Class Action Lawsuit Against Purina

And it's a real shame how many people, including children!, die from excessive inhalation of DHMO.

benbradley said:

And it's a real shame how many people, including children!, die from excessive inhalation of DHMO.

Click to expand...

I know, right?

Does anyone remember a canned dog food back in the early 70s (can't recall the name, K-9?) that contained horse meat? It wasn't Ken-L-Ration, but they did use horse meat also. I gave it to my dog until they outlawed it.

Sorry. Didn't mean to go off track.

The thing that bothers me isn't about pet food, exactly. It's the idea that avoiding any particular brand of food based on sentiments like:
"It can't all be coincidence."
"I'm not taking even a 1:million chance."
"If X number of people say, then it must be true."

These are the exact same reasons used by parents not to vaccinate their kids, and recently, according to a vet friend of mine, to not vaccinate their pets - including against rabies.

In this case, there should not be any harm, unless you go to a radically unbalanced diet. There are many options for safe, healthy pet food, and so a personal choice not to buy Purina doesn't hurt anything, but overall, it's not a sound, logical mindset. The decision isn't based on fact but on the ephemeral idea that if a certain number of people say something, then it must be right, even if the idea isn't supported by the evidence.

If you don't want to buy Purina brands, then by all means don't. But, I would encourage people to make important decisions based on evidence rather than on what just feels true based on emotional anecdotes.

Up until about 1980ish, most canned dog food was horsemeat. Between 10-20% of all otherwise-healthy horses are rank (dangerous), untrainable, crippled, or otherwise useless. Dog food is an excellent use for them.

There was a track??

Myrealana said:

The thing that bothers me isn't about pet food, exactly. It's the idea that avoiding any particular brand of food based on sentiments like:
"It can't all be coincidence."
"I'm not taking even a 1:million chance."
"If X number of people say, then it must be true."

These are the exact same reasons used by parents not to vaccinate their kids, and recently, according to a vet friend of mine, to not vaccinate their pets - including against rabies.

In this case, there should not be any harm, unless you go to a radically unbalanced diet. There are many options for safe, healthy pet food, and so a personal choice not to buy Purina doesn't hurt anything, but overall, it's not a sound, logical mindset. The decision isn't based on fact but on the ephemeral idea that if a certain number of people say something, then it must be right, even if the idea isn't supported by the evidence.

If you don't want to buy Purina brands, then by all means don't. But, I would encourage people to make important decisions based on evidence rather than on what just feels true based on emotional anecdotes.

Click to expand...

I agree with all of this. The internet is a sea of intriguing stuff, but what you find floating on top (aside from kittens and porn) is a whole lot of panic and outrage. You have to go a little deeper to find reliable information.

Quentin Nokov said:

And how many people in this thread conveniently overlooked the letter by the FDA to Purina? You don't consider that evidence of something being wrong with the food?

Click to expand...

I read the FDA letter. A great deal of it is "someone didn't do the right paperwork". The rest is more along the lines of "you really should fix this cuz something might happen" rather than "OMG Horrors Right Now!!"

Furthermore, this letter concerned one line of canned dog food, not dry dog food.

The FDA can and will shut down a feed plant that is found to be shipping genuinely contaminated feed; in fact that happened with a dog food company in SoCal ca. 1985, in the case of an aflatoxin incident where the company declined to do the recall. (Incidentally this plant was owner-operated, it was not yet some big corporation. And having met the owner, noncompliance doesn't surprise me.)

Quentin Nokov said:

And how many people in this thread conveniently overlooked the letter by the FDA to Purina? You don't consider that evidence of something being wrong with the food?

Click to expand...

This was in my local newspaper today.

The county health department checks out area restaurants every month. They always find something wrong. That's their job. It's the restaurants' job to fix what the health department finds.

Restaurants will continue to violate public health laws because restaurants employ people, people make mistakes, and there are lots and lots of laws to violate. But I'm still going to eat in restaurants.

The fact that a regulatory agency found problems in one Purina plant doesn't bother me. Quite the opposite. It means they're on top of the situation.

Haggis said:

The county health department checks out area restaurants every month. They always find something wrong. That's their job. It's the restaurants' job to fix what the health department finds.

Click to expand...

Sometimes these inspection findings are valid. It appears your local incident is valid and not exaggerated; it contains specifics, not might-happens. Kudos to them.

But just as often it's job justification. Frex, the inspectors for USDA licensed kennels will mark a dusty footprint on a doghouse as "filth" (yes, really -- most of the time there aren't any serious violations, so they resort to this). Failure to record every time your kid takes a puppy out to play is also a violation (with a steep fine). If inspectors don't write up enough violations, they won't get promoted, and next year the budget committee might decide there aren't enough violations to justify so many inspectors, and there goes your job. So inspectors will always find violations, valid or not.

Because of this, I always eye these reports of violations with buckets of salt. I'd like inspectors to actually inspect and find what's genuinely wrong, not nitpick cosmetic trivia of no health consequence to anyone. But so long as the department has to justify its budget, and so long as promotions tend to rely on who marks up the most violations, this problem will persist. About the only thing I can think of is also rewarding inspectors for finding nothing wrong, but then how do you avoid getting into corruption from the other direction?** I don't know. There isn't a good solution.

But blindly believing that every 'violation' is actually something serious -- well, that perpetuates the problem, even exacerbates it with cries for more inspectors! more fines!!

** Back in the days of protection rackets, it was common practice for restaurants to sic the well-bribed health inspector on a rival and get them shut down, with the inspector then turning a blind eye to anything wrong in their own kitchens.

Meanwhile, after hours Los Angeles' downtown market (I forget what it's properly called), with food still in the display cases, crawls with rats.

A brand that uses by-product while running a page called Petfood Honesty to slam other brands using by-product, is one that doesn't need to poison pets to scare the crap outta me. So I don't even care too much about the truth behind this issue.
That is all I will say on the matter for now... In the meantime, I'll just be here, feeding PetCurean's GO and Now, and Natural Balance. Because I actually understand the words in the ingredient lists. Because "poultry by-product" is a little vague.

veinglory has already addressed the continued conflation of ethylene glycol and propylene glycol, so I'll just add that antifreeze with propylene glycol was specifically formulated for antifreeze that could possibly come in contact with foodstuffs.

veinglory said:

No it is not a religious issue, I am using facts,

For example: Propylene glycol is not in antifreeze, that is ethylene glycol, which is not a GRAS chemical. Propylene glycol is only in special petsafe versions of non-toxic antifreeze.

What I do eat is Betty Crocker icing, and Edy's ice cream, with lashings of propylene glycol. You probably eat is sometimes too but have not looked at the ingredient list and seen it.

Propylene glycol is deemed safe in the amounts it currently exists in in our food and in dog food. A dog could eats fifty times as much and still be at no risk.

Click to expand...

But if anyone is concerned that they or their pet(s) could have a propylene glycol allergy, this is a list of products you might want to look to (in addition to pet food):

• Cosmetics
• Soaps
• Toothpastes
• Cleansers
• Body washes
• Deodorants
• Hair care products
• Packaged Foods
• Automotive fluids
• Lotions
• Creams
• Moisturizers
• Prescription topical medicines
• Moist wipes
• Shampoo
• Shaving gels
• Cake, dessert, and brownie mix
• Prepackaged cupcakes, donuts, and pastries
• Salad dressings (especially ranch)
• Sauces (steak, barbecue, horseradish, etc)
• Sour creams, whipped-toppings

Should you suspect an allergy to propylene glycol or one of its components, more information on the types of products to look to in your household can be found here: http://www.mypatchlink.com/pdf/propylene_glycol.pdf

NaeimGiladisLegacy said:

Because I actually understand the words in the ingredient lists. Because "poultry by-product" is a little vague.

Click to expand...

AAFCO Definition: Chicken By-Product Meal

Chicken by-product meal consists of the ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers, except in such amounts as might occur unavoidable in good processing practice.

Click to expand...

Basically, it's all the edible parts of a chicken (or more generally, poultry) that aren't muscle-meat and feathers. It is somewhat more nutritious than muscle meat. Dogs do better in the long term on byproduct-based diets than on straight chicken-based diets (especially if that is the sole animal protein).

And you wouldn't want to waste feathers in chicken by-product meal anyway; it's worth more as feather meal, an excellent source of protein for chickens. Who gladly eat the feathers off each other, too.

http://www.aafco.org/
and more specifically
http://petfood.aafco.org/labelinglabelingrequirements.aspx

If you really want to get into it in hot and heavy detail (albeit mostly for livestock), you can subscribe to Feedstuffs magazine, or for more general info, get their special annual edition which has all sorts of entertaining data on the feed market and on research in species-specific nutrition. (If they don't happen to run numbers for dogs that year, and you feel a burning urge to manufacture dog food, you can use the hog requirements as a reasonable substitute.)

As to the difference between "meat" (any sort) and "meat meal" -- it's whether the water was removed before weighing (as in, added as x-much weight in a feed batch). And dry weight is what counts nutritionally, not water weight. If the ingredient in dry food is 'chicken' there's only about 1/5th as much dry-weight chicken as if the ingredient was 'chicken meal'. So in dry pet food, 'meat(any) meal' is always preferable to 'meat(any)'.

Reziac said:

AAFCO Definition: Chicken By-Product Meal


Basically, it's all the edible parts of a chicken (or more generally, poultry) that aren't muscle-meat and feathers. It is somewhat more nutritious than muscle meat.

And you wouldn't want to waste feathers in chicken by-product meal anyway; it's worth more as feather meal, an excellent source of protein for chickens. Who gladly eat the feathers off each other, too.

http://www.aafco.org/
and more specifically
http://petfood.aafco.org/labelinglabelingrequirements.aspx

If you really want to get into it in hot and heavy detail (albeit mostly for livestock), you can subscribe to Feedstuffs magazine, or for more general info, get their special annual edition which has all sorts of entertaining data on the feed market and on research in species-specific nutrition. (If they don't happen to run numbers for dogs that year, you can use the hog requirements as a reasonable substitute.)

As to the difference between "meat" (any sort) and "meat meal" -- it's whether the water was removed before weighing. And dry weight is what counts nutritionally, not water weight. If the ingredient in dry food is 'chicken' there's only about 1/5th as much dry-weight chicken as if the ingredient was 'chicken meal'. So in dry pet food, 'meat(any) meal' is always preferable to 'meat(any)'.

Click to expand...

This is interesting, but then again, why do the cheap brands boast by-product and prices rise with the percentage of real meat? If by-products are so valuable, why are they the cheapest?

NaeimGiladisLegacy said:

This is interesting, but then again, why do the cheap brands boast by-product and prices rise with the percentage of real meat? If by-products are so valuable, why are they the cheapest?

Click to expand...

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because of us the consumer, and that there is little to no market for the by-products of meat processing beyond pet food and fertilizer. I know I've never asked my butcher if he had any fresh calf lung or chicken intestines. So, when it comes to nutrient dense food, our pets are most likely eating healthier than we are.

That's pretty much it. First, there's the ick factor for average first-world consumers (tho these same parts are routinely consumed in other countries), and second, organ meats (which is to say, the bulk of byproducts) have to be either processed or frozen a lot sooner than do muscle meats (beef muscle meat can keep for weeks, as when a carcass is hung for aging) because organ meats deteriorate a lot faster. Which won't affect it for processing into meal (it's going to be broken down anyway), but you wouldn't want it on your table.

Today's retail price of dog food has fuck-all to do with ingredient cost, until you get down to the 'low-end' products, which generally do reflect that reality. That $60 bag of Whoopie-Doo Brand may even have a lower cost of ingredients than the cheap stuff, but it has a lot more consumer appeal. Consumer appeal (not nutrition or cost to make) is the primary driving force in today's pet food pricing, cuz consumers have no idea what it actually costs and will pay anything for Fido. Most ingredients cost in the range of $100 (barley) to $550 (meat meal) per ton, last I checked. By the time it gets to market, freight can add more cost than ingredients. Processing and bagging are around a dollar each per bag, or a bit more. (Those heavy-duty woven plastic bags cost about a buck apiece at wholesale.)

As to why soybean meal continues to be in pet food at all, when meat meal has historically cost less (and only went up in the past few years due to reduced supply) -- I suspect it has more to do with existing feed mills set up for the consistency of a soy-based product, and the insane cost of retooling, rather than the relatively trivial extra cost of the ingredient. Meat meal is much harder to deal with in a feed mix, since once wet it tends to set up like concrete.

The other reason is that thanks to mad cow disease, there are few remaining legal sources of meat meal in the U.S. Baker Commodities told me most of theirs is exported to Thailand, tho some comes back to us as pet food. Some of Baker's plants are retooling to exclude heads and spines from the end product so it's again legal to sell in the U.S., but that's an expensive upgrade for little market benefit and they're in no rush. (Shame for us, cuz their pet-food grade meat meal is absolutely primo.)

And yes, humans can live perfectly well eating dry dog food. Won't hurt you a bit. I myself consume a handful here and there, and live to tell of it.

My one year old grandson swears by it--s6

Quentin Nokov said:

And how many people in this thread conveniently overlooked the letter by the FDA to Purina? You don't consider that evidence of something being wrong with the food?

Click to expand...

It wasn't convenient at all. To be honest, I never saw it because that website is so poorly designed it gives me a headache. I went back and looked and still can't find it.

According to Snopes, it's still unconfirmed whether or not the panic is legit. From what I understood though, the Snopes article is less about anti-freeze and more about bacteria and other signs of poor manufacture/storage.

Reziac said:

Up until about 1980ish, most canned dog food was horsemeat. Between 10-20% of all otherwise-healthy horses are rank (dangerous), untrainable, crippled, or otherwise useless. Dog food is an excellent use for them.

Click to expand...

If we replaced the word 'horses' with the word 'humans' in that, what would be the difference? I sense a solution to the overpopulation problem.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I don't kniw what it says about his opinion. I had one vet who tried to push Science Diet because, you know ... Kickbacks. He was paid to recommend it, not because he believed it was the best. In those days, I fed my dog good old fashioned Purina Dog Chow and he wanted me to change. The dog lived to be 14 and we only put him down because of severe hip displasia, but otherwise he was still as active as a puppy.

Click to expand...

I'd say he either actually liked Science Diet (god knows why), or was a bad vet. Mine has the stuff (and a couple other brands) for sale on a big display but doesn't push anything, is open to a variety of stuff and offers various samples of special diet stuff.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Define holistic. To me that just conjures up images of quackery and snake oil.

"In August 2013 Purina recalled some of its Purina ONE Beyond dog food, because of one bag that was found to contain salmonella."

ONE BAG. Sorry, but does that sound like a company that would deliberately continue to sell a product if they knew it had a bad ingredient? Sounds like a responsible one, and one I'd trust over some malcontents trying to make a fast buck by maligning that company.

Click to expand...

I'd want to know under what circumstances the bag was found to contain salmonella first.

If it's one bag that was pulled from the line as they were filling thousands for a routine check, that's not one bag, though it is, if you see what I'm saying.

cornflake said:

I'd say he either actually liked Science Diet (god knows why), or was a bad vet. Mine has the stuff (and a couple other brands) for sale on a big display but doesn't push anything, is open to a variety of stuff and offers various samples of special diet stuff.

Click to expand...

Our current vet hasn't pushed a dog food on us, but recently, my dog started showing some hip problems and the vet suggested we get some weight off her. We've been working really hard with her current food (which is the only we've found that she'll eat reliably) and exercise, but the vet did say that if we couldn't manage it, she'd want to talk about putting Maddie on Science Diet.

I flailed around, which is what I do when someone tries to make me buy Science Diet, so the vet explained that Science Diet is the most transparent with vets about their nutrition profiles and studies regarding their food for treating obesity, kidney problems, etc. She said she's sure there are other good foods out there; it's just that she doesn't have the same mountain of data from those companies to feel comfortable officially recommending and selling. I.e., it's easier for her to predict exactly what the Science Diet will do, whether that's better or not.

Shadow Ferret said:

Define holistic. To me that just conjures up images of quackery and snake oil.

Click to expand...

The word "holisitc" by itself doesn't have anything to do with quackery and snake oil.

Characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

In medicine, characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the physical symptoms of a disease.

Click to expand...

Granted, a lot of quackery and snake oil have attached themselves to the word, but the word itself is not indicative of such... I'd just do your research before you opt in to any treatment. But holistic medicine can be a great thing.

cornflake said:

If we replaced the word 'horses' with the word 'humans' in that, what would be the difference? I sense a solution to the overpopulation problem.

Click to expand...

Indeed! One order of Soylent Green, coming right up!

cornflake said:

I'd say he either actually liked Science Diet (god knows why), or was a bad vet.

Click to expand...

Vets are not nutritionists (and you can't be a good nutritionist without first being a biochemist). They are doctors.** They are rarely experts on animal topics outside of canine medicine. In over 40 years as a canine professional, I've seen exactly one vet who knew the first thing about nutrition beyond what's printed on the bag. Science Diet is all about marketing, and they are very, very good at that. They have 40 years of "it's so good that we only allowed it to be sold through vets" behind 'em. This is just as convincing to the average veterinarian as it is to average consumers.

** Well, the older ones are. More recent graduates are being taught marketing more than medicine. I've seen some that I wondered if they learned surgery from their local butcher.

[I was a biochem/microbiology double major, back-when. I still have a few clues about this stuff.]

cornflake said:

I'd want to know under what circumstances the bag was found to contain salmonella first.

Click to expand...

The wonder isn't that salmonella is occasionally found in chicken products (pet or human). Rather, that it's not an everyday problem. Know why you're advised to keep raw chicken away from other food, wash your hands after touching raw chicken, etc??

Salmonella is not a contaminant. It is a natural inhabitant of poultry. If you have chickens, you have salmonella. So the problem isn't keeping it out of the food chain, but rather preventing the existing salmonella from becoming a health issue. So we wash and cook our chicken for human consumption. And scrap meat/byproducts such as goes into pet food are heat-processed (ie. cooked) to kill bacteria, but like all bulk processes, it isn't perfect.

Incidentally, salmonella is found naturally in chickens' ovaries. Layer chicks are dosed with tetracycline to kill it off, and this is why we no longer have a problem with salmonella in eggs (at least, if produced in a modern facility that eliminates contact with natural sources of salmonella), despite that we use billions of eggs, and not always cooked.

cornflake said:

If it's one bag that was pulled from the line as they were filling thousands for a routine check, that's not one bag, though it is, if you see what I'm saying.

Click to expand...

Oooookay. Let's see if I can clear up some misunderstandings about how commodities and bulk manufacturing works.

There are NO vertical manufacturers (that is, who control every stage of production from raw materials to finished product) in the dog food industry. The only one with even a nod to that is Purina, because they do run a big farm and research facility. (And its production wouldn't cover a day's worth of dog food, nor all the ingredients.) Everyone buys major ingredients from the commodities market.

And here's how that works (somewhat crudely, as this isn't my field):

--Farmer grows raw material (grain, chickens, whatever).
--Broker buys raw material, which is then pooled with raw materials bought from tens of thousands of farmers. (And the edible waste from human food processing, such as peelings from the potatoes that go into chips. Chicken in dog food got to be a big thing as a byproduct of Chicken McNuggets.)
--Broker sells bulk lots raw material to a processing facility, such as a flour mill or rendering plant. What they get comes from a common pool of such material, not necessarily from the same lots the broker bought from the farmers. (A lot of it gets moved around on paper.)
--Processing facility does its thing and sells the bulk ingredient (now turned into flour or meat meal or whatever) to a commodities broker.
--Commodities broker pools that with product from perhaps dozens of other facilities. It may even be pooled with imported product. (That is, when you order 50 tons of X, the broker orders 50 tons from whatever sources he has on the hook. It isn't stored all in one place. Some may be in a silo in North Dakota and some on a barge in Long Beach Harbor.)
--Pet food manufacturer contracts for N-many tons of various ingredients (which come from various brokers and various pooled sources). They have NO control over where the ingredients came from or how they were processed up the line, tho they can specify grade, or sometimes country of origin.

This is true for human food too, for pretty much anything on your grocery shelves that isn't flat out labeled "locally produced".

The ingredient is inspected multiple times all along the line -- as raw material, processed material, on arrival at the dog food plant, during production, and as a finished product. [In wet years, cereal grains undergo extra inspections because wet weather at harvest increases the risk of aflatoxins from naturally-occuring fungus.] But you can't inspect every bit of the several million pounds in any single batch. So samples are taken -- one bag out of some tens of thousands of bags is good practice.

And if anywhere along the line a contaminant is found, the entire batch is discarded (or recalled), because the assumption has to be made that it is a batch issue and not a spot issue. Fact is most probably ARE spot issues, but they don't take the chance. The flipside is that spot issues will be missed, because you can't open and inspect every bag nor every nugget from every bag, and that is what you'd have to do to catch every spot issue. (This is why once in a blue moon you'll find a whole chicken foot in a bag of dog food.)

Far more is discarded (well, more likely recycled into fish food) and recalled before it ever hits the retail shelves than the consumer ever hears about -- in fact over 90% of recalls happen before the product reaches the retail market.

This is the reality of bulk production. It is not perfect at any level, because the sheer volume required means it cannot be perfectly controlled or perfectly tested.

And the total volume is so huge that a tiny fraction of a percent deemed 'bad' translates into 50,000 bags recalled. This is not "lousy quality control". This is the average consumer having no idea what a miniscule fraction of the product that really is, or how the entire process works, or how well best-practices keep naturally-occurring contaminants down to a minimum.

To add to the confusion, very few dog food brands actually own their feed mill; doing so is simply too expensive (millions of dollars in startup costs). Most contract the production process to Diamond or Mars, or less often to Purina or various smaller manufacturers; or more rarely and for very small volumes, to a privately-owned feed mill (which is what I did. Minimum batch nowadays is typically five tons.)

The majority of premium-brand pet food on the market is actually made by Diamond. Used to be you could reliably ID any Diamond-made product by "made in Meta, Missouri" on the label, but they've since acquired some other facilties.

RichardGarfinkle said:

Mod Note

Everyone, this is a contentious subject. Let's try to stick to documented facts.

Click to expand...

Not to be argumentative, but aren't discussions based upon opinion? If we limited ourselves just to documented facts regarding the OP, which are sparce at best, it would be a very short thread indeed. I'd don't believe this restriction is applied anywhere else on this board, but maybe I'm just misinformed (which wouldn't surprise me).

NaeimGiladisLegacy said:

According to Snopes, it's still unconfirmed whether or not the panic is legit. From what I understood though, the Snopes article is less about anti-freeze and more about bacteria and other signs of poor manufacture/storage.

Click to expand...

People are leading with the anti-freeze fallacy. The other plank is mycotoxins (resulting from using moldy ingredients), which if true would apply to every kibble on the market based on these same bulk ingredients. Personally I would want to see the analysis claiming presence of mycotoxins before even taking this suggestion seriously. Ditto the alleged 3000 or 4000 complaints. This same basic suit has been thrown out repeatedly over the years and seems to be improving only in media/socila media savviness, not actual openly-shared evidence.