And neither is that of our pets. This is what comes of defunding regulatory agencies and allowing companies to merge and aggregate resources.
Both of our cats are fine and do not appear to be showing any signs of illness. As recommended by the vet, we’ve been feeding them dry kibble as a morning meal and wet food — the “cuts and gravy” style food — in the evenings.
But it appears as though it was a close call.
Sometime in August of last year I decided that I wanted to cut back on some of the wheat and corn our cats were eating. Not entirely, necessarily, but I thought I could do better than than the Iams kibble and Friskies pouch food, so we switched to the Nutro Max. Nutro Max is one of the foods listed, and if our cats hadn’t demonstrated a clear disinterest in that food after a couple of weeks we might still have been feeding them that when the contaminated food made its way to the shelves.
I have an unopened, recently purchased bag of Nutro Max kibble right here next to me. The dry food has not been recalled yet, but you better believe I’m leery of feeding that anyway.
Let’s set aside the rat poison issue for a moment and think about this. Menu foods manufactured ninety-five brands of food. Ninety-five brands. You thought you were buying a new brand of food? Sorry, you weren’t.
Our cats have so far refused to eat food prepared for humans. (No joke.) But they may have to learn.
Ah. Who am I kidding? There’s no reason rat poison can’t show up in our own food, too. Where’s Upton Sinclair when you need him?
Update: According to the Nutro foods website, the kibble is safe because it actually is manufactured by Nutro themselves in a separate facility and Menu Foods has nothing to do with it.
We want to assure you that none of Nutro’s dry foods, biscuits or treats were affected by this recall and none are manufactured by Menu Foods.
We also feel it is worth noting that many Nutro employees feed our dry and wet foods to their own pets. We understand our customers’ concerns and we regret the unfortunate situation caused by Menu Foods’ recall. The health and well being of our customers’ pets has always been our top priority. [ Nutro, emphasis in the original. ]
“Safe” for certain values of “safe,” I suppose.
