I follow a page called The Truth About Pet Food that lists the pet food recalls and other things of that nature.

Today’s article is about how the pet food manufacturers are now treating recalls and pet deaths in a different manner – Silence.

The 2007 pet food recall taught Pet Food and the FDA something BIG.  The 2007 pet food recall taught Pet Food and the FDA that Pet Parents go a little ballistic over news of a pet food recall.  It’s been referred to as ‘pet food hysteria’.  Instead of just going on as usual, panicked ‘hysterical’ Pet Parents turned to blogging and Tweeting about a tainted pet food.  We (pet parents) want to learn everything we can and want to share every bit of pet food news the best way we can hoping to save the life of our or someone else’s pet.  This blogging and Tweeting told Pet Food and the FDA pet parents have lost trust in pet foods and have serious doubts of the effectiveness of the FDA.  The apparent new method of handling pet food recalls, is not handling them at all.  The new recalls are silent.

Did you know there have been 3 recalls or recall-esque events in the past few months besides the one I blogged about earlier this month? Probably not. The FDA does not have the authority to authorize that pet food manufacturers issue recalls. Read this blurb:

Why was there not a prompt FDA recall press release of these pet foods?  Why were these products (and many others of late) ‘withdrawn’ from store shelves instead of publically and promptly recalled?  What is the difference between a pet food withdrawal and a pet food recall?

The FDA provided me the following explanation to the difference between a pet food withdrawal and a pet food recall…
"FDA does not have statutory authority to require manufacturers to initiate pet food recalls. Therefore, the initiation of such recalls on the part of manufacturers or importers is voluntary.

Please see the following for additional information on recalls: http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm049070.htm
Recalls classified as Class I require a press release which is typically issued by the firm. FDA posts those releases at http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm.
Companies have conducted recalls that were not classified as Class I and issued press releases which is their prerogative but only Class I classified recalls require a press release."

The original blog post http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/articles/480/1/The-Silent-Killer-of-Pets/Page1.html goes into a bit more detail on the FDA…it’s worth taking the time to read the entire article.

It goes on to say this:

There is a GAPING HOLE in the pet food withdrawal and recall system that everyone of authority seems to be ignoring; Notification of pet owners.  Ya know…the people that purchased the pet food…they’re called CUSTOMERS!  Customers and their pets are falling into this GAPING HOLE and no one seems to care. 

Thanks to the Internet and a world of concerned pet parents, news of pet food withdrawals does get out sooner or later…but I have to wonder how many times has the news of a suspect pet food arrived too late?  How many pets have fallen into the GAPING HOLE?  One sick pet due to NOT INFORMING A PET OWNER is too many.

OMG this is SO true! Without the companies letting US, the pet owners, know, how the heck are we supposed to know WHAT is going on in our pets’ food? How do we know we’re not feeding out pets tainted, moldy, contaminated, TOXIC foods? We put our trust into these companies thinking they know what they’re doing! And then they don’t have the decency to INFORM us??? That is OUTRAGEOUS!

Be mad people, be outraged. DEMAND change! The Truth About Pet Food has a suggestion to take action:

Let’s take matters into our own hands and ask (ok, perhaps demand nicely) Pet Food Companies initiate a notification system for pet food withdrawals and silent recalls!  This isn’t brain surgery…this is a very simple system that can Save the lives of Pets!  Perhaps your pet!

Please take a few minutes, copy a letter and email it to your Pet Food Company.  Click Here for the very simple instructions.

I am going to do this myself this weekend. This is just crazy and I’m tired of it. No pet owner should have to go through losing a pet because of the food they chose to feed their pets. And no commercial or premium food seems to be safe anymore. I’ve lost ALL faith in the entire industry.

Article in its entirety: http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/articles/480/1/The-Silent-Killer-of-Pets/Page1.html

http://www.wysong.net/recall.php

Where I got the information: http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/articles/469/1/Wysong-Dog-Food-Recall/Page1.html

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This next little bit is terrifying! I’m so glad we no longer use these products on our dogs! Yikes!!

A veterinarian presented with a peculiar case of a poodle stuck in its crate last week traced the problem to the pet’s spot-on flea treatment.

Residue from the product Advantage, which was applied between the poodle’s shoulders, somehow came in contact with the plastic base of the animal’s crate, dissolving the plastic and causing it to adhere to the dog’s belly.

When the dog wouldn’t come out of its crate the next morning, its concerned owner brought the dog, crate and all, to Dr. Tej Dhaliwal of North Town Veterinary Hospital in Ontario, Canada. Following two hours of sleuthing, Dhaliwal concluded that benzyl alcohol, an inactive ingredient in Advantage, was to blame.

Bayer Animal Health, maker of Advantage, acknowledged that the flea treatment was the likely culprit and offered to pay the owner’s veterinary bill, compensate him for loss of salary and replace the crate, Dhaliwal said.

Bob Walker, a spokesman for Bayer in the United States, confirmed that Advantage contains benzyl alcohol, which reacts with certain plastics. He said he consulted with colleagues in veterinary services and was told, “We know it can happen, but we’ve never seen it.”

Walker said a lead veterinarian in the department thought that most of the veterinary community was aware of the potential for the product to react with plastic. Walker said that he personally had not heard of such a thing before. He added, “My counsel would be, if you’re not aware, you need to be aware.”

For more information: http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/articles/472/1/Spot-On-Flea-Treatment-melts-Plastic-Crate-to-Dog/Page1.html

http://news.vin.com/vinnews.aspx?articleId=14061

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This next article showed up in my inbox just this morning.

The ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (APCC) reviewed 200,000 cases from the past two years and produced no examples of lead poisoning from pet toys. According to Dr. Sharon Gwaltney-Brant, ASPCA Vice President and Medical Director of the APCC, younger dogs, just like children, are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, but most studies reveal only tiny amounts of lead in pet toys—not a grave risk for acute or chronic lead poisoning in dogs.

“Just because it’s ‘detectable’ doesn’t necessarily make it hazardous,” says Dr. Gwaltney-Brant. “Even oxygen is toxic at the right concentration.”

Amazing…there are no regulations for the amount of anything when it comes to our pets. We need these laws changed. Now.

Here’s the full article: http://www.aspca.org/news/national/10-16-09.html

The article also touches on rawhide and the risks of that. I am going to look for a good rawhide article. That’s another huge no no!

Here’s one: http://www.millennium-ark.net/News_Files/INFO_Files/rawhide.chew.warning.html

I wasn’t home, so the hubbs had to take care of it…and he did a wonderful job! Funny how in a pinch, he can deal, but in general…no.

I got a call around 9:45 or so…and he tells me that Beans just had a seizure. My heart dropped. O.M.G!!! Not another one! We already have an epileptic dog…I cannot handle another epileptic animal! So thinking…”ok I will need to blog about this later” I asked for the details. Here’s what he told me.

• seizure was around 10 seconds total and happened at around 9:30am
• started with her screaming crying
• she was under the bed and she peed herself
• she was frothing at the mouth
• pupils were dilated/eyes huge
• paddling and twitching
• he picked her up and washed her off and she seemed ok
• little to no post ictal period

I had him call the vet and ask what to do. They said keep an eye on her and if she has another to call again and bring her in.

I was thinking in between calls and looking some things up online. I guess feline seizures aren’t as common as canine. I was thinking about environmental issues…any changes…could she have gotten into anything. No, things are the same as usual…food is the same…Topaz got into the trash over the weekend so she could have gotten into that, but being that she’s a tiny thing it probably wouldn’t be effecting her a few days later. I asked my husband to look around for anything that she could have gotten into.

While debating on whether to take her in just for some general blood tests (she was kind of sneezing this past week and has had diarrhea for the longest – and yeah, we’ve done numerous stool samples – no worms or parasites) my husband tells me that he found “two bright orange pills under the bed that were chewed on”. The only orange pills we every have had in the house are Motrin. Unfortunately, he flushed them….Arg! Men! So I don’t know for SURE what they were…but bright orange to me is Motrin.

So I have him call the vet again…they said if she chewed the pills then the seizure could have been from that and to keep an eye on her. And to no drop any more pills! heh…yeah, no problem there!

We’ll be keeping a pretty good eye on her for the next few days and will be praying this is a fluke thing and not a regular thing. I honestly cannot handle more than one epileptic animal!

And funny thing is, she seems more lovey now…don’t know if I am just noticing it, but she’s been coming to us…usually she’s one to hide.

FDA Confirms Probe of NUTRO Pet Food Deaths, Illnesses

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has confirmed that the agency is investigating NUTRO pet food, following a series of unexplained illnesses and deaths. Consumers have been complaining for more than two years that their pets have become ill after eating NUTRO products; many have recovered when they were switched to other foods. The company has steadfastly denied that its food is to blame.

 

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/04/nutro_foia.html

Almost immediately afterwards in one of the forums, the link below was posted:
http://www.wxyz.com/news/story/FDA-No-Investigation-into-NUTRO-Pet-Food/hOoE48nKOkORqDNodwN3EQ.cspx

In the comments on that page, this link was posted…which is Nutro’s response:
http://www.nutroproducts.com/quality_facts.html (it’s in the 2nd Q)

Of course, I got emails back from people who “have been feeding Nutro to their dogs for X amount of years and have never had a problem”. Good for them.

When we lost our cats in the Menu Foods recall of 2006, we had been feeding the same food for however many months and then – boom – the cat got sick and we lost him a month later.

That’s all it takes, folks.

When is the FDA going to get some control over pet food? When are they going to stop getting crappy ingrediants from God knows where and have us feeding them to our pets? When is this madness going to stop??? If real human food had killed the amount of animals that have been killed in the past few recalls, it would be ALL over the news…HUGE investigations, lawsuits would be going on. But because these are ANIMALS and NOT people…the reaction is much, much smaller and all of the hype dies down after a while.

It’s BULLSHIT! It really is.

People ask me why we feed raw…well, not only do we have a special needs pup, but I don’t think I could feed my dog commercial pet foods. I’m even leery of the natural foods anymore! I hate that we have to feed the cats commercial food. I hate worse that it’s a “grocery store” brand and not premium. But we have 4 stinking cats and it’s too much money to feed them premium foods. But I swear to God, let there be ONE recall of the brand we feed them and I’ll work something else out. I’ll make their food if I have to.

I’m not losing another animal to a pet food recall…not as long as I can afford to help it!

There’s a video on this page…check it out. it’s about half way down the page.
http://www.ilovemydogfood.com/

So back to Nutro…personally, we don’t feed it and we never will. I say buyer beware. But that’s really with any pet food anymore. Who knows what’s REALLY in the bags?

So…since I can’t do my webmaster duties for the APSFA, and I’m totally avoiding cleaning the nasty kitchen, I’ve been working on some layouts.

On the Scrapmatters blog, they have “Template Tuesdays” and they were talking about nicknames and posted a template freebie. I couldn’t wait to use that and what a cool idea because all of our animals go by their nicknames more than they do their real names!

I did Malcolm aka “Mooshy’s” for the template challenge:

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Papers & Elements by Thao Cosgrove @ Scrap Girls

Then I did Alex aka “Fanna’s” next:

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Papers & Elements from ABC Run kit by Digitreats or add on kits by various

And then I made Onyx aka “Missy Girl’s”:

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Papers & Elements by Kay Miller Designs

Here is Razzle aka “Yidda’s” page:

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Papers & Elemets from Felty Cat & Dog kits by Calico Designs
Alpha by Misschifis @ scrapmatters
Kitty tag by Major Tigger Scraps

Here’s Topaz aka “Puppa’s” page:

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Papers & Elements by Kay Miller Designs

And finally, here’s Jellybean aka “Beans” page. I wanted to make her page all girly because she is SUCH a little prissy girl. I am convinced all girl cats are this way because of her. haha

Credits:
Template by Sya @ scrapmatters
Most Paper & Elements by Jessica Edwards (glitter also)

I tried to use different pictures in these layouts because I know that I’ve been using some of the same ones over and over. You’d think with over 5 gigs of pictures on my husband and my’s picture site, I could find some different pictures to use! lol But I have my favorites!

So basically I spent the day digiscrapping! lol…actually, I did a few other things…but mainly I scrapped. It relaxes me.

I need to look up the credits for all of these and then post them. I also need to go back and post credits for the other ones that are missing them. I’ll work on that.

The theme of her blog was made by Allie with one of her kits. It’s too cute, so I went and checked out Allie’s blog and she has other themes available and also directions on how to use them. I tried to use the kitty one but the background was a little dark for me, so I decided to make my own!

Why pears? Well, it’s a long running joke from when I worked in the grocery store. I’d smell the pear wrappers…they really smell like pears!! And it just escalated from there!

So now I collect pears. My kitchen and dining room “theme” is pears and I have pears everywhere in my house. Here are a couple photos of the kitchen and dining room.

Razzle…aka Yidda in the dining room window

Our baker’s rack and my pears!

I was also supposed to do the dishes this weekend. I HATE doing the dishes. I will let them completely stack up until we don’t have any dishes clean before I do them. I know that’s nasty, and we even have a dishwasher, but I despise doing dishes. I’ll have to bite the bullet and do them one day this week. Maybe tomorrow.

What I did do today was organize my scrapbook stuff on my external hard drive and downloaded some more freebies. The organizing took a long time, but it’s worth it because everything is nice and neat now. I even downloaded a new little program to extract zip and rar files. It’s much better than Winzip. It’s called “ExtractNow” and it works really quickly and can do multiple files at once!!! Which is something that really annoyed my about Winzip. So now I can just download and extract scrappy things much much quicker. lol Lord, help me!

I made this page today:

I need to find the link where I got the template, but all of the papers are from Michi and they are a freebie mega kit called “Endless”. The ribbon on the side is also from there and the crown is from somewhere else that I’m not sure of.

Like I’ve said before I was just downloading and never saving where things came from, so most of my kits and everything, I have NO clue where they came from. Most are freebies. I didn’t change the filenames so some I can figure out. If I’m posting pages here I’ll try to figure it out so I can give credit where I can. Just assume I made NONE of the papers or embellishments because I have no clue how to even color something!!! LOL I’m learning though!

The picture is of Jellybean, aka Beans or “Missy Beans” as she’s more recently been called. I guess I should have put her name on there somewhere. She’s our only girl kitty and she’s a rescue. We adopted her from a shelter that we volunteered at for a while. Actually all but one of our cats came from that shelter. Good thing we’re not still there or we’d have many more cats!! Beans is 2 yrs old I think now and she’s just a little bitty thing. She’s been more social lately and comes out more…she used to just hide mostly.

It’s not a great thing to have so many cats in the same age range. Especially boys!!! I totally prefer boy cats to girl cats for many reasons, but they are so bad…it’s like a house full of toddlers here. They’re just into EVERYTHING and I swear, they get together at night and conspire against us!! lol

Tomorrow I’m going to make a scrapbook page using a photo of my two nephews together. It’s a silly and cute picture of them sticking their tongues out. I don’t know if I am going to put it up or not. I’m not sure if I should put their pictures out there for all to see. Maybe it doesn’t matter, so many people do it. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll probably put it on here. I’m really going to try to make a page a day…or a couple a week anyways.

Well I need to put the food I made for my breakfast tomorrow away in the fridge and my bed is calling me. I hate having no food and no money. Hopefully that stimulus check comes tomorrow!!!

The concert was tonight and it was awesome!! Our seats were great…not too far up, not too far down. The show was just great! He’s an excellent performer. I had a really good time and I think my mom did too!!!

We always listen to the “Ultimate Manilow” CD when we list things on eBay. We put it in when there’s no Christmas music on the radio or for a change from the radio. It gets us pumped and it’s a lot of upbeat songs. I couldn’t stand it in the beginning, but I’m a fan now, the album is even in my ipod.

Right now it’s 1:58am and it’s snowing like the dickens outside!! Will make for some pretty pictures in the morning! I can’t wait to take some. The dogs love the snow, they are so funny too…they prance around in it and play.

It’s Fana’s first time seeing snow too!! And maybe Malcolm and Beans. I am not sure if they saw snow at the shelter or not. Alex (Fana), Malcolm, Jellybean (Beans) and Razzle are our kitties. I may take the Fana out to put his paws in the snow. That will be funny!

Oh, and the husband will get to play with his new/used snowblower (insert Tim The Toolman’s grunt here). I’m sure he will LOVE that. Hopefully it works and everything for him, we have a lot of driveway that needs to be done.

Ohhhh!!! AND!! I almost forgot!! Another Christmas Miracle!! Kisses, another cat I NEVER thought would get adopted went home with her new someone today!!! There was this older gentleman who was looking for an adult female cat and he was at the shelter for HOURS today looking at all of our kitties. We have mostly females so there are a lot to choose from. He finally decided on Kisses!! She’s a good cat, just moody and temperamental and wants love on her own terms. But I’m SO glad he adopted her. I think it will be a good match!! I hope anyways, she needs a chance to be in a home. First Buddah, now Kisses…and omg, maybe Ariel too!!! Now if we could just get Safari adopted!

Ok…I need to get some sleep…I get to sleep in (if the dog lets me!!) tomorrow!! AND I have no where to be, so I can have a lazy-take-my-time-doing-things kind of day! PURE BLISS!

Topaz ate his breakfast AND ate his dinner!! The raw is a success! I am so happy. The lady who runs the Pet Beastro brought me in some chicken necks to try with Topaz…and he ate it right away. So either he was hungry, or he’s into it now! LOL Onyx, of course, ate hers like a pro.

Also, we had an excellent adoption at the shelter today. 15 homeless animals were adopted out into their new forever homes. We were SO busy today at the shelter!!! I’m really glad to see so many people who want to open their homes and hearts and welcome a new pet into their family. It’s awesome to watch people come in and meet their new best friends. It definitely makes me feel great to be a part of it all.

I got all of our Christmas decorations out this week. Well Todd got them from the garage for us. I went through and picked out the few things we will be putting out this year. See, my mother decorates every inch of her house…and I mean every inch. And don’t think it’s tacky because it’s really spectacular. She uses lights and a lot of vintage Christmas items, it’s just really cool. I wish I had that much stuff to decorate with, and could do it as nice as my mother does. But I’m always left with this feeling like it’s just not enough. My sisters say the same thing. It’s a curse really. lol

Anyway…I am going to put up the few things I picked out of our boxes to decorate with. We have not had a proper tree since getting topaz and now that we have 4 cats here, I am so afraid that they will climb into our tree and/or knock it down. And I don’t want to ruin all of our nice ornaments. Maybe next year we’ll get a tree and I’ll decorate with plastic bulbs. We’ll see.

Gotta go…have stuffs to do!!

Later…H