Are you worried about what your dog has been eating these days? Your cat?
If I were you I’d be more worried about what you are eating. Because you are also on the bottom of the food chain along with Fido and Frisky.
Menu Foods, that once invisible Canadian corporation behind the majority of pet feed produced today, has been poisoning pets for close to two months now, and there’s still no end in sight.
Only two weeks ago more cat and dog foods were dragged down from the shelves.
How did this begin?
Here’s the story according to consumeraffairs.com.
On February 20th, Menu Foods began receiving what soon became a flood of complaints about dead and dying pets. Rather than testing the first victims, on February 27th Menu Foods began force feeding healthy cats and dogs with the suspected feed.
One out of six died.
On February 26th and 27th the CFO of Menu Foods sold $102,900 of his shares.
When asked about this he replied: “It’s a horrible coincidence, yes….”
On March 12 Menu Foods admitted the food was toxic.
Finally, on March 16 it recalled 60 million products of ‘wet’ dog and cat feed.
This was a Friday — the weekday notorious for minimum press coverage of a news release.
Initially, 95 brands were pulled, ranging from the cheapest to the most expensive.
That’s when the dog puke hit the fan.
The shocked public suddenly realized their expensive, heavily-advertised, scientifically-formulated, designer dog and cat foods were made by the same outfit that brewed the cheap junk on the next shelf.
It gets worse.
On March 22nd, the CEO told reporters: “all the tests that we have done to date have indicated there is nothing wrong with the product.”
No mention was made of the test that killed approximately 17 per cent of the cats and dogs (at least nine cats and one dog had died by then).
PETA called for criminal investigations into Menu Foods.
On March 23rd Menu Foods announced, oops, there was some rat poison in there.
Sorry.
By March 30th, the US Food and Drug Administration acknowledged it had received more than 8,000 complaints about the feed.
Menu Foods admits to 300,000.
The newspapers and the media are filled with reports that the Menu Foods phone line is busy (I’ll bet it said: “Your call is important to us.”) and the internet site near-useless for contacting the multinational.
The FDA still refused to order a pet food recall. However, it did announce that Menu Foods was incorrect about the rat poison.
It was actually Melamine, another toxic chemical.
It appears the melamine arrived in approximately 900,000 kilograms of wheat gluten from China.
This is all part of globalization and free trade. We ship them our good jobs which they turn into near-slave labour, and then ship us back their contaminated feeds.
What has Menu Foods offered stricken pet owners who fear they’ve been ruining their pets’ kidneys for the past two months? They’ll pay the vet bills (with proof of purchase).
When asked about the panic and potentially sickening an estimated 39,000 cats and dogs, Martha Wilder, executive director of the Pet Food Association of Canada, said: “Supply chain issues do happen. Mercifully, they happen very, very little in pet food.”
This will make those 39,000 pet owners feel more comfortable.
Then, beautifully, she noted that tainted food recalls for humans are much more common.
That’s right, if the multinationals are poisoning us at an alarming rate with their factory farm products, why get in a sweat about Fido?
Not long ago I watched the documentary film Frankensteer which in one scene displayed mile upon mile of monstrous feedlots filled with cattle, sometimes up to their bellies in excrement, being stuffed with genetically modified corn and other grains blended with chicken offal.
The potential for feed contamination is extensive, especially when you consider the testimony at the Robert Pickton pig farm trial or the famous Montreal incident of vets selling dead pets to a rendering plant to be converted into pet and livestock feed.
A man servicing machines at one rendering plant claims to have witnessed barrels of euthanized pets, cattle, and road kill waiting to be boiled down and slopped into the enormous screws of the grinder.
Should pets be fed diseased pets?
In England, Bernard Mathews Turkeys displays pictures of happy turkeys in rolling English fields on its packaging.
When it was struck with avian flu it was investigated for processing illegal turkey parts from Hungary, despite a quarantine, and 160,000 of its own turkeys, raised in crammed and windowless sheds in Suffolk, had to be euthanized.
This fatal strain of avian flu originated in filthy bird factories near Hong Kong, and it’s suspected fish farmers transferred the disease to wild birds when they began feeding their fish by spraying contaminated excrement from the chicken factories onto their ponds.
Meanwhile, how does our government protect us?
By encouraging big agri-business and introducing onerous health regulations designed to crush local small farming.
Next year in Canada all traditional neighbourhood raising and slaughtering of chickens, beef, pork, and lamb will be illegal.
Farmers will be forced to send their hand-raised livestock to the ‘approved’ slaughterhouses.
Strangely, it’s almost exactly 100 years since that intrepid American president, Teddy Roosevelt, initiated the anti-trust laws which broke apart the food processing cartels of his time. (These laws were later dismantled by President Ronald Reagan in order to create today’s monopolies.)
Roosevelt’s crusade against the monopolies began immediately after he read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a terrifying chronicle of the Chicago Stockyards which processed 82 per cent of all meat in the US.
These slimy, rat-infested slaughterhouses often ground up their workers along with the beef, and they liked to brag they processed “every part of the pig except the squeal.”
Today’s food-supply chains are now killing your puppies and kittens, and they will be poisoning your children next.
Come to think of it, maybe they already are poisoning your children.