March 20, 2007
KEEPING YOUR PET SAFE BY . . . ANIMAL TESTING?
When I first read the headline "Test Of Pet Food Kills 7, FDA Says", I was going to make fun of the WNBC site where I found it. By leaving out the word "That" between "Kills" and "7", they're saying that the tests are what's killing people's pets and not the tainted pet food. My apologies to WNBC's copy writers because that is pretty much what they are saying. Turns out that the procedure for testing suspected poisonous food is to feed it to dogs and cats and then see how many of them die. That's what Menu Foods, the maker of pet food under 48 different brands, did when it first started receiving complaints that pets' post-meal naps were becoming permanent. The company had to see this for itself and conducted a test by feeding the suspect food to 40-50 dogs and cats, seven of which died.
WNBC's article has another small fact that may drive pet owners and animal lovers absolutely batshit crazy: after Menu Foods concluded that their food was capable of killing one out of seven animals that ingested it, the company waited several weeks to initiate a recall. Trial lawyers across the country must get positively light-headed giddy when they read something like that.
I predict that this Menu Foods pet food fiasco will within the year be a Harvard Business School case study on how to plunge a corporation irretrievably into a shitstorm so intense and all-encompassing that you may as well burn the whole thing to the ground and take the insurance money to Brazil or Cuba, or some other country without an extradition treaty. You think tobacco execs are reviled? Menu Foods execs are going to be held responsible for poisoning puppies and kittens!
NB: You have to give WNBC bonus points for including a sidebar in its article with links to its "Cutest Pet" and "Cutest Kitten" slideshows, among others.
Posted by Lexiphane at March 20, 2007 6:48 AM
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