signal boost: Purina food could be hurting your pets

[cellio]

Thanks to siderea for pointing me to this post about problems with Purina pet food (dog and cat, at least). After seeing this I read the last several month's worth of consumer-affiars complaints, and older ones about the specific foods relevant to me. (Warning: can be gross.) This goes well beyond "ew, yuck" to "get that stuff out of the house before it contaminates anything else". Fortunately I don't use their dry food (infestations), but I do -- or did, until now -- use Friskies canned food (toxins) sometimes.

I didn't find anything on Purina's site about this. Since this isn't in the news I don't know how I would hear about a response from them other than searching from time to time.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm certain that, in most cases, the grain moths aren't a problem. Grain moths are quite tasty, according to my cats.

The thing is, though -- the melamine-in-wheat-gluten thing has never been adequately dealt with. There's nothing in place that will stop the same thing from happening again. Pet food doesn't go through the same FDA import controls as human food (which is totally reasonable), and supply chains are long and confusing enough that end manufacturers like Purina can't know each step. And China has neither the ability nor the inclination to stop it on their end.

Even if Purina DOES have a vested interest in providing quality pet food -- they can't control the entire process well enough to guarantee that.

[hildakrista.livejournal.com]

My cat also eats pantry moths for fun... he loves them!

Actually, pet food is more highly regulated than people food, in many cases. Most pet food isn't imported at all (except maybe from Canada), it's some ingredients that are.

The sad part about the melamine issue of 2007 is that it's unlikely it could have been prevented at all; melamine was a deliberate contaminant not normally found in that ingredient. You cannot test for general contaminants in a batch of ingredients - you have to know what you're looking for. Good pet food companies test for known and natural problematics like aflatoxin, but until 2007, they had no reason to think that melamine would ever get into the food supply, because it's not a natural or possible danger stemming from normal processes. Remember when some psychopath decided to poison Tylenol? Not preventable. Or when a building collapses because some douche head engineer skimmed money and used cheaper building supplies? Not preventable from a processing standpoint (HR maybe, though).

Melamine contamination is unlikely to ever happen again with the big pet food manufacturers because they now require their suppliers to prove beyond a doubt that wheat, meat and dairy ingredients are melamine-free.

You are correct in saying that Purina can't control the entire process well enough to prevent a different unusual and hard-to-detect contaminant in their food. They can't without knowing what it would be. But what company does? What people food company does for that matter? People died from eating fresh baby spinach grown in California a few years ago. People got sick from canteloupe earlier this year.

I guess you could go raw and local (and I applaud you if you do), but even then, you and your pets could get sick from something - bacteria, undeclared pesticides, some idiot putting glass in your apples....

Unfortunately bad things happen when people in power are greedy or negligent. Sometimes bad things happen and it's no one's fault. Food companies do their best to combat that kind of thing, because it's in their best interest to do so. And, hopefully, because it's the right thing to do.