The Fallout from Tainted Food

Two very interesting articles were published by the Wall Street Journal last week on the ramifications of so much pet food (over 100 brands) being recalled because of contamination due to melamine. Some highlights:

• Oddly, the Food and Drug Administration has not updated it's estimate that only 16 dogs and cats have died because of the poisoning. That number was too low the minute Menu Foods released their list of affected products. With additional products being recalled since, it's simply a joke. Who do they think they're kidding? It would be better for the FDA to work with the vets and come clean on the numbers, as veterinarians are now reporting dealing with thousands of cases of renal distress and failure.
• An estimated 50 class action lawsuits have been filed, and there's a push to include pain and suffering along with the hard financial numbers: how much you paid for your pet, the vet bills over their lifetime, the food you've purchased, and the care given due to the poisoning. This is a tough one, folks. As the author of Pet Plaintiffs comments:

  As the owner of two dogs that have been conferred full citizenship in my own household, I can sympathize with those who have been victimized. But I also know that if these efforts succeed, suits involving pets will soon come to resemble the rest of our civil justice system, benefiting lawyers and a few litigants at the expense of the rest of us. Owners, trainers, rescue groups and humane societies that do valuable work will all be vulnerable to potentially enormous liability and forced to pay more for everything from vet care to insurance.

• Since the veil has been lifted on the number of companies that use one source (Menu Foods) to produce their private label, economy, and premium foods, there's all kinds of rethinking going on whether it's worthwhile to pay the higher price for a premium label. In 101 Brand Names:

  In the past, branded pet foods had an emotional advantage: Many owners were loath to give low-quality food to their pets. But even veterinary nutritionists say they have difficulty telling brands apart. "The money you spend on a [premium-brand] diet does not always equate with the quality of the food," says Andrea Fascetti, associate professor of nutrition at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis. "There are no requirements around calling something a 'premium' or 'super-premium' product."

• In the same article, one pet food manufacturer responds with:

  P&G argues that even products with identical ingredient lists aren't necessarily equals. "A less-expensive brand can copy an ingredient list but might not have the same combination to the way the recipe is put together," says company spokesman Kurt Iverson. The quality of ingredients and the way they are combined affects how nutrients are absorbed by the animal, he says.

You buy this argument? I don't. And neither does a vet I was chatting with earlier today. He wrote:

I'm not so sure that I will recommend feeding only home cooked food, but many of my local colleagues and I are skeptical about recommending these brands when they are using an outside source to make even some of their foods.

Chocolate and Lily
And a thought on the lawsuits. I can tell you that if my guy Chocolate or my girlfriend Lily were affected by this crisis, there is no doubt that I'd seriously consider a lawsuit to send a message to the manufacturers that this is not acceptable and there is a price to pay when not injecting caution at every stage of food production. But if we all did this, the larger result brings ramifications that would hurt us, along with the vets and other service providers (walkers, groomers, boarders, etc.) that are, more often than not, sole proprietor businesses that care for our pets because they love them as much as we do. As Steve Malanga states in Pet Plantiffs, accidentally running over your neighbor's cat could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if we let this spiral out of control. Instead, he suggests an alternate plan, which benefits us now and later:

The pet food scare has prompted an overdue scrutiny of our imported pet and human food sources, and it should prod China, a major exporter, to impose higher standards on its farmers and wholesalers. But opening up our court system to pet pain-and-suffering awards will do little to address that problem.

Let's do this instead.