[mrsD]

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This is just horrible. Our Weezie is getting GI upsets from her cat treats...(Temptations) and we stopped giving them this summer!

There is a further explanation in the comments... linking to the chicken used in the treats.
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I'll look around on the net later today for further information.

edit: more disturbing information here:

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This Snopes link has comments denying toxicity by
manufacturers...

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It is so difficult to know what is true anymore!

[Kitty]

I heard about this on the news (NBC no less!) and also saw an article on Yahoo about it.

I forwarded it to my son and DIL because they don't have cable TV (only Netflix) so they don't see the breaking news stories like I do.

I bought some chicken jerky treats for their dog last week and asked them to stop feeding them to her.

It's so hard to know what to trust anymore. They make her food themselves and she has thrived on it. But it's from chicken and they have to trust that the chicken they're using is safe.

[Chemar]

mrsD, Temptations have a natural cat treat range now (chicken or tuna "Naturals") that has no artificial garbage in like their other treats do, and they are USA made

The comments section of that article was referring to a range of kitchenware called Temp-Tations, sold on QVC and made in China

[Dr. Smith]

It sounds to me like its either something from way out in left field that wouldn't be suspected to be in pet treats to test for, or possibly something that is inert until consumed/digested by stomach acids. etc.

~600 dogs (by itself) (over the course of 3 years or since 2007 depending on the source) sounds like a huge number, but out of
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to
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dogs in the U.S. alone is less than .00001 or 1/1000th of 1%. I'm actually impressed that they could nail that few down to that one specific cause. I wasn't able to find statistics on how many dogs die each year from accidental poisoning in toto, but I did find that ~10,000 dogs & cats die each year from ethylene glycol (antifreeze) exposure alone which leads me to believe that, considering antifreeze didn't even make the top 10 lists (one of which is below) the total number is conservatively in the hundreds of thousands to millions.

The Humane Society of the U.S. estimates that up to 10,000 cats and dogs die each year from exposure to ethylene glycol containing antifreeze. One lick of this highly poisonous substance can be enough to cause irreversible kidney failure and death in a cat, and it doesn't take much more than that to have the same effect in a dog.

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Top Ten List from Pet Poison Helpline. Items presented in order of frequency

1. Foods – specifically chocolate, xylitol, and grapes/raisins.
2. Insecticides – including sprays, bait stations, and spot on flea/tick treatments.
3. Mouse and rat poison – rodenticides.
4. NSAIDS human drugs – such as ibuprofen, naproxen.
5. Household cleaners – sprays, detergents, polishes.
6. Antidepressant human drugs – such as Prozac, Paxil, Celexa and Effexor.
7. Fertilizers – including bone meal, blood meal and iron-based products.
8. Acetaminophen human drugs – such as Tylenol and cough/cold medications.
9. Amphetamine human drugs – ADD/ADHD medications like Adderall and Concerta.
10. Veterinary pain relievers – specifically COX-2 inhibitors like Rimadyl, Dermaxx and Previcox.

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Doc

[mrsD]

I don't know what it is with Weezie.... She has always had the
"natural" ones. Not a lot, either.

But she also gets the runs now from Chooka (our cat word for whipped cream). Maya does not have problems with it and gets a small amount daily for her treat. Oreo was huge on whipped cream and hubby tried it on Maya since there was some left when Oreo died, and sometimes Weezie steals some. We give such a small squirt compared to Oreo --when O was so ill that was all she would eat some days!

We used to give a few treats (4 or 5) to our cats on the dock, as
rewards for sticking close to home, upNorth. Oreo used to take off sometimes for a day and make me crazy with worry... but Sheba and Tippy did not. I've used the treats to catch them for their cages sometimes for the trip home. Every season they would learn a new evasive trick and we'd have to figure out a new capture trick etc etc.
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This summer Weezie was really having the runs...and not Maya, and they eat basically the same thing. So I stopped the Temptations, and Weez is better. I don't know what gives yet, as I haven't figured it out. When she was young that one vet we tried was a paranoid parasite obsessive and she wormed Weez with 3 products even when the stools were clear. So I don't suspect parasites for her.

So Weezie gets for treats, the Fancy Feast food kibble. She likes that so much it has become a "treat". But you know IAMs had
another recall on Eukanuba this year.(salmonella) Actually both she and Maya beg for those Fancy Feast! Sort of undoes our Wilderness kibble attempts. I was concerned about Blue Buffalo mentioned in that article. I think I'll stop the Buffalo Wilderness for a while. How can we find out where the chicken comes from in those products? I don't recall seeing "chicken from China" on their labels! Who is going to put that on there anyway?

That TV show on Science Channel has "how its made" features. And once they did pet foods...cat and dog kibble. The plant they showed was in Canada. But that doesn't mean all the ingredients in the kibble comes from Canada by any means.

After all, I was pretty sick this summer from Chobani yogurt of all things. It has locust bean gum in it to thicken it. And if ours was not part of the 1/3 recall for diary contamination, then it was the gum, working on ME and perhaps some GI strain that fermented it too much and making me have cramps all summer? I quit it a week before we left, and by the leave day, I was recovering so I didn't have to stop often driving back alone. I don't want to go thru THAT again, so now I screen my food even more critically than before!

[Kitty]

I bought some "Greenies" cat treats last time I was at the vet's office. My cats seem to love them but the last time Tigger had them he threw up immediately afterwards. Could have been because he inhaled them without even chewing them up because they came back out whole. Eeeww! TMI, I know. I checked them and they seem to be manufactured in the USA.

[mrsD]

Our cats won't touch Greenies!

I think the current China chicken thing has been hidden so long,
that the figures reported, are alarming. There are probably so many deaths falling under the radar. For example we had FOUR vets to get Oreo properly diagnosed for her cancer, and even then the 4th vet didn't believe the biopsy report, and treated her for lymphosarcoma anyway and she lived a whole year longer. He said if she had had the mast cell carcinoma she wouldn't have lasted 2 months.

So getting a proper diagnosis of poisoning in pets, is going to be difficult... and hidden. After all there is no CDC for animals!

A young healthy dog may not respond to this particular contaminant as an older dog might. If an older dog presents, with symptoms, it might be blamed on age and organ failures etc?

When it comes to Listeria contamination in human foods, often only the elderly get sick at times...so it can go on for a LONG time. We had a meat packing source in my state that had contamination from leaking water pipes over the packaging line, for a long time before enough people did get sick (some died) to explore for it. I imagine I ate some of that ham at times even!

[Dr. Smith]

Originally Posted by mrsD
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How can we find out where the chicken comes from in those products? I don't recall seeing "chicken from China" on their labels! Who is going to put that on there anyway?

You can't. Product origin labeling regulations are a spaghetti nightmare. In some cases, 100% of a product's ingredients/parts can come from elsewhere, but if the final product is either assembled/mfd—or in some cases just packaged—in the US, it can be labeled "Made in USA". In other cases, only a "substantial amount" (whatever that means—it doesn't even have to be 50%) needs to originate in the US. One example is in the automotive industry, where parts came from all over the world and then were assembled in plants here, and the car was labeled "Made in USA". That gradually changed and they now state where engines & some other parts originate—but not all. It's still a percentage qualification.

Because of the way some laws are written, the chicken could come from a number of sources, be bought by a broker/wholesaler located in the US, then resold to the company making/processing the final product (without the broker ever taking possession—just on paper), and then still say the chicken came from the US.

There have been ongoing attepts to improve this situation, and some changes have been made, but everyone knows how industrial lobbying goes in Washington...

AFAIK, the only way to assure that chicken treats are made entirely here is to raise your own chickens and proceed from there.

Welcome to the global economy.
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Doc

[Dr. Smith]

Originally Posted by mrsD
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A young healthy dog may not respond to this particular contaminant as an older dog might. If an older dog presents, with symptoms, it might be blamed on age and organ failures etc?

Yes, smaller breeds are also more susceptible than larger breeds, just by virtue of the size (and capability) of their organs. Small dogs can weigh 1/10 or less of what some larger breeds weigh. Breed weaknesses (from inbreeding) also play a part.

Doc

[mrsD]

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FDA is asking for pet owners help with this problem.