Literature scope
No source is listed on this row. Fish-formulation dry dog food medians from Kim et al. 2018 are in the direct answer and on Complete & balanced dry (kibble). This row has no separate mg/kg measurement.
Direct answer
For the question of whether cat and dog food contains heavy metals, this row is fish-based and marine-protein complete diets, it does not name retail brands, and no source is listed on this row. Kim et al. 2018 measured 17 United States fish-formulation dry dog foods and reported medians per 1,000 kcal of metabolizable energy: total arsenic 0.343 mg/Mcal (range 0.025 to 1.104), cadmium 0.027 mg/Mcal (range 0.014 to 0.215), total mercury 0.0082 mg/Mcal (range 0.0010 to 0.0139), and lead 0.049 mg/Mcal (range 0.018 to 0.325) (Evaluation of Arsenic, Cadmium, Lead and Mercury Contamination in Over-the-Counter Available Dry Dog Foods With Different Animal Ingredients (Red Meat, Poultry, and Fish), DOI 10.3389/fvets.2018.00264). Those figures are also on the dry kibble page; the study did not speciate arsenic or mercury, and the group summaries cannot be converted to mg/kg.
v2.2 Step Zero scaffold — Category 17 (Pet Foods), Row 10. New row from the 2026-06-09 whole-taxonomy completeness audit; carries no candidate values yet. Routing destination; sources populate it as ingest proceeds, then synthesis fills the evidence sections.
Sources
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.