Cursed Tongue: Short Order Cook to a Dog

Posted by CursedTongue on April 17, 2007

My dog eats better than I do. Or I thought that she did until the Menu Foods recall a couple of weeks ago. The same treats I used to grab off the shelf for doggy Christmas presents were not good enough for my puppy after we adopted the Scroungy Coyote. I began reading labels and discovered that most of the treats on the shelf contained more sugar than a classroom of 8 year-olds.

Not that I don’t love the dogs of my relatives enough to send healthy food, just that I didn’t think about it until I was responsible for the health and well being of my own four-legged friend.

Scroungy Coyote was getting food with beef listed as the first ingredient (as opposed to corn or wheat). We chose a premium brand touted as healthy and claiming to be natural and contain no fillers. Luckily, we were giving her kibble, and not the “cuts and gravy” style food that was affected by recalls, and which sounds as appetizing as a plate of warmed over utility grade beef with that green tinge.

After a week of hearing about the recall, it seems that now the media is done reporting on the story. Even though investigators have yet to figure out how “cuts and gravy” became “cuts and gravy with a sprinkling of rat poison.” But they are still talking about Anna Nicole Smith ad nauseam. (Guess what, she’s still dead.) And they’re chewing on the allegedly politically motivated judge firings like a dog gnawing on a bone containing contaminated wheat gluten. As if it’s the first time someone in the Bush camp did something illegal and/or morally bankrupt and then lied about it.

The priorities of news organizations that put the not-so-mysterious death of a tartlet, and a routine abuse of political appointments above the lives of man’s best friends, (and cats) is about as turned around as a Fundamentalist Christian in a gay bar.

Ever since it was revealed that the deadly food was tainted with rat poison, I’ve been reluctant to feed Scroungy Coyote food or treats made by any company affected by the recall. Treats I picked out for her because sugar is not one of the first five ingredients are sitting in the pantry because I feel betrayed by the pet food companies that made them. And frankly, I’m worried about the safety of said food.

One of the brands affected by the recall includes the following promise on their web site, “We constantly strive to provide better ingredients and better nutrition for better health at an affordable price. Every [expletive deleted] product is 100% natural. We use only high-quality ingredients. No chicken by-products, no ground yellow corn.”

That sounds really good, but the rodenticide aminopterin, found in the food, is not “natural.” How can consumers trust that their other products are natural or even safe, once a chemical used as rat poison slips into their ingredients?

Finding dog treats that aren’t packed with sugar is a challenge. So, I’ve been training Coyote with tiny, sugar-filled globs that are vaguely shaped like steaks and have no nutritionally redeeming value. On the plus side the company that produced them was not one of the brands selling the tainted dog food. (I could bake treats myself, but that wouldn’t fulfill my requirement that they be edible.)

The recall isn’t simply about pets, but also about the people that love them. It’s about the people who thought they were doing something nice for their dog by feeding them premium “cuts and gravy,” which is made to resemble human food (in a “Who vomited?” way). An Ottawa woman ingested the tainted dog food in an attempt to trick her picky, recently adopted dog into believing that the food was table scraps, and therefore perfectly good to eat. She and her dog became sick around the 17th of March. It was only after she heard news reports about the recall that she made the connection between her symptoms and the “chunks and gravy” style food.

It’s easy to lay the blame squarely on Menu Foods, the producer of the poisoned pet food. It took them a month to reveal that seven of the cats and dogs used as testers had died as a result of consuming their food.

A pet food label based in California, should rethink the location of the manufacturer it chose in Canada and the manufacturer in should rethink purchasing ingredients from growers in China, because the jumbled supply chain is out of control. All of the companies involved should be held accountable for the illness and deaths of pets, and people that ingested the food.

When I feed my Scroungy Coyote she looks up at me with an expression that might mean, “Put that kibble down now or I’ll eat you,” but which I choose to interpret as implicit trust. Not that I’d ever implicitly trust any dog food manufacturer, but it would be nice if I could trust them as much as manufacturers of human food. At least e-coli and salmonella contaminations aren’t fatal to most.

- Sarah Letnes

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Tags: humor, pets

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