More d*&&)($%# recalls!

This time it is Natural Balance canned dinners. You can read about it here. This time it is botulism found in an American plant.

Be careful my dogblogging pals! Maybe we should start making our apes test our food?

Killer food & the politics of pets

I found this great article in Maclean's about the pet food recalls. It discusses how it is the cumulative effect of market practices and the deregulation of food production in Canada and the U.S. led to this particular crisis. There's some interesting stuff about the growth of Menu Foods as a conglomerate and how it came to produce most of the wet food in North America. And they suggest one solution is to guarantee a financial loss when the health and safety of pets is compromised by consider animals, legally, to be more than just property. Yes, please.

More damned recalls

The Brat Pack posted this link about expanded dog food recalls, including some in which the tainted ingredients may have been used but are not listed on the labels. The manufacturer is American Nutrition. It includes Blue Buffalo, Natural Balance (expanded to cans), Diamond, and that Chicken Soup stuff. Most of these are canned.

I also read that Drs. Foster and Smith brand has been recalled.

Frankly, I'm sick of blogging about this. Why is the FDA so reactive? Why is this problem stretching out for months? I'll take a steak burger, extra-rare, please.

More recalls likely

This MSNBC story says that more pet food recalls are likely because they have located a second supplier of rice protein with melamine in their product. It may be in the human food supply, too, via animal feed:

Rice protein tainted with the chemical melamine was used in pet foods from at least five manufacturers who obtained the protein from one supplier, U.S. officials have said. It also made its way into feed used at a California hog farm.

and

Last week, privately held Wilbur-Ellis said contaminated rice protein was distributed to several pet food makers. Three of them — Natural Balance Pet Foods, the Blue Buffalo Co. and Diamond Pet Foods — have pulled some of their products.

ANOTHER recall!

Apparently Natural Choice has decided to yank two of its products: Venison and Brown Rice Dog Formula and Venison and Green Pea Goddamn Cat Food. They don't know what, if anything, is the problem but they have gotten some calls about gastric distress after eating the food so they decided to yank it. More info here. If there's a problem it isn't gluten cuz there isn't any gluten in it.

Sigh. What's a dog to eat (answer: anything he finds in the fridge).

Assessing the tainted food debacle

I read this good editorial in SFGate today. It talks about how the number of deaths from the tainted pet food has been underreported and how the complete lack of oversight of the pet food industry is to blame.

Nearly one month passed from the date Menu got its first report of a death to the date it issued the recall. During that time, no veterinarians were warned to be on the lookout for unusual numbers of kidney failure in their patients. No pet owners were warned to watch their pets for its symptoms. And thousands and thousands of pet owners kept buying those foods and giving them to their dogs and cats.

Not only is the probably worse than we thought but we will probably never know exactly how bad it is. There's no clear system for reporting pet illness/death or even for getting information. The information has been poorly reported and disseminated and my ma ape is not entirely sure she trusts the FDA's claim that the wheat gluten isn't in the ape food supply and she eats loads of wheat gluten (as a meat substitute).