Healthy Living Blog

Stacy April 7th, 2007

All the news lately about dead and dying pets, seemingly all from wheat gluten produced in China, gave me the strangest feeling the other day.

First a little background. We once sold an all natural pet food (different than our current brands). As we were trying to get a vet to switch to our brand, we were given a full litany of why “the science in this pet food is better than none other.” We were beaten down relentlessly over the next few weeks, but we held strong in our beliefs.

Back to the present, as I heard that on top of the rat poison, a chemical that is only used to make plastics was also found. The conversations with the vet flashed back into my mind and I jokingly blurted out “the science of our pet food is so good, we import poisoned and plasticized wheat gluten to ensure that our gravy is better and thicker than all the rest!” Although it sounded funny, it’s no laughing matter.

We don’t know anyone personally who was affected by this disaster. We do know a few peeps on the net that lost their pets. We have been shocked by all of this and I seriously wonder if there aren’t links to human food stuffs somewhere. My fears grow daily as even yesterday, the FDA expanded the recall list. Notice that? The FDA expanded it, not the manufacturers! They seriously had to know where that gluten came from, yet they seemingly tried to hide it. Not so easy nowadays to hide your supply chain however.

Although not easy to hide, it is taking far too long to connect the dots. If we can trace a bad lot of ingredients within hours to the final piece of ammunition it went in, and know almost certainly the location of that particular piece of ammunition, we should be able to do much better on our foodstuffs. We should have known weeks ago which products were affected. Also, I want to know the real truth about where all this stuff has been and how it was transported. And who was responsible.

I have no illusions that we will ever know. In this day of information overflow, some things don’t change. Those with power and influence will hide behind the companies affected. Will ride out the fluctuations of the stock, and probably are already making that next deal that could possibly harm us or our beloved furry friends again.

I feel that this is the just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger issue. Wheat from China, spinach from Mexico, and lettuce from even further south of the border, where does it stop. Outsourcing our food supply is starting to play havoc with us, and is already killing scores of our pets. Are we next?

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