no scientific evidence to date that dogs can or ever have contracted Mad Cow Disease at all.

• Meat from contaminated cows could be used the making of food for poultry and house pets. According to some, like specialists for infectious diseases at the University of California at Davis, it would be highly unlikely that nervous tissue would end up even in pet food.

Pet food is supposedly vigorously inspected and processed in such a way that they are deemed safe for the pets included heat-treated to destroy any pathogens. As we’ve seen in the last year there are lapses in the inspection process. However, by the same token, because of the pet food scare in the last year, we can hope there is more attention on inspecting pet food, especially with two Chinese businesses and a U.S. company indicted in connection with tainted pet food which killed and sickened thousands of pets last year.

Besides, dogs potentially had more exposure anyway. Meat prepared for pet food is almost always from sick or injured livestock. In other words, the stuff that cannot be sold for human consumption. I didn’t realize.