Are you kidding me?

Nancy Cook, Vice President of the Pet Food Institute, an organization that acts as the "voice" of the U.S. pet food manufacturers, has been quoted as saying the majority of pet owners are "confident" their pet food is safe, even after this Spring's massive pet food recall.

Huh?

Nancy, the PFI, and their membership should call on a few of us and get the real story. To this day, I still don't buy any gravy-based foods, and there isn't a new can opened that I don't wonder if there's something terrible in it that I might be unknowingly giving my pets. I'm sure I'm not alone in this worry and just because, as busy pet owners, we've had to return to feeding our pets purchased foods doesn't mean we're fine with things as they are without significant changes.

There are about 13 bills working their way through Congress that relate to food safety, and while additional bureaucracy may not be the solution, it can at least serve as a forcing function to clean things up. For Ms. Cook to declare that "we can't insult" China because they are "our largest growing supplier of ingredients in the world" is ludicrous. We have a competitive world market and opening it up for bidding on delivering non-poisonous ingredients seems to be a no-brainer, and this should have started the day the recalls were announced.

The good news is that Menu Foods, the pet food manufacturer that produced most of foods that contained ingredients with melamine, has discontinued their contracts with their China-based suppliers. Hopefully, they can lead the way to a more sane approach in addressing a problem that hits the very core of all families with pets.