The way I read your article Ben Huh is still connected to the itchmoforums and blog, but I heard that he had sold it to some of the forum members last summer. If you can shed any light on this, I’d appreciate it. I think its good to know who is financing websites that pet lovers might see as sources of pet food safety and quality information.

(That is why I appreciate the transparency of Pet Connection.)

Thanks!

Thank you to blogs like you (and me) who are getting the word out. Keep putting the reality out there, create our news network that reaches as many pet owners as possible.

Wag more and expect each next moment to be great… just like my two dogs! :)

No, it won’t.

Shelters still need pet food. So do rescues. So do people who lack the funds, the time, the energy, or the ability to make their own pet food - none of whom deserve, any more than you or I, to have their pets sicken or die because of commercial food.

But I have talked to a great many in the agency and researched a whole lot more. This is an agency with a strong tradition of saving lives going back to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and that culture is still in there, battered nearly to death by the “gov’t is bad/drown it in a bathtub” attitude the big corporations have been able to sell since Reagan told his “I’m from the government, I’m here to help” joke.

The man knew how to deliver a line, true, but I gotta tell you that I believe the FDA’s problems would be fixed in large part with some enforcement powers. Right now, they can’t force a company to recall anything except infant formula, which is why we see this “voluntary recall” crap. They’re ALL voluntary, because the FDA can’t legally act in the public interest.

You want to see how far we’ve come and how bad it was WITHOUT government protection, I have a great read for you — entertaining and eye-opening as hell. Get a copy of “The Poisoner’s Handbook” by my friend Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize-winning science writer who’s now a professor of journalism at the U of Wisc.

Every chapter tells a story about people who died because of corporate malfeasance, including young immigrant women who painted watch faces with radium. Until public health agencies were given the power to say, “NO!” employers swatted these workers aside and wouldn’t even pay for their burials. And other companies sold poison, and knew it.

So yeah, the FDA needs to reclaim its legacy. But the fault is in almost 30 years of the systematic dismantling of government watchdogs by corporations who don’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line.

Make the FDA whole and then let it do its work.

There will ALWAYS be a need for watchdogs like us. But there’s also a need for government to draw a line that companies cannot cross, profit or no.

Let’s hope that when we check in a year from now the answer to both of those questions is “yes.”
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I just don’t see it. The FDA has been a largely impotent, inattentive agency for decades. They act when they’re clubbed over the head, and threatened with being de-funded into oblivion. Additionally, Congress won’t lift a finger until some massive industry crisis (involving more than one isolated, bad corporate actor) forces their hand. Even then, we all know the food industry forces (whether people or pet-related) will fight reform hammer and tong, just as insurance agencies are fighting health care reform today.

It’s going to take a Menu recall on steroids. For change to take place, the media and gov’t will have to see many people sickened (or, sadly, buried). Big change doesn’t happen without crisis.

In the meantime, WE are the ones who will make the difference. We who care, who research, who watch carefully, who speak up, who fight, and who don’t take no for an answer.

In other words, Christie, Gina, and everyone who has heard the alarm since.

Also, I predict the next (additional)pet food ingredients we really need to worry about are “bakery product” and “dried milk product”.

These raw ingredients are used extensively in the pet food industry (generally they are listed on the ingredient label) and are being found to be contaminated with Melamine in things like chocolate, candies, formula and drink mixes. If these raw ingredient are contaminating human food products, they’ll be found in pet food as well.