Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats by Richard H. Pitcairn, Susan Hubble Pitcairn Read Free Book Online Page B

stimulants, hormones, tranquilizers, and other drugs fed to livestock consuming grains.
    H EAVY M ETALS
    Another important class of contaminants is heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, and especially mercury), which are increasingly finding their way into our food chain. It was a major shock to many of us to find that the EPA has been allowing the recycling of industry waste—material loaded with heavy metals—into commercial fertilizers. We read how industry is cleaning up their act by putting “scrubbers” onto smokestacks of factories to collect all this nasty stuff so it doesn’t get into the air. But once collected, where does it go? We didn’t think it would be used in fertilizer and end up in our food.
    The problem is this: Heavy metals, like many contaminants, are not destroyed over time. In the soil, plants take them up into their tissues, where they remain for the life of the plant. When this plant is eaten by an animal, the metals enter the animal’s body and collect there. The more plant that is eaten, the more heavy metal collects in the tissues. If that animal is eaten by another animal, that additional accumulation, more concentrated, is passed on. The contaminants in the soil become more concentrated in plants, then more concentrated in the grazing animals that eat plants, because they eat so many plants. Then the carnivores that eat these grazing animals consume a greater load. Each step results in more accumulation. The problem for carnivorous animals, those that eat other creatures, is that the buck stops with them.
    If these elements were neutral, having no effect, it wouldn’t matter. But they are not neutral—they are very toxic. Every year, more and more of these metals are spewed into our biosphere, and the effects on people and animals are staggering.
    For example, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine , the average chemical pollution of breast milk in American women compared to that of American women who are complete vegetarians was 35 times higher! Yet less than one out of every quarter million animals slaughtered in the U.S. is tested for toxic chemical residues.
    Lead, the Most Common Hazardous Metal
    In one study, a sampling of canned pet foods revealed lead contamination levels rangingfrom 0.9 to 7.0 parts per million (ppm) in cat foods and 1.0 to 5.6 ppm in dog foods. Daily intake of only six ounces of such foods would exceed the dose of lead considered potentially toxic for children.
    Much of this contamination comes from the use of bone meal in pet foods. Though they are otherwise an excellent source of calcium and other minerals, the bones of American cattle contain high levels of lead, owing to our prolonged usage of leaded gasoline over several decades. The only safe bone meal nowadays is from cattle raised in South America, Ethiopia, or some other country with few automobiles. A complication is that poisoning by these contaminants is very difficult to recognize. They come on gradually and are not very distinctive in their symptoms. Lead poisoning can appear as a type of anemia that is recognizable, but not all animals poisoned with lead will exhibit this. Some will be hyperactive, have seizures, become hysterical, go blind, have stomach cramps and diarrhea, constipation, or develop thickened and itchy skin. Not all these symptoms occur—there may be just one.
    This wide range of possible symptoms is typical of these environmental poisons and makes recognizing them very difficult. Think of a common problem, like a cold. Not hard to recognize when someone has a cold, is it? Runny nose, sneezing, stuffed up. These contaminants don’t show up like that. One animal can have anemia, another seizures. How would you even know they are caused by the same thing?
    If your pet has accumulated lead, for example, and was sick from just this one thing (for the sake of discussion, ignore all the other factors we have been considering), and you took your pet to a