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Senate Hears from Pet Food Lobbyists, FDA Officials, Promises Action

Consumers Inflamed by Nationwide Epidemic of Dog, Cat Deaths

By Joseph S. Enoch and Lisa Wade McCormick
ConsumerAffairs.com

April 12, 2007
Senators today heard from industry lobbyists and government bureaucrats at a hearing into the nationwide pet food poisonings, but unrepresented were the thousands of consumers who have lost their pets.

Two of Peggy G's dogs

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) chaired the hearing which pitted Food and Drug Administration (FDA) representatives and pet food lobbyists against the bipartisan Appropriations Subcommittee. Earlier in the day, the FDA warned that some recalled pet food may still be on store shelves and warned retailers and pet owners to be careful.

"Many cats, dogs and other pets, considered members of the family, are now suffering as a result of a deeply flawed pet food inspection system," Durbin said. "The FDA's response to this situation has been wholly inadequate -- we need to establish standardized inspections, impose penalties on companies who delay reporting health problems and increase communication between the FDA and the state inspectors so that we can catch problems more quickly. These sound like basic steps but the FDA has failed to put them in place."

Durbin's remarks highlighted the many flaws in the pet food industry's patchwork inspection system, which is not all that different from the haphazard, industry-dominated, system that supposedly protects humans.

To begin with, the FDA has only inspected about 30 percent of all pet food plants since 2004, said Stephen Sundlof, director of the agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine. He said many of those visits occurred after recalls had been put in place or during the Mad Cow scare.

The FDA had never inspected the Menu Foods facility in Emporia, Kan., where many of the recalled products had been made, until after Menu Foods reported a problem.

Eric Nelson, president of the American Association of Feed Control Officers (AAFCO), said that few inspections are required because the industry, with help from the AAFCO, regulates itself well.

The AAFCO is a voluntary trade group that puts its logo and quality assurance on pet food products that pay to be a member of the organization. However, further questioning by Durbin revealed that the AAFCO only has one full-time employee, does no inspections and makes no promises as to the quality of the products is endorses.

Reporting Delays

Another issue was Menu Foods' delay in reporting.

Durbin said Menu Foods first noticed a potential problem on February 20, 2007 but did not contact the FDA until March 15.

Sundlof, who gruffly refused to speak with ConsumerAffairs.com following his testimony, said that there is no means in place to punish Menu Foods for delaying almost a month in reporting the problem.

Durbin also expressed concern about the FDA's incomplete data. Durbin said websites and blogs have provided better information to consumers than the FDA.

The FDA's website currently has no succinct list of all the pet foods and treats recalled. Instead, there's a list of press releases which one must click through to find out what products are safe. The FDA's website also tends to coincide with the agency's conflicting reports on what is the actual cause of the thousands of animals' falling ill.

"As of Monday, a page titled 'FDA Update and Synopsis' stated that 'All the contaminated wheat gluten has been traced,'" Sen. Herb Kohl, (D-Wisc.) said. "But a few clicks away in a Frequently Asked Questions section, the FDA states, 'We are still tracing the contaminated wheat gluten.'"

"Obviously pet owners can get two very different ideas, depending on where they click," Kohl continued.

Sundlof promised Durbin the website's issues would be addressed but a few hours after the hearing, there was still no list of recalled products and the discrepancy Kohl noted still exists.

A Government Accountability Office report released in February highlighted the nation's "flawed" food inspection patchwork. That report found 15 agencies share food inspection responsibilities and that often some inspections overlap while other foods are hardly inspected at all.

Since that report's release, many Congressmen have vowed to fix the problem, probably by giving all food inspection jurisdiction to one agency. No legislation has been introduced yet.

Durbin told ConsumerAffairs.com he is working on legislation that will address the problem but did not specify how broad the scope of his pending legislation will be.

Consumers Speak

Peggy G. of Arkansas would have told Congress that her dogs -- Spicy, Zorro, and Roxie -- were treasured members of her family, just like her children. And she'd have asked them to pass laws that ensure the food she and other pets owners feed their dogs and cats is safe.

"If people care enough to pass laws that prevent cruelty to animals, why don't they care enough to pass legislation to make sure pet food is safe?" asks Peggy G. of Jacksonville, Arkansas. "I would like to see Congress pass laws that require the inspection process for pet food manufacturers be equivalent to the process that plants that make human food go through."

Peggy would also have told members of the Senate sub-committee that the recall isn't broad enough -- and should include more brands of pet foods.

Specifically, Ol' Roy dry food. That's the brand Peggy fed her dogs. The one she says made her dogs sick and caused them to die.

But it's not included in the nationwide recall of nearly 100 brands of pet food.

"Congress needs to know that it's not just the brands of pet food on the recall list that are affected," she says. "There are probably a whole lot more out there.

"I know it was the food that killed my dogs. It's the only thing they ate."

"They had just eaten some of the Ol'Roy," she recalls. "We were gone for about five or six hours and when we got back, one of the dogs -- our Chihuahua-mix, Roxie -- was dead in the backyard. And two of our other dogs were very sick. They were vomiting, had diarrhea, and were lethargic."

Peggy says she tried to find a local veterinarian willing to examine her dogs -- on a payment plan.

"We'd spent so much money on bills, rent, and utilities that my husband's paycheck would not pay for the vet bills upfront," she says. "But none of our local vets would see them without payment that day.

"We finally found a vet in Tulsa -- some 300 miles away -- who would take them on a payment plan." Peggy says their St. Bernard-mix, Spicy, died on their way to Tulsa.

"We hadn't been in the car an hour," she says. "When we stopped for gas, a man saw us and asked what's wrong with the dogs. We told him, and he offered to take Zorro, our Shepherd-mix, to his vet who was much closer. But Zorro didn't even make it to that vet. He died on the way.

"I wish I had the money to test the dogs' bodies to see why they died," she adds. "But I believe it was the food that killed them."

Dry Food Blamed

Susan S. of Gainesville, Georgia, is also convinced the Purina dry food she fed her 16 dogs contributed to their illnesses. And to the death of her Great Pyrenees, who suddenly died last month.

"When I returned home from work, I found Sampson, my Great Pyrenees, dead," she says. "This was a two-year-old, healthy dog. I checked his gums and eyelids and they were healthy in appearance. But he had been lethargic after eating the Purina food.

"Several of my other dogs then began to vomit, have diarrhea, and they would not eat their food, which was very unlike them."

Susan says the dogs had eaten Purina dry food -- which in not included in the massive recall of 60 million containers of pet food -- for years. And they'd never had any problems until last month.

"So it has to be something that's in the food now," says Susan, who holds a master's degree in entomology. "Something in that food changed because they'd eat it before. And all 16 refused to eat the food."

Susan says she tried to mix in table food with the dry food -- hoping they'd eat something.

"But the dogs picked out the table food and left the dry food. They are still rejecting the dry food, which is unlike them because they always cleaned their bowls. I think they know something is wrong with the food."

When asked what she'd say to members of the pet food industry attending today's hearing on the recall, Susan replies: "I would ask them to make an affordable, nutritious pet food that I could have confidence in and could feed to my animals. At this point, I'm not confident with the pet food that's out there now."

Susan would also ask them why it's taken so long to identify the problem with the pet food -- a problem the Food and Drug Administration blames on melamine-tainted wheat gluten.

"I have a background in science and it offends me that it took this long to identify the problem. And there are still a lot of unanswered questions."

She adds: "What I'm saying is 'why are we tolerating this kind of contaminants in the food without having them identified?' If I was going to make chicken food to give to chickens that would be used in human food, I would want to be sure that there's nothing in the (chicken feed) that is detrimental to humans. If you have a substance that's causing (these problems), why not eliminate it from the food? How can you responsibly sell that product to the public? That's my problem."

Are more stringent regulations for the pet food industry the answer?

"I think there needs to be a consistent set of laws," Susan says. "Whether they are federal, state, or local laws, there needs to be some kind of accountability and consistency so that whatever happens in Kansas at one plant is consistent with what happens at the plant in New Jersey."

Menu Foods, which announced its recall on March 16, 2007, has production plants in Emporia, Kansas, and Pennsauken, New Jersey.

In the meantime, Susan tried her dogs on a new brand of food today -- one her local animal control officer recommended.

Some of the dogs tried it, she says. But others walked away from it.

"If they won't eat this, I'm going to give them rice and boil it with barley and chicken broth. Financially this will be extremely difficult for me, but I will not let my dogs continue to suffer and die."

More about the Pet Food Recall ...

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