I wouldn’t put too much faith on the guardian vs. owner hype, or odds and ends of common law
related to vet malpractice suits. As close as I can tell, most of them amount to attorney
malpractice, or something close to it. Most of those appear to be related to claims for “pain
and suffering” on the part of the animal, where it seems to me the pain and suffering is on
the part of the owner. If the legal theory is pets are property, there is a ton of precedent
on loss of use, damage, unique value, “other valuable consideration”, etc.. Yes, you can go to
a shelter and pick up a cat or dog for under $100, but even at shelters, many of them place more
emphasis on the ability of the new owner to provide quality care to the pet once adopted. You can
go to the pet ads in your local classifieds and find the majority of them place more value on “to
a good home”, than on cash considerations. In other words, in typical arms length transactions
involving pets, there is a huge value placed on a pet’s well being, care, and potential for a long
and happy life. I ran across one case where the actual value was placed at $10, but the special
value was assessed at $30,000. From what I’ve seen, most of the suits announced so far don’t seem
to be focused too much in that direction, although I can’t say for sure as I haven’t read any
of the complaints. IMO, the question that has to be answered here is: In an arms length transaction,
what would one expect to pay a pet owner to poison their pet? I don’t think such a deal would allow
the buyer to get off very easy (to put it mildly). From another angle, this situation is also
beginning to establish that a pet owner will spend considerable sums to keep their companion animals
alive, even when the prognosis in incredibly grim. Plus, I think this situation is unique enough
that a lot of previous common law will not apply.

There is a lot of stuff going on that looks like nothing more than collusion to control the damage
to the responsible pet food companies. Look at all the write ups telling people to return the
evidence to the store, so it may be returned to the company for destruction. What evidence will those
people have that the cause of death was poisoned food? The vet organizations are now working on
forming a definition for evidence of poisoning, and don’t intend to release even preliminary results
for at least 6 months. For as long as that smokescreen continues, the official toll will be 16. And in
the meantime, no one appears to be looking for anything except melamine, which has been shown to
not be toxic in previous animal studies, and at levels considerably higher than anything found in the
food so far.

It’s a safe bet the Pet Connection tolls include a substantial number of pets which died of natural
causes. It’s an equally safe bet the majority of people who lost pets to poisoned food have never
heard of the Pet Connection and wouldn’t enter their information even if they had. What we do know
is that 60 million servings of poison were on store shelves for close to 6 months. The propaganda
that only 1% of the pet food supply was affected is obvious nonsense. You can go into any store and
see the affected products take up considerably more than 1% of the shelf space. But, for the sake of
argument, let’s use the 1% number. If there are 170 million dogs and cats in the US, 1% fed poisoned
food comes to 1.7 million animals.

The thing I find most amazing is that Menu Foods in not trading as a penny stock. If only 6% of the
affected pet owners prevail in a suit, Menu Foods will be bankrupt.

Thank you for your thoughtful posting. The patent app. is a wonderful find and hope you are forwarding it to research labs. I don’t think we should take for granted that they have the time to do a full sweep of research such as this.

I agree that we have more hope of honest investigation coming through class action lawsuits and the legal system, imperfect as it is. On one of the blogs, someone posted a list of the many incorporated cities in which residents are legally considered as pet guardians rather than pet owners. Class action lawsuits with plaintiffs that are protected by these laws stand to make a much bigger impact financially on the defendants, pet food-related companies and even the FDA. The results of such litigation could lead to fundamental change if the class action lawyers don’t intimidate their plaintiff class into settling without making their investigative findings public. In other words, pet owners, if you become plaintiffs in one of these class actions, dont’ take the early money offered in settlement to make you go away. Insist that the findings become part of the public record.

This is also of interest: http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5022917.html

It’s a patent claiming melamine increases the toxicity and longevity of a wide variety of poisons.
Fungus, plants, insects, rodents, you name it, the patent doesn’t explain why melamine makes poisons
more poisonous, but claims observations have shown that to be the case. I don’t know how much faith
can be put in patent claims, but it might explain what we’re seeing. For example, melamine which isn’t
especially toxic by itself, might be causing a laundry list of trace toxins in other ingredients to
be more deadly than they would be otherwise.

IMO, this whole gluten-melamine hype is a smoke screen to hide what goes on in the rendering plants.
In the mean time, it looks like the pet food lobbyists have taken over the “investigation” and the
politicians are lining up to collect their usuals. At this stage I think we can abandon any hope of
an honest investigation, unless it’s conducted by class action attorneys. Of course, these days, the
judges are even more corrupt than DC politicians. It’s kind of sad when lawyers are likely to be more
honest and trustworthy than those elected and appointed to positions of trust.

Note Mal’s posting of an FDA warning to Iams and Eukanuba re: their weight management products on her Apr. 16th, 7 a.m. posting on the preceding blog (Pet food recall: Looking forward, looking back. She links to this which is now on an FDA site that isn’t presently operable:

FDA warns about additive for obese pets

// 30 mar 2007

The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning letter to pet food maker Iams Co. about an additive in some of its products for overweight dogs and cats.

The letter, dated Jan. 8 and recently posted on the FDA website, said that several Eukanuba-brand dry and canned pet food products made by Iams, a unit of Procter & Gamble Co., contain chromium tripicolinate, which is allowed as a source of supplemental chromium only in swine feed.

The company will take chromium tripicolinate out of future formulations of its Eukanuba Veterinary Diets Optimum Weight Control and Restricted-Calorie dry and canned products for obese dogs or cats, spokesman Kurt Iverson said. He said the FDA had not ordered a recall of the products.

Safety
Because chromium tripicolinate has not been tested for safety in dog and cat food, products containing the chemical are considered adulterated under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, the FDA letter said. The letter issued by the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine also said Iams had earlier tried to demonstrate that chromium tripicolinate is non-genotoxic, but the agency determined that data submitted by the company did not sufficiently address its safety concerns.

I think maybe it was Laura but not sure…