pet connection

Anyone who was around here during the 2007 pet food recall is familiar with Itchmo, one of the other blogs that investigated and reported on the story when the traditional media was ignoring it (and its implications).

Itchmo went silent shortly after the recall ended, although its forums continue to provide an important resource for pet owners interested in the safety of the food they buy for their cats and dogs.

Itchmo was the project of Ben and Emily Huh, and what they did after they put their blog on hiatus is the subject of my current column for SFGate.com:

Even if you’re not a cat lover, if you know which button to push to turn on your computer you’re probably familiar with ICanHasCheezburger.com.

It’s the wildly popular Internet meme factory that takes quirky, user-submitted kitty photos, lets other users add equally quirky captions in a special language known as LOLspeak, and uploads them for the amusement of millions of users each month.

Ben Huh is the guy behind LOLcats and the vast network of sites that grew out of it, including its canine cousin I Has a Hot Dog and the ultimate archive of communications disasters, FAILblog.

[....]

“My background is in journalism, and I still think there’s a need for a really good animal news aggregation blog,” he said. “But what Emily and I found when the recall was over is that most of the pet news out there is sad and upsetting. It didn’t jive with the world I knew from living with a dog, which is that it’s happy. Getting a dog was one of the happiest things I’d ever done in my life.”

When ICanHasCheezburger came along, the two philosophies just matched, he said. “This is about pets and it’s about happiness. I can do this long term. This makes sense to me.”

You can read the whole story here. 

Photo of Ben Huh taken at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin by Clint Gilders.

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No food or drug can ever be made 100 percent safe, and that’s a fact.

I’m OK with that, because life can’t ever be made 100 percent safe, and that’s a fact, too. Honestly, who would want life to be 100 percent safe? Not me, for sure, because that would be awfully damn dull.

I know that even under the best of circumstances food will occasionally be contaminated and need to be recalled. I can forgive a company for that, although my level of forgiveness will vary depending on how likely the company was to know that there was a problem, and how much of the resulting problem was due to accident, or to a decision after doing the math that a few dead pets (or people) weren’t worth the cost of making changes.

When there is a problem, though, I expect — no, I demand — that a company make a real, true and honest effort to let everyone know about it, not dump-and-run a media release late on a Friday night. I want the information front and center on  company’s Web site, and I want to see that the company is making at least as big an effort to get bad product back as they did to market their goods in the first place.

And then I want a company to be honest about what happened, how it happened, and have a plan for getting the problem fixed so the problem — at least not that problem — won’t happen again.

With all that in mind, I say this: Nature’s Variety is a case in point of how to handle a recall right.

They never hid their recall notices — always the first thing you saw on their Web site.  They reached out to retailers, purchasers, media and bloggers to make sure the word got out. And now, they’ve reviewed their internal manufacturing process and are making changes:

… Nature’s Variety now uses High Pressure Pasteurization on our Raw Frozen Diets as a unique process to kill pathogenic bacteria through high-pressure, water-based technology. Having incorporated this state-of-the-art technology on our Freeze Dried Raw products in late 2009, we were able to confidently implement the process universally on all Raw Frozen Diets after the February 11, 2010 recall in order to further enhance food safety. Nature’s Variety also utilizes a test and hold protocol to ensure that all High Pressure Pasteurized Raw Frozen Diets test negative for harmful bacteria before being released for sale.

Let’s repeat that:

Nature’s Variety also utilizes a test and hold protocol to ensure that all High Pressure Pasteurized Raw Frozen Diets test negative for harmful bacteria before being released for sale.

You know what makes me sad? That this sort of thing is news, not standard operating procedure in the food industry.  I have hope, though, that it increasingly will be. Or that we can make sure it will be, by law.

In the meantime, kudos to Nature’s Variety for behaving in such an overtly responsible way.

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About a decade ago, not long after walking away from a job at a well-respected daily newspaper — a move that seemed insane at the time but not so much now — I walked away from the second real job of my life, running the Pet Care Forum on AOL as part of the Veterinary Information Network.

I had a $30,000 book advance in my back pocket, a regular gig at Pets.com and a six-month lease for a beach house on Alligator Point, Fla., at the point where a line dropped southwest from Tallahassee and northeast from Apalachicola would intersect. We weren’t talking a beach condo, either, but an old-style Florida family weekend house, a simple wood-frame structure heavy on bayfront windows and decking. The little blue house was perched precariously on wooden stilts with so much give in them that the entire place shook during the spin cycle of the washing machine, which had been named for a relatively mild hurricane that had had a similar effect.

My house may have been on Alligator Point, but to the U.S. Postal Service, I lived in Panacea. Looking back, that seems about right.

But no matter: I had my dogs, my van, a handful of books, some music CDs, a couple week’s worth of clothes and a Sony laptop. I was never going to have a day job again.

Well … ha!

Pets.com collapsed not long after my arrival, its sock puppet one of its only assets, along with the work I did for them, which was sold to a Microsoft content site and still pops up now and then. (The sock puppet was last seen working for a used-car dealer.)

I finished the one book, wrote second editions of two others, continued with my  syndicated newspaper column and waited for news on the new book proposals. After a few months I realized I would have to go back to the empty house in Sacramento that I was still paying the mortgage on.

Shortly after 9/11, I knew the economy and the publishing industry weren’t going to be anything like normal for months to come, so I did what every unemployed writer/editor/journalist does in a town like Sacramento: I took a government job.

It was a good fit, for the most part. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is a customer-owned electric utility with a history of public service,  a product of the state’s progressive era, when civic-minded advocates broke the monopoly of the Robber Barons who ran the railroads and were gearing up to run the new electric and gas utilities. In more recent times, SMUD had become world-famous for renewable energy — solar, wind, biofuel, electric transportation and more — and, to a lesser extent, for mothballing a nuclear plant after a public vote. Who knew infrastructure could be so much fun?

My boss had a relaxed attitude and an infectious, honking laugh, and my co-workers were funny, smart and committed to public service. The gorgeous 1950s headquarters building had been ruined inside by the addition of beige “Dilbert”-style cubicles that blocked the light and made the place gloomy, at best, but the grounds were beautiful and every day I got to touch a 1959 Wayne Thiebaud mural as I walked in — and I almost always did, right at his tile “signature.”  For a public-service-oriented policy wonk like me, it was a great place to be.

And it it still is, but as of last Friday, I’m not there.

The Tuesday previous, I woke up and quit. Well, technically, I retired so I could be able to buy group health insurance, but the end result was the same. I’m outta there.

Of course, the seeds of change had been sown a while back, starting when Dr. Becker and I formally became writing partners, 11 (soon to be 13) books ago. Those seeds were watered by the 2007 pet-food recall, and warmed by the greater opportunities Christie and I gained from our  post-recall blogging cred, and with better, more prestigious and, well, better-paying writing gigs. That, and I have a burning desire to be a part of the sustainable, more humane agriculture movement, the heart of which beats in the Capay Valley, one county to the west of me.

The pet-food recall changed my life. I knew it would from the beginning, when Christie and I immediately realized it wasn’t a “pet story” at all, but one about an industrial  food-delivery system for pets and people gone off the rails.  I wanted to report on it, and I wanted to be part of fixing it. And I also, of course, wanted to keep writing about pets.

By any sensible measure, the decision to leave SMUD is a bad one, but truth is any of my co-workers would tell you with a smile that I was always a square peg in the round hole of civil service.

So it’s  time to put the sensible behind me once again. Besides, I don’t have much time to worry: Dr. B and I have a book due May 1 and another due  six months after that. And two more articles for Parade due within two weeks, and a weekly syndicated news feature due Monday.

This time, I hope I’m really on my way.

Top: Ben (died 2005) and Heather (d. 2009) at Alligator Point, Fla., January of 2001. Bottom: The award-winning SMUD headquarters building (Dreyfuss and Blackford). Here’s another view of this splendid building, which is awaiting California Office of Historic Preservation for being  “a virtually pristine example of the International/Miesian style of post-WWII Modernism.”

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This evening, Friday, Feb. 19, at 9 PM Eastern Time, Dr. Marion Nestle will be speaking live via streaming audio with Pet Connection’s  Christie Keith about her recent visit to the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine and the present and future of pet food in America.

Dr. Nestle is one of the leading voices in the movement to reform how we deal with food and nutrition in this country. She is the Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and a visiting professor in the College of Agriculture’s nutritional sciences division at Cornell University. She branched out into covering pet food issues with her book about the 2007 pet food recall, Pet Food Politics, and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on feeding pets in America.

Speaking with Dr. Nestle will be Christie Keith, who has a few stories of her own to tell about the FDA and pet health and safety.

The interview with be via streaming audio, and you’ll be able to comment and ask questions in a text-based chat room. Pet Connection readers can also post their questions here.

To join the chat: Registered users of PetHobbyist.com log in here. If you’re not registered, log in as a guest here and select “Auditorium” from the drop down menu!

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Today’s the day that Sally and Stephen Miller, owners of ChemNutra, Inc., the company that imported the melamine-laden protein powder that led to the 2007 pet food recall, and the illness and death of tens of thousands of dogs and cats, will be sentenced.

But if you were hoping for justice or even just tough love, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Via reader Sandi Shaw, from the government’s sentencing memorandum (PDF):

Sentencing is scheduled for Friday, February 5, 2010, at 10:00 a.m. before United States Magistrate Judge John T. Maughmer. As more fully explained below, the Government recommends that the Court adopt the agreement of the parties and impose a sentence of three years probation on each defendant, to include certain conditions of probation for each defendant, all as set forth and agreed to by the parties in the plea agreement.

The government concludes the Millers were at fault, and what they did caused great harm:

Because of the neglect of these defendants, because they failed to exercise foresightand vigilance, the public suffered greatly. Thousands of innocent pets became seriously ill and many suffered death. It is impossible to talk about this case without realizing that the defendant’s criminal conduct posed and caused substantial physical injuries, death, and psychological injuries.

Seems the Millers are still balking at the charges, even though they’ve pled guilty to them — and the government’s not very happy about that:

The defendants pled guilty to misdemeanor violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). Particularly in this case, the nature, circumstances, and seriousness of misbranding and adulteration crimes go far beyond the misdemeanor label that is attached to them.

And this:

Every factual objection [they are making] can be traced to one or more allegations in the indictment which the defendants either admitted was true or agreed could be used to determine their sentence.By raising these objections, the defendants could be viewed as being in breach of the terms of the plea agreement. In case of breach, the Government is released from its obligations under the agreement, the defendants remain bound by their guilty pleas, and the defendants are sentenced without the benefit of the promises made by the Government.

[....]

(T)he defendants have never admitted that they knowingly imported wheat gluten that was misbranded and adulterated with melamine.

In fact, the Government does not contend and does not ask the Court to conclude that the defendants had actual knowledge that the imported wheat gluten was adulterated with melamine.

But the fact that the defendants did not actually know that the imported wheat gluten was adulterated with melamine does not prevent the Court, or anyone else for that matter, from concluding that the defendants acted recklessly or with more than mere negligence.

There’s a lot more, including an overview of just how and why the Millers should have been able to detect and prevent this tragedy. It makes for some rough reading.

I don’t know what the actual sentence will be, but I’m pretty sure it will be along the lines laid out in the memorandum: Probation, and a small fine. That’s it.

And the Millers still have their friends, too. Plenty of them sent letters (here and here) to the court  testifying to what good, righteous, honest, religious, upstanding citizens the Millers are. Not a word about what happened to the people and pets affected by the adulteration of the alleged wheat gluten with melamine — but lots of sad stories about how hard this has been on the Millers.

Who are, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know, back in the food ingredient importing business already.

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