Animal Testing & Lies of the Menu Pet Food Recall - March 2007

By G. Morton

*Note: Since the first recall of 95 brands there have been more recalls. Now of dry food and more wet pet food, including expensive brands like Hills. The article below details the sources of rat and other poisons found in the food and the seriousness of the problem which was largely hidden by the media. Media focus has since shifted to wheat gluten contaminated with melamine, a substance used in making plastic. Another brand was recalled because of salmonella so deadly that humans that even touched beef jerky style dog treats could get extremely ill.

  Some people and small companies are now serving pets home cooked meals. It is apparent that the pet food industry has become one that is completely irresponsible. In the race to bottom of globalization and attempts to buy the cheapest un-inspected content from meat renderers and the Chinese, they have turned pet food into poisonous trash. Regulation of the industry is the only answer, yet the Canadian Government of Stephen Harper does not want to consider regulation.

The Fabrications of Menu Foods - March.2007

1. Ducking the Public
The First suspicious thing one might notice about the Pet Food Scandal is that Menu Foods hid all of their web site and left up a page with the Recall list of bad food. It was impossible for pet owners to get through to Menu Foods at all during the crisis.

2. The Big Lie
 In March Menu Foods spokeswoman Sarah Tuite told Associated Press Radio the company was “still trying to figure out the cause.” Obviously they knew the causes and tried to find a way to cover them up and package a lie for the media. Even in April when it is public knowledge that thousands of pets have died, news outlets like Global News are talking of a small number of kidney failure cases in their reports. Mark Wiens, the chief financial officer of Menu Foods Income Fund sold nearly half his units in the pet food company less than three weeks before a huge product recall of 60 million containers of dog and cat food. Company insiders knew about the contamination and did little or nothing.

3. Incomplete Recall List and Recall Dates
 Names mentioned in the media like MasterChoice weren't on the Recall List. They didn’t release a complete list meaning many people checked it and fed their pets deadly food that wasn’t on the list. Nearly one month passed from the date Menu got its first report of a death to the date it issued the recall, meaning a lot of contaminated food was eaten by pets. Then the recall list expanded to other dog treats and Hills pet foods not made by Menu. By April 5th it also included Ol'Roy biscuits, sold by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Stater Bros. large biscuits, sold by Stater Bros. Markets. It also covered a portion of Sunshine Mill's Nurture, Lassie and Pet Life dog biscuit brands. On April 6th Menu Foods backdated its recall to November 8th 2006, meaning that pets had been eating contaminated food for months. Obviously Menu played a sneaky game by getting the public convinced through the media that the contaminated food hadn't been on the market long, when it in fact had been.

4. Lying about the extent of the Damage
 Tests, I believe some of them were done at Cornell U and the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine in the States show that the bad food outright killed 9 of 25 cats. Media reports and Menu’s reports are of a few dead animals. The reported tally of dead animals only included the cats and dogs who died in Menu's test lab and not the much larger number of affected pets. The real toll of crippled and dead pets must be in the thousands. Yet the toll is easily hidden because a vet must prove that kidney damage, illness or death is a result of the food. Few vets would ever bother. A group called Pet Connection did track pet deaths and as of March 31 the number of deaths was at 2,797. Pet owners in the US were encouraged to report deaths and illness to the FDA. But there was no place on the agency's web site to do so and nothing but endless busy signals when people tried to call.
Kidney failure was as high and it affected hundreds of pets a week during the three months the food was on the market. Because kidney failure causes nausea recovering pets won't eat. Many owners coaxed and hand-fed their pets the very same food that had made them sick. Those animals ended up back in the hospital and died, because their owners weren't told that the food was tainted.

5. No Accountability
Canada doesn't have a Gov Agency that regulates Pet Food. Any garbage could be put in it and Menu gets away with it. The Society of Vets is looking into it but that is also a no accountability group. An example would be if a vet gives the wrong treatment to your animal they will investigate and correct him, but there is no real penalty. The pet owner doesn't get compensated.
Menu said it would compensate people whose pets have died. Proof must be mailed to them. Currently the company doesn’t even return phone calls from the media or anyone else.

Other Facts on Menu
- At 90.1 million in a late 2006 quarter Menu Foods’ sales were down nearly 3 percent.  Yet gross profits increased by 6.2 million. Sales are about 400 million per year. Giving them deep pockets for pet owners that want to sue.
- The large profit increase came mostly in increased prices for the cans and pouches (Same ones now containing the contaminated food) and from operating efficiencies. Yet sales of the pouches were down. News articles also mention new suppliers of ingredients. So here we see that they decreased manufacturing costs and increased prices. In industries like food and textiles, new suppliers are often very dishonest. Worse than organized crime. They will try to sell you anything, offering it at a lower price than your current supplier does. In the pet food industry, which is unregulated in Canada, they would sell you recycled garbage from the city dump as meat or filler content if you were willing to buy it.
Menu spent a measly 4.2 million on plant, property and equipment during that quarter indicating they are running a sweat shop there in Streetsville Ontario and Emporia, Kansas. Most likely with incompetent and underpaid employees.
The US has opened the border to Canadian beef so now Menu is pursuing the option of selling beef in their pet food that is made from young cattle. And what other options may they be pursuing?
- To avoid taxes the Menu Food fund operates under different legal structures – trusts, partnerships and corporations in different jurisdictions. The company is an unincorporated trust.
- Most of their contracts are not long term, meaning big name pet food brands could decide not to do business with them. So they can be put under pressure.
- The contaminated food was sold under both store and major brand labels at Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and other large retailers. This brings about the question as to whether there are lower grades of the major brands shipped to Wal-Mart and others at lower prices.

Conclusion: This is a company that does anything to avoid taxes, operating costs and accountability.
As I said in another post they are killing animals in testing, but not likely toward the goal of providing high quality pet food. Perhaps they want a level of toxicity that allows them to keep production costs down. Poor quality food that may sicken some animals yet leave the public unable to prove that the pet food was the sole cause. This can be easily done as the media has aided them with stories of the food only causing a few deaths and the problem being a mystery.
We may see them keeping profits up in the future, continuing to sell bad food and hiding this problem. There may be a number of things wrong with their ingredients and production methods. Most likely they will clear themselves in the media through blaming one supplier. They are already trying to scapegoat a wheat gluten supplier. Apparently another pet food company had a problem with decayed wheat gluten as filler in the past so the media has seized on this as the answer.
Also – the major brands are now going to distrust their suppliers and engage in more animal testing of the food and ingredients. Pet Food brand name companies increasingly only engage in marketing while contracting out the manufacturing of the food to companies like Menu.
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ON RAT Poison in the Food
Menu Foods as of March.25.2007 upped its recall to all 95 brands of its cuts and gravy style pet food.
Aminopterin, a toxin used as a rodenticide was found in the food. Let's ask ourselves the next question. How would it get in the food process chain?
The average person guesses sabotage. The company says it doesn't know while the media is reporting that it may be that a new Chinese supplier of lower cost wheat gluten is the source. Menu Foods changed to Chinese suppliers of the gluten. But have now discontinued using them. The gluten turned out to be contaminated with a substance used to make plastic and not with rat poison. Meaning some pet food was doubly contaminated with plastic chemicals and rat poison.
Rodenticide could be added to wheat gluten to make a tasty rat poison but that likely is not the cause. I suspect the cause is RATS.
Rats can get into the food chain in three ways. They do get into wheat and their corpses could get ground up, but the most likely source is MEAT Content. Recently we've read how mass murderer Robert Picton sent the bodies of his victims through meat rendering plants. Even road kill is tossed into many rendering plants. Another source of ready meat content is dead rats tossed in with other kill, some of them with undigested poison in their system. Also, large factories like the Menu Foods plant tend to have a strong rodent problem.

In Canada the Harper Government has shunned regulations for the pet food industry, stating that government testing would not have uncovered the problems at Menu Foods. I take that to also mean that government testing would not find various poisons, toxins and items like rat flesh and human flesh in meat content it does inspect.
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Menu Food has an annual meeting coming up.
Annual Meeting: Menu Foods Income Fund's next Annual and Special Meeting is scheduled to take place 2:00pm on May 10, 2007 in Room 714A of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building, 222 Bremner Boulevard, Toronto, Ontario.
 Note: Date is subject to change without notice.