THE MARKET IN TAINTED PET FOODS

THE MARKET IN TAINTED PET FOODS. Contaminated wheat gluten in pet foods made by Menu Foods appears to have killed many cats and dogs. How many, nobody knows for sure, because the pet food market is more unregulated and unmonitored than the markets for human food. Christie Keith writes:

How did this problem, now involving almost every large pet food company in the United States, including some of the most trusted -- and expensive -- brands, get so out of hand? How come pet owners weren't informed more rapidly about the contaminated pet food? Why is it so hard to get accurate numbers of affected animals? Why didn't veterinarians get any notification? Where did the system break down?The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there isn't really a system.There is, as the FDA pointed out, no veterinary version of the CDC. This meant the FDA kept confirming a number it had to have known was only the tip of the iceberg. It prevented veterinarians from having the information they needed to treat their patients and advise pet owners. It allowed the media to repeat a misleadingly low number, creating a false sense of security in pet owners -- and preventing a lot of people from really grasping the scope and implication of the problem.

The sad case of Menu Foods and its tainted supplies serve to remind us that "free" markets -- to use the conservative term for unregulated markets -- are not always best left alone. Government regulation and oversight are not just a nasty way to pile up bureaucratic obstacles in front of entrepreneurs. Sometimes such oversight even saves lives. The case of Menu Foods is not just sad but also mysterious, and not only because the exact cause of the pet deaths is still poorly understood. From the very beginning, the media coverage of the case had on odd omission. Though all stories mentioned the wheat gluten supplied by a new Menu Foods subcontractor as the likely cause of the pet deaths, none gave the name of this subcontractor. None even initially mentioned that the firm was Chinese. In fact, the name of the suspected firm was only made public last Friday:

On Sunday night, April 1, Pet Connection got a report from one of its blog readers, Joy Drawdy, who said that she had found an import alert buried on the FDA Web site. That alert, issued on Friday, the same day that the FDA held its last press conference about the recall, identified the Chinese company that is the source of the contaminated gluten -- gluten that is now known to be sold not only for use in animal feed, but in human food products, too. (The Chinese company is now denying that they are responsible, although they are investigating it.)

The firm's name, by the way, is Xuzhou Anying Biological Development Company.Why the reluctance to name the firm earlier and why did the name only appear through an import alert on the FDA Web site? Is it because the firm also makes gluten for human food products? Did any of the tainted gluten get into the human food-chain? Nobody seems to know for sure, not even the FDA. This is the sort of confusion a few extra bureaucratic hurdles might have prevented.

--J. Goodrich