Until the recent Menu Foods recall of over 60 million cans and packages of pet food, Canadians were ignorant to the many dark secrets about our pet food industry. Since March 16, 2007, a host of other pet food manufacturers have joined in recalling their products when they discovered their wet or dry pet foods contained the contaminant melamine. Royal Canin has recently been called to task for overdosing our pets with Vitamin D. What will we trusting pet owners be poisoning our pets with next?

There is NO regulation over the manufacture and sale of pet food in Canada.

Canadians need to band together and stand firm in our demand that the pet food industry in Canada is regulated once and for all. We need to make sure not one more pet becomes ill or dies from tainted pet food. We need to know for certain the food we feed our pets lives up to the claims that its ingredients are as nutritionally balanced as the pet food companies say they are.

Now is the time for action. Please take a few minutes to send a letter to your local MP, and to the leaders of our country to let them know that Canadians are calling for the pet food industry to be regulated.

Sample letters are provided in the link to the right of the page, below the flag. Simply follow the link then save the file to your computer. Links are also provided with contact information for various elected officials. Feel free to personalize the sample letters or write your own. Send letters to as many people as possible. We need to get the word out there and let the government know that we mean business!

The moderators of this site – who we are:

Carol:After my cat was diagnosed with diabetes, I learned that the 'prescription' dry food I had been feeding him had likely caused the disease. I changed his diet and he is now nearly off insulin after a few short months. I have joined the campaign for pet food regulation because I believe that our precious pets should be provided with safe, high quality nutrition.

Linda: My cat became severely ill after eating one of the foods manufactured by Menu Foods. Fortunately, after four intensive days of care, my cat is now in good health. Thousands of others were not so lucky. I joined the campaign for pet food regulation because I want to make sure that pet owners and their beloved pets never have to go through this kind of crisis again.

Mel: Since having one of my cats diagnosed with diabetes and the other with inflammatory bowel disease in the past year, both which likely would have been preventable with proper diet, I have become passionate about feline nutrition and the need for regulation of the pet food industry.

In addition, there are many more working behind the scenes who are involved with doing research, providing information, campaigning and getting the word out there.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Can food safety be solved with testing?

Minister of Agriculture Chuck Strahl (among others) has stated that testing would not have detected the contaminants in the recalled foods. Itchmo.com has some interesting commentary on that thought, pasted below. Click here to go to the original blog post on Itchmo's site.

Can food safety be solved with testing?

Pet food companies have maintained that testing would not have caught melamine spiking since it was so unexpected. But two issues have raised doubts about just how much testing was done in the first place.

  1. Spiking food ingredients with fake-protein was so widespread, there were cases in the US as well as brazen requests for melamine scraps by food makers in China.
    The FDA said pet food makers
    received wheat flour, not wheat gluten. Two substances very different from each other.
  2. Melamine was visible in the tainted foods.
  3. Now, companies are beefing up their testing processes and offering new testing services. We don’t think that testing will catch every possible problem. We believe the industry must escape its “who can get to the bottom the fastest” mentality, and look to raise the bar by finding partners and suppliers they can trust, while giving consumers the most honest, accurate, and up-to-date information to make informed decisions.

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