"Horrible coincidence"?

Menu Foods CFO sold almost half his stock in the company right before the recall of tainted food.
How convenient.

I'm not really a snob....

Of course I should have known when I wrote:
No serious dog person I know of feeds crap food like Pedigree or Iams...
...that a: I would quickly hear from someone who did, and b: I'm sure I know plenty of "dog people" who feed kibble and I shouldn't be so snobby about it!
In fact, the oldest dog I knew personally was a little yellow mutt named Chester who ate the weird red colored Alpo kibble and lived to be just about 23 years old.
So genetics and luck probably trump diet any day.
And feeding dogs is (or certainly should be) a fairly minor part of our relationship with them. If I were rehoming a dog I'd go for a home that fed whatever if the dog was trained and worked and a part of the family, any day, over one fed a carefully crafted diet but didn't get out much or got stuck in the back yard understimulated much of the time.
Still, my dogs would probably be sorta bummed if I stopped giving them things like lamb necks, deer carcasses and whole chickens and started giving them nothing but pellets!

Pet food recall, raw diet, dog nutrition, etc.

Everyone has heard of the pet food recall by now.
It's bigger then you think.
(Keeps growing too, 22 brands of dry dog biscuits have just been added, mostly carried by Walmart who kisses China's butt for cheap crap so that American consumerbots can buy lots and lots of cheap crap but I digress.)
Someone in my advanced agility class lost a lovely, healthy dog. She was feeding him one of the tainted pouch foods because she had a bitch in heat and her Dennis was off his food as a result; like people, dogs enjoy junk food. He got really sick. She took him to the vet and he pulled through. So she took him home and fed him more of the pouch foods. He got very sick again. Back to the vet and he died at the beginning of March. Dennis is now a statistic, reported to the FDA.
Of course Menu Foods and their corporate consumers were already killing dogs and cats in their laboratories because they knew there was something wrong. But they didn't want to let anyone know. Bad for business, you see. Maybe they thought it was just a few lots of bad food and nobody would notice?
Anyhow so Dennis's owner and her vet had no clue about the food, nobody did at the beginning of March. Menu Foods and their associates let people keep on poisoning their pets because, well because they didn't want to lose money or see their stock drop.
According to a news story I heard yesterday, some Chinese official is saying they've never exported wheat gluten to Canada or the US. Liars.
In fact, check the rest of the Blog Pound site, Leigh-Ann has written several comprehensive articles, as have many others.
Royal Canin has been hit with a class action lawsuit recently for having excessive amounts of vitamin D in the food, causing harm to an undetermined number of pets.
Last year, of course there was the big Diamond Foods recall for toxic mold, which also caused death and organ damage in many animals.
And the FDA recently issued yet another alert about salmonella in commercially sold pet chews and rawhides.
So pphhhhttt to any vet who tells you that feeding raw or homecooked to your pets is unsafe and not balanced and blah blah blah. If pet food was safe and balanced, why does it keep getting "new and improved" with new and different ingredients?
Take a look at animals fed a PROPER raw or cooked diet and you will see healthy, shiny coat and skin, strong clean teeth, great muscle tone and overall excellent condition. Is diet a miracle cure? Of course not. But it does make one hell of a difference.
A goodly percentage of people I know with show and performance dogs either feed raw, or very good quality kibble, or some combination. No serious dog person I know of feeds crap food like Pedigree or Iams. I can usually tell a dog fed a monotonous inferior pellet diet with a glance. Especially when they're a few years old and poor care has taken its toll.

Y'all know I don't bother feeding processed pellets to my pets and haven't for many years. I find it utterly bizzare, really. I feed raw and I wrote this book which is still doing extremely well, thank y'all very much! Four years after publication and I'm a top ranked Amazon.com book, cool.
Here's the official book site.
So. I have a yahoogroup for those interested in feeding raw, or generally discussing canine nutrition, health and stuff like that. Margot and I have seen a big upswing in new members in the last few weeks - people who are willing to try feeding non-commercial processed diets because they've been scared by all the news.
Mary has a home cooking group.
Tons of information in the archives and files of each group for anyone curious....there's a TON of bad advice on animal nutrition out there so beware!
I know I just tossed a bunch of information and links out here and in the grand scheme of things, what you feed your dog or cat isn't really that important.
Except when it is.

Happy damn Easter or whatever you celebrate.

I have been vewwy, vewwy busy and have not had much time to update or visit or scrutinise email or anything like that.
Actuall those are deer ears, not rabbit ears so in the spirit of being primal and celebrating spring and fresh meat, these are my dogs enjoying (most of) a deer carcass.
So happy damn easter and passover and various pagan holidays.