2007
I went to PetsMart at lunch time. I wanted to get some more mini soccer balls, a feather attachment for Anatole’s wand toy, and some catnip. He was also out of dry food as of this morning.
Ahh, yes, pet food.
Now we’re up to three different companies who’re in on the recall. (Del Monte makes pet food???) No one will “confirm” any more damage or deaths beyond the animals at Menu Foods’ test kennels, so the “official” count remains at about 16. The reality is that it’s likely in the thousands. Could mean tens or hundreds of thousands… remains to be seen. There’s a good possibility that Andrew’s sister and brother-in-law have a cat with permanent kidney damage because of tainted food. Pet food is mass-manufactured in centralized locations just like ours these days…
Both brands of cat food (dry and canned) that I had for Anatole were on the initial recall list. Fortunately the canned and dry food he has were not on the list. However. The list keeps expanding. The types of food affected keep expanding. I am not comfortable getting more of the same brands for him.
And so there I was at PetsMart, wandering the aisles, looking at empty sections of shelving, reading labels, feeling uneasy. In the end, I couldn’t do it. Too many ingredients listings for grain gluten, too many kinds of “meal” (you don’t want to know what that word really means), too many ambiguous “meats”, like “animal liver”. Honestly, I could have been feeding euthanized shelter cats to my cat. (He’s not a huge fan of other cats, so he might not mind, but I digress…)
I didn’t trust anything on those shelves. So I left without food. And on the way home I stopped at the Natural Food Market. They carry Precise pet food, so I figured I’d give Precise Plus and several of their varieties of canned food a try. The dry food is not gluten-free (it has corn and some other grain products), but it is free of wheat gluten. I’m not real happy about the corn — we feed it to everything these days, and most domestic animals have no business eating it — but I needed to get something for Anatole to eat while I keep researching.
One of the girls at the store asked me if I’d been feeding my cat that food previously, or if I had started buying it because of the recall. She said she’d been asking everyone who’d been buying pet food. I got the impression I was far from the only one who’d made a switch.
Several sites have had excellent commentary and information, Dogged Blog and nakedjen among them. (They also both happen to be people who feed their pets home-prepared foods.)
A homemade diet is something I’m definitely considering for Anatole. I need to cook more for myself, so really, it wouldn’t be adding that much to it. And I’d know what he’s eating and where it comes from. Cats are carnivores, considerably more so than dogs. Anatole wouldn’t eat corn on the cob, and I don’t like feeding him processed corn parts.
It’s certainly a world away from how we fed my dogs growing up. I don’t even remember what brand of dry food they ate. It came in huge bags from the feed mill where Dad worked. I’m sure it was crap. Their diets were supplemented with plenty of “people food”. Of course, that included old leftovers and things that had gone off and weren’t good enough for us to eat anymore. Those dogs must have had guts of iron. Oh, and they supplemented their diets themselves, too. Roadkill, things they hunted, grass… Country dog diet, doncha know.
And here I have a cat who has no front claws, never goes outside, makes strange noises at birds from the window ledge, and is likely to end up with a diet superior in quantity and quality to that of more than half the world’s people.
Thing is, this pet food scandal is a bellwether. Being a first-world nation carries with it a great deal of luxury and many advantages, among them highly developed industry, manufacturing, and transportation. (Hell, just having pets is a first-world luxury.) Exotically-grown, centrally processed foods are actually a pretty new development in our cultural history. Less than a century ago our pets ate what we ate, because “pet food” as we know it didn’t exist. Then again, neither did Lunchables. Pet food is not made much differently, or with that many different ingredients, from our food. How long until your daughter, husband, grandmother, or best friend ends up in the hospital with kidney failure?
Maybe if we’re lucky, this pet food scandal will be the An Inconvenient Truth for food.
