(AKA our philosophy, our processes, and testing)
Marden’s Ark was founded when we lost our three-year-old Congo African Grey, Marden, to ingested (systemic) aspergillosis. He had eaten a “feed” product so contaminated with Aspergillus spp. fungus. The spores went throughout his system, creating little granulomas, and eventually taking his life. Marden had a “well-baby” vet visit in December of 2013, and everything looked great. He died less than a month later, on January 13, 2014. His necropsy, and a talk with the pathologist, confirmed this came from something he ate.
In February, we visited a sanctuary for a pre-planned visit to see how they constructed their aviaries as we wished to build one for our own flock. Now carrying the grief of losing our baby boy, we decided to take another direction and focus on helping not just our birds but other birds in need. Marden’s Ark was born.
The first thing we focused on was how did this happen? How could food that was supposedly watched over by government and industry agencies that were there to insure safe food have caused the death of our beloved Marden. We found that the pet food industry has a lot of issues. The top issue is that their “food” isn’t “food” – it’s “FEED”. The difference is in the standards. The standards for what is allowed in “FEED” is much lower than “FOOD”. As a registered nurse, my critical thinking kicked in, telling me this made NO sense. If something isn’t safe for me to eat, why would I want to feed it to a companion that I love?
You can read more about this disparity in standards on our blog, here: What About Pet Food?
We don’t believe there SHOULD be a difference in standards. Safe means SAFE. If something makes food UNsafe for humans, it’s quite likely that it is unsafe for your companion animals as well. So we decided that we weren’t going to stoop down to those standards. We were going to RAISE our standards for what our flock eats. We do not feed anything to the birds that we wouldn’t eat. Granted, there are ingredients that we – as humans – can’t easily eat. An example is canary grass seed. It’s not typically eaten by humans. Now, there are some who make “alpiste” or canary seed grass ‘milk’. There seems to be little regulation on the sale of “alpiste” canary seed and we’ve found large amounts of other matter in seed sold for “human” use (aka “alpiste” seed or “human-grade” seed). We buy our seed from a trusted provider and triple-clean it here on site to make sure there’s not corn, sunflower seeds, or any other foreign material slipping into the mix. Other products are specifically sourced from human-food suppliers. All our botanicals are sold for human consumption. All the other seeds and grains are sourced as human food products (millet, oat groats, buckwheat, quinoa, etc.). While nyjer seed was in the original formulation, we eliminated it because it was not available as a human-food grade ingredient but unlike canary seed, it was often very “dirty” and didn’t meet our standards.