Ontario-based Menu Foods describes itself as a “leading North American manufacturer of private-label wet pet food products, selling its products to supermarket retailers, mass merchandisers, pet specialty retailers, and other retail and wholesale outlets.” You will, no doubt, recognize some Menu Foods products on your own store shelves. PetSmart’s canned brands—Authority, SophistaCat, and Award—are made by Menu Foods. Safeway’s Safeway Select brand, A&P’s Master Choice, and even Stop & Shop’s canned pet food is made by Menu Foods. Menu Foods sells an astounding 800 million containers of wet pet food per year. If you were to ask any of these stores if they test their pet foods on animals in laboratories, they might say “no,” and they wouldn’t be lying. Unknown to most consumers and perhaps even to the stores themselves is the fact that the actual manufacturer, Menu Foods, does conduct such tests as was shown during PETA’s nine-month investigation into a contract testing laboratory—the same one in which Iams animals were found suffering.

Metabolic Tests

Like Iams and many other “pet” food manufacturers, Menu Foods conducts tests to measure the “metabolic energy” of dog and cat food. Such tests are inherently cruel because they involve severe confinement in stainless-steel metal cages. PETA’s undercover investigation at a testing laboratory with which Menu Foods contracts found countless examples of cruelty and neglect.

During the tests, dogs and cats are forced to live in cold, hard, barren stainless-steel cages with no toys or beds. PETA’s investigator took video footage of animals circling endlessly in their cages, suffering the severe effects of lack of stimulation, exercise, and socialization. Metabolic cages are approximately the size of a cage that your vet might use for animals recovering from surgery. Imagine keeping your companion animal in such a cage day after day, year after year! You wouldn’t do it. But Menu Foods dogs had no choice and virtually no life.

PETA’s investigator called a researcher at Menu Foods and asked if the animals could have some toys but was told, “If you give them toys, they are going to have higher activity and [this] will affect the [metabolic energy] result.” He even went so far as to tell our investigator that the protocol doesn’t call for toys!

These miserable animals were not given adequate exercise, either. The dogs were only “exercised” in the galleyway on wet and often filthy concrete on the days when their feces were not collected for the study, and the cats never received any exercise at all. They were simply stored in small carriers while their cages were cleaned.

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Click here for a list of dog and cat food companies that don’t test on animals.