WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Matthew Philips
Newsweek
Updated: 5:09 p.m. PT March 21, 2007
March 21, 2007 - It's been nearly a week since Canadian pet-food manufacturer Menu Foods Inc. recalled some 60 million cans and pouches of wet food linked to the deaths of at least 15 cats and one dog, yet authorities still can't explain exactly what went wrong. Some critics and animal lovers are honing in on what they see as lax regulation of the $15 billion pet-food industry in the United States.
"There's almost a void there," says Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association. "There is no real pet-food department of any federal agency."
Technically, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is responsible for ensuring that pet foods, like human foods, are safe to eat, truthfully labeled and produced under sanitary conditions. But on Tuesday, FDA officials admitted that the regulation of pet food takes a back seat to its regulatory obligations of other food and drug sectors, and that inspections of pet-food processing plants are done only on a for-cause basis.
"There are limited resources," said David Elder, director of the Office of Surveillance and Compliance in the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine in Rockville, Md. Elder added that inspections of companion animals' food products are "based on risk." Which means that the processing plant in Emporia, Kans., where the tainted food was manufactured, had never been inspected by government officials until after consumers started complaining about pets dying of kidney failure. The Emporia plant remains open and continues to produce new food, according to a Menu Foods spokesperson, who adds that safety tests are being done around the clock.
3 comments:
latest reports showed that there was rat poison in the pet food. how the hell does that happen?
can this possibly happen to people food? say a can 'o' tuna. hmmm, maybe we should pay attention to what happens at canneries. where are our canneries. how are these products safety inspected? etc, etc. are there any angry unpaid employees at these canneries that are too afraid to strike because some company may shut the cannery down and reopen it where the employees are less likely to complain?
and greed. pure unadulterated corporate greed. So we kill a few kitties and puppiues, we certainly aint gonna dispose of this food we know is poisoned. they'd have the same attitude about people, I'm sure.
This whole thing is so heart wrenching. Think of what would happen if one of those world renowned chefs at the White House grabbed a can of that tainted food and passed it on to W as pate' or something. Here. Polly wanna cracker???
It's a sad climate in this country when its own citizens aren't protected in any kind of way--from tainted food for themselves, their pets or even having a union that protects its workers.
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