The Vulnerabilities of Love

For all of us pet lovers, the stories of the past week are chilling. Long lists of pet foods, premium and affordable, show brands being recalled because of rat poison contamination. My first thoughts go to those that have been affected by this: the pets and the ones who love them. The recent picture of Pebbles being treated broke my heart. I think of others who fed their pet the food from one of the 60 million tainted cans… 60 million cans! – staggering… and my heart goes out to them.

There isn’t any one of us who doesn’t feel vulnerable when something like this happens. My guess is that you held your breath as I did when looking through the long list of contaminated foods and thought: “Please don’t be on the list.” While I am one of the lucky ones, I still can’t stop thinking and reading about the others who not only found their brand on the list but are dealing with its effects. It’s a terrible lottery that no one wants to win.

For many of us, our pets are part of our family – losing a family member is difficult no matter what the circumstance. Losing them in the process of our daily routine, by giving them food we believe and trust to be healthy, and finding out it’s not, is devastating and exposes our vulnerabilities to the core.

Menu Foods has offered to reimburse pet owners for their medical bills (in the same story as the picture of Pebbles, mentioned above), which is an honorable effort if they don’t overload the process with so much red tape that it seems like going through still another trauma. The company should also keep pushing to find out how this happened, and work cooperatively with their partners and other manufactures to put in the needed safeguards so we don’t need to fear this again.

Menu Foods updates the list frequently, and just to be safe, keep away from the gravy stuff for a while…