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Menu Foods - Sue Their Asses

It turns out that Menu Foods - makers of the poisonous pet food since recalled - has known for at least a month that there were problems with its pet food. But instead of doing an immediate recall and then sorting out the difficulty, they waited until late last week to come clean to the public and issue their recall. In the meantime, pets continued to fall ill of kidney failure and to die. The true number of pets to die from this is not, at present, known. It seems to be widespread, across the country.

The tainted ingredient was the wheat gluten in the food which may have contained molds or heavy metals - the cause is not yet known. If you think about it, though, feeding wheat gluten to cats is just bizarre. It's not as though their systems have evolved for wheat in the diet. In fact, after 1000s of years of eating wheat, it is becoming recognized lately, that not all humans are able to tolerate wheat either - thus the rising number of people recognized to have wheat sensitivities and celiac disease.

Menu Foods claim that reports of problems first reached them in February and they still waited a month to go public. But, that looks like the legal ground that they are staking out for themselves.

According to more informal sources, the kind found on the internet in the comments sections, so take it for what it is worth, warnings first arose months before that.

Kidney disease is the number one killer of cats in the US. Coincidence? I don't think so. I think this is related to the pet food industry. The difference is on this occasion enough food was tainted so that the effects were absolutely widespread and fatal and it couldn't be passed over. I suspect that food has been tainted before.



My cat had a similar but not fatal incident last year. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, he got quite ill - vomiting, no energy, drinking tons of water. I brought him to the vet, it turned out he had early kidney disease, and I changed his diet completely and started using some natural remedies as well, such as making parsley tea for him and giving it to him in a dropper.

I now feed my cat only human grade cat food and table scraps. And he has mostly returned to health although I believe he still has some kidney problems that were brought on with his serious illness. He still drinks a great deal of water, for instance, a symptom of kidney disease. A healthy cat kidney permits a cat to go a long time without water, an adaptation necessary since they were once desert animals.

Labels: cat, pets, recall

posted by Alcibiades @ 5:51 PM