pet connection

Sometimes being a pet writer kind of sucks, because when a girl’s out with a bunch of other journalists, well… we don’t get no respect.

But sometimes we get to eat at Chez Panisse. That’s what happened to me when I interviewed Marion Nestle and Mal Nesheim about their new book — “Feed Your Pet Right” (Simon and Schuster Free Press, May 2010) — over one of the best lunches I’ve ever had — goat cheese salad and a beautiful Moroccan chicken from Soul Food Farms.

And cherries and cappuccino for dessert. I mean, this is why I went to journalism school.

The fact that we had a fantastic free-range discussion of “Feed Your Pet Right,” their experience researching it, and some of the aftermath of its publication was just  the (totally organic) icing on the (sustainably produced) cake.

Marion told me this book was originally supposed to be a chapter in her book “What to Eat,” which took shoppers on a tour of a supermarket’s aisles and helped them understand food labels, health claims and, well… what to eat.

But the book was already getting too long, so the chapter didn’t make it. And it was a good thing, too, because when Marion looked at the labels on the pet food in the grocery store, her Ph.D. in human nutrition was absolutely no help to her in understanding them. For that, she turned to her partner, Mal Nesheim, who has a Ph.D. in animal nutrition. From my column today in the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com:

If it strikes anyone as odd that even a Ph.D. human nutritionist had to consult a Ph.D. animal nutritionist to understand a pet food label, there’s a reason for that. “Compared to the human food industry, the pet food industry is is much, much less transparent,” Nestle says. “They are awash in secrecy.”

She adds, “It’s an enormously profitable business with no organized consumer base in the way that you have with human food. After all, their food is fed to dogs and cats, who can’t pick up the telephone and call the companies.”

Most pet owners, Nestle says, are no more able than she was to understand a pet food label.

“They don’t know what the whole ‘complete and balanced” thing means, or what most of the information on the label means,” she says. “It’s all inexplicable to them.”

That’s not all, Nesheim says. “There are all these products out there, and pet owners don’t realize just how many of them are being made by the same companies, but sold under different brand names. Nestle, Purina, Mars — these companies make dozens and dozens of brands, and the lists of ingredients are just not that different from each other — although the prices, and the marketing campaigns, often are.”

The lack of transparency made “Feed Your Pet Right” a much harder book to research than its human counterpart. For instance, many pet food manufacturers refused to let them into their facilities.

“Although the ones that let us in were all right,” says Nesheim. “Hills, Bravo — they impressed us. The Waltham plant in England (owned by Mars) was wonderful. The dogs spend their days interacting with the staff, and there are people on the payroll whose entire job is to play with and walk the dogs.”

I ask if he assumed the companies that wouldn’t let them in — which included Purina and Procter and Gamble — had something to hide. “Either that, or they were afraid of animal rights groups,” he says. “There are lots of questions being asked about animal testing, including on pet food, and I think a lot of them are frightened of that.”

Read it here — including what they think about home-prepared and raw diets.

Photo: Marion Nestle and Mal Nesheim at Chez Panisse.

Share & Enjoy

Facebook	Twitter	Google Buzz	Digg
Technorati	StumbleUpon	Delicious	Email

The FDA and National Institutes of Health (NIH) rolled out their food safety reporting portal yesterday. And just like the Ark, the animals were on board.

The new website allows consumers, veterinarians as well as members of industry, government or the human public health system to report food safety problems, as well as problems with animal drugs.  In fact, it implies it’s our patriotic duty to do so:

The Safety Reporting Portal (SRP) streamlines the process of reporting product safety issues to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Whatever your role, (manufacturer, health care professional, researcher, public health official, or concerned citizen), when you submit a safety report through this Portal, you make a vital contribution to the safety of America’s food supply, medicines, and other products that touch us all.

I honestly have no idea if this is going to improve food and drug safety in the United States. But I have to say that not only the fact that food and drugs for animals are included in such a matter-of-fact way, but that the connection of the human and animal food systems is clearly acknowledged, is encouraging.

Go kick it around, tell us what you think!

Share & Enjoy

Facebook	Twitter	Google Buzz	Digg
Technorati	StumbleUpon	Delicious	Email

I’m at Omnivore Books in San Francisco, liveblogging Marion Nestle and Mal Nesheim’s reading of their new book, “Feed Your Pet Right.”

Reminder about liveblogging: This is really live, so there will be typos. Only things in quotation marks are direct quotes; everything else is a paraphrase or close approximation. I’ll come back later and add links.

I’ve also created a Twitter hashtag for the event, #feedyourpet. You can watch that for my Tweets and probably other people’s, too.

This is being done in real-time, so hit refresh to see the newest material. When I’m done I’ll go back and tuck this all behind a jump, so as not to mess up the blog.

Here we go!

(more…)

Share & Enjoy

Facebook	Twitter	Google Buzz	Digg
Technorati	StumbleUpon	Delicious	Email

I’ve been trying to pretend the Delta Society, the nation’s leading therapy dog organization, hadn’t just issued a ban on participation by dogs fed a raw diet. Because honestly, after 24 years of feeding raw meat, eggs and dairy products to my dogs and cats with not a single food-borne illness or nutritional problem, I’m just plain tired of this debate.

And it’s not like I haven’t written about this topic before.

The person who pried my head out of the sand on this was my longtime friend Lew Olson, who owns and founded the K-9 Nutrition e-mail list. Lew assembled an encyclopedic list of links on the subject of pathogenic bacteria and raw foods. Some of them address the issue of widespread contamination of processed foods, primarily kibble, which will come as no surprise to anyone here. Others have to do with the fact that most dogs and cats who carry salmonella have no symptoms of it — which is actually a bit off the point of Delta’s concern, but interesting.

She even had some studies on humans transmitting salmonella to dogs. Go figure.

But without question, this Powerpoint presentation was my favorite of her links. It’s a slideshow from the University of Guelph in Canada, purporting to show how scary raw diets are from a deadly pathogen point of view. I have to wonder if they even looked at their own data, though, because, well… you look at it:

Sure, the raw fed dogs have higher counts of salmonella and e. coli, and their numbers are lower so that’s even more significant. But MRSA, clostridium, and vancomycin-resistant enterococci are higher in the kibble-fed dogs.

And obviously, perfectly healthy dogs, raw-fed or kibble-fed, can have salmonella and other pathogenic bacteria in their systems.

Now, I know the raw feeding movement is hard for a lot of people to understand. I know that veterinarians are concerned about food safety (although I wish they’d be concerned enough to get their colleagues in large animal practice to get the poop out of the food supply in the first place instead of haranguing us about the food we prepare in our own kitchens, but I digress), and I know that plenty of people with therapy dogs figure that it’s better to be safer than sorry and the raw feeders should just take one for the team.

But does the Delta Society, which has fought so hard to get access for therapy dogs to people in hospitals and nursing homes, really want to go down this path? Selectively counting cooties in the dogs’ poop?

Do they honestly believe a living creature, let alone one that regularly licks its own butt, is ever going to be sterile?

As Lew said:

My concern is that, in your hurry to label the raw diet as the culprit, and eliminate its use by your volunteers in your program, you are only putting the spotlight on the issue that all dogs can carry pathogens regardless of diet. This could cause all dogs to be banned from any health facility. In essence, I see your new rule as shooting yourself in the foot.  Salmonella is everywhere, including dry dog food, the soil, pond water and even in humans. You are looking at narrow parameters that need a more careful and extensive study on how pathogens are spread and how to use sensible and effective precautions to prevent the spread of disease-causing microbes and parasites.

[That would include] bathing the dogs, insuring therapy dogs are flea and tick free, making sure the dogs are properly exercised (ie pottied) before a visit, and carrying sterilization equipment (bleach, bags and paper towels) in case of an accident.

All research points out pathogens are spread by stool or saliva. That would mean not allowing the dogs to lick the clients, making sure the coats and skin are recently bathed and trusting your volunteers.

Your volunteers are the backbone of your organization, and they do this loving volunteer work without compensation and give the Delta group thousands of volunteer hours. I hope you take this email in the light it was written, in that sometimes, we need to look at any situation with more study and thought, and understand the healing, joy and encouragement dogs give so many people. Being a patient with serious illness and being away from home often stifles recovery. Pets, as you know, bring hope, happiness and support to begin the process of healing.

I hope you rethink your position on this matter, and continue to allow your therapy dog work to bring joy to both your clients and your volunteers.

Of course, Delta can have any rules or requirements they wish; they’re a private organization. But what troubles me is the focus not on outbreaks of pet or human illness but on simple bacterial counts.

When I wrote the post about “poop on the food” I linked to above, it was because I saw a vet conference presentation on the impossibility of safely cleaning the bowls used to feed raw meats to our dogs. It seems that research has shown that not even running them through the sanitize cycle of the dishwasher, can remove all bacteria from the dishes.

I asked then, as I ask now, “Then how can I ever make a meatloaf or marinate a chicken?” But I also have to ask this question: So what?

Are the bacterial levels on a dog bowl or mixing dish that once held raw meat or eggs. or the traces left behind on the carpets or other surfaces of a nursing home after the visit of a raw-fed dog, likely to cause any kind of disease outbreak? In other words, yes, the bacteria are there; are they dangerous? Or just present?

Does the presence of dogs who eat raw diets increase the risk of disease or harm over that of dogs who eat kibble (and lick their behinds)?

Can we actually look at that question before banning these trained dogs and their dedicated owners from this valuable and respected program?

Photo: My Deerhound Lillie, who lived to the ripe old age of 12 and a half, outliving all her kibble-fed littermates, while eating a raw diet, drinking out of streams and licking her butt.

Share & Enjoy

Facebook	Twitter	Google Buzz	Digg
Technorati	StumbleUpon	Delicious	Email

On the plane back from Orlando to California, an article in the New York Times magazine on how companies handle bad news on their Web sites caught my attention.

The unwillingness to part with critical information on life-threatening matters has long been something we’ve ripped companies for here. From the very beginning of the 2007 pet food recall, too many companies did their best to hide information, leading to countless pets becoming sick and dying when they did not have to, because their owners and their veterinarians were unaware of recalls.

The Friday night dump-and-run recall releases were so common we mocked them. Most memorably, there was the time when we were in an FDA media teleconference and the FDA folks definitively stated there were no additional recalls, opened up for questions and were gobsmacked when Christie asked them about a recall we had just gotten wind of and the FDA didn’t even know about.

In a panic, the FDA cut the feed.  Came back on a little later and confirmed our information, which turned up on that company’s Web site much later, and in a hard-to-find place.

This shameful corporate behavior isn’t limited to the pet industry. Companies have a big a problem when it comes to saying, “We’re sorry.”

Or indeed even just saying, “We’ve got a problem.”

From the NYT:

The [post-recall] Maclaren home page is dominated by a wide shot of adults, evidently employees of the company, in country-casual clothes posing on a green knoll before three knotty climbing trees. Not a [baby] stroller in sight. [...] Over the heads of these “family members” — as the employees are known in the blurbs — are rotating banners that comprise a weird, Churchillian incantation. “For all those who trust us, we say we are grateful,” it starts, sensibly enough. But then the weirdness sets in:

“For all those who believe we saved a life, we say that is our ultimate reward.

“For all those who believe we have caused them pain, we say we are sorry.

“For all those who shun us, we say look around, check the facts, be objective.

“For everyone else we say, we strive for excellence and we all stand together to achieve it.”

Then the kicker, in italics: “And . . . for all those who copy us, we are delighted that our past inspires your future.”

Oh, come on. The classic insincere apology (“Those who believe we have caused them pain”) and the nonsense heroics about lifesaving and then the jab at competitors! Petulance and paranoia: only someone way too emotionally involved with Maclaren’s reputation — and not a corporate P.R. firm — could have made such a hash of damage control.

Read the rest, including an evaluation of Toyota’s ham-fisted efforts at online damage control.

Really, makes you want to go around dope-slapping every exec who ever signed off on this crap, every lawyer who ever insisted on it, and every PR pro who ever suggested it.

Tell the truth. Tell it now. And tell it loud. Nothing else is acceptable.  Nothing. Not when lives are at stake.

Share & Enjoy

Facebook	Twitter	Google Buzz	Digg
Technorati	StumbleUpon	Delicious	Email