First, let me express my deep sympathy for everyone whose pets were recently exposed to toxins in foods containing a contaminated ingredient. Im sure that every animal lover can empathize with your pain and concern for your canine and feline companions.
If there can be an upside to this disaster, its that the event is already shaking the pet food industry to its core. America woke up, started looking at its pet food labels, and had a few questions. Every pet food company in this country has been buried in calls, letters, and e-mails from pet owners who wanted to know how the disaster had happened and what the makers of their dogs foods were doing to prevent it from happening again. Thats a good thing.
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Another positive result is that the industry seems to be taking this event very seriously and very personally (as well they should). I guarantee you that every pet food company executive alive has spent many hours of the past month in meetings about improving their companys ingredient sourcing and testing, manufacturing practices, customer relations, product liability, and more.
Ill have an amazing opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation of some of these executives as they gather in mid-April at Petfood Forum, an annual industry event sponsored by Petfood Industry magazine and its publisher, Watt Publishing. The editor of Petfood Industry, Tim Phillips, DVM, invited me to speak at the conference about scrutinizing super-premium pet foods. After 10 years of criticizing the pet food industry, I feel a little bit like a hen invited to a foxhouse, if there is such a thing. Im terribly excited.
Like the pet food companies, weve also received lots of calls and letters about the recent recall. Ive printed a sampling of the letters (and my responses) on pages 22-23. I hope that this exchange, and my article on page 3 (about what you can do to help protect your pets from future disasters), will help answer some of your questions.
Of perhaps even more use to owners who may have lost faith in the pet food industry is the second installment of our series on home-prepared diets, which appears on page 8.
In the first article, published in the April issue, author Mary Straus presented an overview on home-prepared diets everything you ought to understand about making your dogs food before actually feeding the stuff to your dog. This month, she gets down to the nitty-gritty regarding diets that include raw meaty bones. Next month, shell discussed cooked diets, for those owners not yet ready to go raw. And in the July issue, her topic is the reality of home feeding. Straus will describe how different people go about building their dogs diets in different ways, and offer tips on finding economical sources of nutritious ingredients and ways to limit preparation time.
Like a lot of you, Im not quite ready to cook more for the dog than I do for my husband. But another disaster might change all that.
