The Pet Food Recall That Wouldn't Die

Melamine, cyanuric acid, aminopterin, amilorine, amiloride, and now acetaminophen. What is this stuff doing in pet food anyway, and what else have they simply not reported yet?

According to Pet Connection, the FDA is investigating imported Chinese wheat gluten, corn gluten, corn meal, soy protein, rice bran and rice protein concentrate, in both the human- and pet-food systems. These products are widely used in human food production, in breads, pastas, "meat"-substitutes, pizza, baby formula, protein drinks and bars and more. The tainted pet food has also been fed to hogs, poultry and farmed fish.

The first recall had more than 60 million containers of cuts and gravy style food that turned out to have wheat gluten tainted with melamine, which is used in the manufacture of plastic countertops, cleaning agents, glue and fertilizer. The products were all made by Menu Foods under almost 100 different brand names at all price points. Subsequent recalls have included dry foods, and foods containing rice protein concentrate and corn gluten. At time of this writing, companies continue to pull products.

The Veterinary Information Network’s extrapolation indicates that pet deaths are in the range of 2,000 to 7,000, affected pets in the tens of thousands, with veterinary costs in the range of $2 million to $20 million.

To find out what foods have been recalled, what to do if your pet is sick, and how to prevent trouble, check out Itchmo's pet food recall portal by clicking the big blue Pet Food Recall button on the Blogroll on the right-hand sidebar.

Alternative pet foods are emerging as the primary beneficiaries of the recent pet food recall crisis, and could enjoy double-digit growth rates over the next two years, according to a new study by market research firm Packaged Facts. Packaged Facts estimates there will be a brand shift in the market worth $1.3 billion to $4.3 billion in pet food sales. The report identifies the main beneficiaries in this brand-switching trend as "high-quality pet foods chosen as alternatives to traditional brands".

Packaged Facts study

Ed Bartram's Precambrian Series

"The Thirty Thousand Island archipelago, stretching along the northeastern shore of Georgian Bay, is the source of my inspiration as a printmaker and painter. This bay of Lake Huron is so large it could be considered the sixth Great Lake," says Canadian artist, Ed Bartram.

"Along this island-studded coast, glaciers have scraped away the earthen mantle, revealing the ancient Precambrian landscape. This rock, older than life itself, provides a record of the primordial processes of creation. I have been most influenced by the banded metamorphic gneiss. A great upheaval seems to have occurred, causing the rusty, pink rocks of the southern archipelago to merge wiht the black and grey rock of the more northerly coast, creating intricate striated patterns. These rocks have been liquified by the great forces within the earth, causing various layers to intrude upwards or to fold and tilt at odd angles. Other layers have shifted and cracked along fault lines, creating dynamic abstract structures. These formations in turn have been smoothed and kept free of more recent deposits by the continual polishing and cleaning action of waves."

Art in Killarney Park

Don McKay wins Griffin Poetry Prize

Don McKay is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Strike/Slip for which he won the Griffin Poetry Prize on June 6. He has won two Governor General's Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, most recently for Camber: Selected Poems, which was a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. McKay is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country.

But close up it is more likely to be the commotion of stress lines swirling within each slab that clutches at the heart—each stone a pent rage, an agon. None of the uniform grey of limestone, that prehistoric version of ready-mix concrete, in which each laid-down layer adds to the accumulated weight that homogenizes its predecessors. Think instead of Münch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror; then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing these surfaces, whorled fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue and car crash into the high-school prom. They engineered this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend some time.

-- Strike/Slip 39

“McKay doesn’t write about natural science so much as through it, using its terms and principles to explore the science of human nature. A poem about a hike through ‘the broken prose of the bush roads’ gradually, gracefully metamorphoses into a meditation on desire. . . . These exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins.”

-- New York Times Book Review