(CBS/AP) For owner Elizabeth Krottinger, it's been a difficult week: All five of her dogs have been sickened.
"I've just been one big stress ball," she told CBS News.
Menu Foods, Canadian company based outside Toronto that produces pet food, said Saturday it was recalling dog food sold throughout North America under 50 brands and cat food sold under 40 brands including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba. The food was distributed by major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger and Safeway.
An unknown number of cats and dogs had suffered kidney failure and about 10 died after eating the affected pet food, the company said.
Two other companies — Nestle Purina PetCare Co. and Hill's Pet Nutrition Inc. — said Saturday that as a precaution they were voluntarily recalling some products made by Menu Foods.
Many stores that sold the affected brands frantically pulled packages off shelves.
Silviene Grzybowski's cat, Smokey, hadn't been eating for days.
"The vet told us to buy her her favorite food, but I'm going to call the vet right now," Grzybowski said.
Ron Finegold of Boynton Beach, Fla., said he noticed about a week or so ago that his family's 3-year-old cat — who was regularly fed a variety of Iams cat food — had stopped eating and did not appear well. He quickly took the animal to the veterinarian, who determined she was in renal failure.
He said he heard about the recall on the radio Friday night. He checked his trash, and found out he had given the cat some of the affected food.
"That's when I realized (the illness) had to be related," Finegold said. "She won't be eating that stuff anymore."
A complete list of the recalled products along with product codes, descriptions and production dates was available from the Menu Foods Web site. The company also designated two phone numbers that pet owners could call for information — (866) 463-6738 and (866) 895-2708.
Menu Foods' chief executive and president Paul Henderson told the Associated Press on Friday that the company was still trying to figure out what happened.
He said that the company had received an undisclosed number of owner complaints that dogs and cats were vomiting and suffering kidney failure after eating its products. He estimated that the recall would cost the company, which is mostly owned by the Menu Foods Income Fund, an estimated $26 million to $34 million.
The recall involves all the "cuts and gravy" wet style dog and cat food produced at Menu's Emporia, Kansas, facility between Dec. 3, 2006 and March 6, 2007, reports CBS News' The Early Show veterinarian Dr. Debbye Turner. "What makes this recall so scary is it involves so many brands: 50 dog foods and 40 cat foods."
The company said it makes pet food for 17 of the top 20 North American retailers. It is also a contract manufacturer for the top branded pet food companies, including Procter & Gamble Co.
Sarah Tuite, a company spokeswoman, has said the recalled products were made using wheat gluten purchased from a new supplier, which has since been dropped for another source. Wheat gluten is a source of protein.
Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said it is still too early to determine what could have affected the food. Zawisza added that even if wheat gluten is the source "it doesn't necessarily mean the wheat gluten per se. It could be another substance associated with the wheat gluten."
The recall covers the company's "cuts and gravy" style food, which consists of chunks of meat in gravy, sold in cans and small foil pouches from Dec. 3 to March 6.
In Omaha, Neb., Susan Balvanz said she sometimes feeds her five cats packets of sliced meat and gravy sold by Nutro Products, one of the brands affected.
"I've done so much research on pet food. It didn't surprise me but it scared me all the same," said Balvanz.
She said her 9-year-old cat, Boots, was especially fond of the food but seemed to have lost its appetite in the last few days.
At the Missouri Valley Veterinary Clinic in Bismarck, N.D., veterinarian Jacob Carlson has been referring worried pet owners to the Menu Foods web site.
"We've had a lot of calls," Carlson said, although none of his patients were sick.
The Humane Society of the United States was responsible for establishing aweb site that allows you information as to the "goings on" of theanimals transported by all airlines. Please click on the link below:
This link will take you to the Aviation Consumer Protection Division. Click on "air travel consumer report",
Receives informal complaints from members of the public regarding aviation consumer issues, provides guidance to the industry and members of the public on ... airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
Emergency Travel Alert: Don't Transport Pets By Air!
Airlines Show Little Regard For Animals' Safety
The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) hasissued an emergency alert warning pet owners to avoid transporting their animalsby air, particularly during the hot summer months. ALDF cited airlines continueddisregard for the safety of the animals they carry as the reason for thewarning.
"Despite hundreds of incidents in which animals have been lost, injuredor killed while being transported by airplane, the airlines have shown littleregard for the safety of the animals who are entrusted to them," saidValerie Stanley, ALDF senior staff attorney. "We feel compelled to letconsumers know that they are risking their pets' lives when they transport themby air."
Stanley said the summer travel season is the most dangerous time of the yearfor pets to be loaded aboard an airplane. If planes are delayed on the ground,the extreme temperature in an airplane's cargo hold can cause animals to sufferbrain damage or die due to hypothermia. Some pets are left to swelter ontarmacs. Others are mistakenly freed on the way to or from the plane, where theyare lost or killed.
Flagrant violations
According to ALDF, although the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and the UnitedStates Department of Agriculture (USDA) require that animals be transported in amanner that ensures their safety and well-being, virtually every major airlinehas a long record of flagrant violations of these rules.
The results can be tragic: Five hours after 81 healthy puppies were putaboard a TWA passenger jet en route from Kansas City to St. Louis, baggagehandlers discovered 50 of the puppies were dead due to heat exposure ofsuffocation. When a Continental jet bound for Denver was delayed for three hoursin Philadelphia, three of the five Samoyed dogs being transported in the plane'scargo hold were found dead on arrival. Too many animals needlessly suffer injuryor die each year -- and an airline's only liability for the often gruesome deathof a beloved pet is limited to the value of a piece of luggage.
"The airlines consider payments or USDA fines for an injured or deadanimal as merely a `cost of doing business,'" Stanley said.
Just last December, Stanley noted, United Airlines declined to pay the $4,000medical bill and related expenses incurred by the owner of a dog who sufferedruptured eardrums and other trauma on a flight from Los Angeles to Miami. Unitedcontended that "there was no value declared for this shipment" andhence the airline's liability was limited to 50 cents per pound for the116-pound "shipment," or $410.50. United's letter never onceacknowledged that the "shipment" was a dog.
ALDF, the nation's only public interest law firm specializing in protectingthe well-being of domestic animals and wildlife, is preparing a petitiondemanding that the USDA adopt stricter regulations and improve conditions foranimals transported by air. Accompanying this demand will be thousands ofpetitions from individuals who want safer conditions for animals traveling inairplanes. In addition, ALDF is asking corporations to put pressure on airlinesby pledging to favor only those carriers that sign ALDF's cruelty-free pledge totake better care of animals entrusted to them. The Houston Rockets, Frederick'sof Hollywood and John Paul Mitchell Systems have already signed the pledge.
"The skies are not friendly to pets. Most airplane cargo holds areunsafe for animals. Until conditions improve, pet owners should never put theirtreasured companions aboard a plane. Doing so could seal their doom," saidStanley.
IT'S A DOGGONE SHAME!
They're dropped, crushed, lost and rerouted.
By Laura Italiano - New York Post - 3/21/99
In the very worst cases, they freeze to death on icy tarmacs, or overheat andsuffocate in stifling cargo holds.
They're dogs and cats. Thousands of them are killed, injured or lost annuallyafter their owners entrust airlines to carry and deliver them safely.
Heat alone - typically from the cargo holds of planes delayed on hot tarmacs- kills or "severely" injures more than 500 animals a year, accordingto the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which keeps only a partial accounting.
For the pet, these holds turn the skies into a hell.
A November study by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty toAnimals in San Francisco found that animal crates are almost always shippedalong with routine baggage in cargo holds with no air- conditioning or aircirculation.
Temperatures routinely exceed 115 degrees.
"These are animals that are struggling to breathe, their hearts areracing, and they're in a panic, suffering extreme stress and anxiety," saidDr. Lila Miller, a veterinary adviser for the New York-based ASPCA.
Their paws are often bloodied, and their teeth chipped and broken, in theirfrantic attempts to break out of their shipping crates to escape the infernalheat.
"That's torture," police-dog trainer Mike Cain told the CharlotteObserver last year after his five Belgian Malinois arrived dead from heat strokeand suffocation in Atlanta on a Delta Airlines flight from the Netherlands.
More common - and virtually unpoliced and uncounted - are the dogs and catswhose shipping crates are dropped, crushed, sent to the wrong location, ordamaged enough to allow the animals to escape.
There's the Staffordshire terrier from Boise, Idaho, whose crate was droppedand smashed from a height of four feet last year by a Delta baggage handler ashis owner watched in horror.
The Air Transport Association boasts of the industry's "excellentrecord" shipping pets, and says less than 1 percent of the 500,000 petsthat fly each year experience health problems.
"We carry hundreds of pets throughout our system each day, normally withcomplete satisfaction to their owners," said a spokeswoman for Delta, anairline that turned up again and again as this story was researched.
*The USDA has only 70 inspectors to police nearly 11,000 sites - not onlyairports, but puppy mills, zoos, circuses and research labs.
*Airlines are not required to report pet mishaps. No one knows how many ofthe nearly 170,000 passenger baggage complaints logged each month by theU.S.Department of Transportation involve pet cargo.
*An airline's civil liability is limited by federal tariff law to only $2,000per piece of luggage - and a pet in a crate is legally luggage.
Unless a pet is small enough to qualify as carry-on luggage, "You can be99 percent certain you are putting your pet in a cargo hold that is notventilated and has no temperature control," said Nancy Blaney, the ASPCA'snational lobbyist, who is currently fighting for a bill that would address allof these problems.
This summer I had the privilege to be involved with one of the most heart warming rescues that I have ever done. Below you will find the links to the "live" video that one of the local TV stations captured and also a story that was written in the Tribune, a local paper. Please click on the links to view the story.
Gale Lang / TLC Pet Transport / Owner
Here’s a link to the TV story that a local Albuquerque station did on Rice and Brett/Adam.
One of the local TV stations here in Albuquerque taped the meeting between Rice and Brett in the parking lot just off the I-40 freeway in Albuquerque at 11 PM Tues. night. The story aired last night (Wed) on the 10 o’clock news. It was a great story – lasted almost 2 mins – and had a strong “adopt a rescue dog” theme as well as a reference to www.soidogrescue.org I recorded it on VHS tape. If you all send me your snail mail addresses, I’ll make copies of the tape and send it to you.
One of the local newspapers still plans to do the story and should call us sometime this week or next.
I think Rice is going to keep Brett. J
Thanks again for everything!
Robert
All,
Here's the story in today's Albuquerque Tribune. The story was promoted on the top of the front page of the paper.
"The Albuquerque Tribune
"Power of Love. Adopting a pet, whether from Thailand or the pound,is a celebration of the intense bond between living beings. Extra, Page C6" - along with a reduced in size version of the story "A Rite of Passage" (see link below) w/ the picture of Brett and Rice overlooking the Rio Grande Valley and Sandia Mountains beyond by our house. As you can see, it's a tad rural where we live... :-)
Adam Wasserman found his perfect puppy across the world
Rivkela Brodsky/Special to The Tribune Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Turning 13 in the Wasserman family is a special occasion. It means the new teenager gets to chose between a party or a puppy as a birthday present.
Lani, now 19, opted for the party, although she later ended up with a cat named Matt. Zach, 17, chose a Chesapeake Bay retriever, Flash.
In February, Brett Adam turned 13. He wanted a puppy, preferably a lab cross.
The home-schooled eighth-grader (who goes by Adam) got a dog bed and a toy hippo for a puppy on his birthday. The search began online.
That's when the Wassermans stumbled across a photo of a white, scraggly looking dog with captivating brown dog eyes. Adam was in love. No matter the pup wasn't a lab cross or that he would no longer be a puppy by the time Adam would get him.
That's because the dog, then 2 months old, lived in Bangkok, Thailand.
"It just felt right," Adam said last month, almost two weeks after Rice became an American canine citizen.
Rice and five siblings had been abandoned in May in the outskirts of Bangkok. Volunteers from a rescue group called Soi Dog Rescue took in the pups.
Rice and four of his siblings - one was hit by a car before it could be adopted - were put up for adoption on the Soi Dog Rescue site that the Wassermans stumbled upon.
The Wassermans contacted Soi Dog Rescue in July. Workers were so excited that they didn't notice the Wassermans' New Mexico address. The organization usually sends animals to New York and Boston airports.
"We try to avoid a domestic flight in the States because a third flight is a lot of stress for the dog and also a lot of extra cost for us," said Carrie Pinnow, adoption coordinator for Soi Dog Rescue, in an e-mail from Bangkok.
Sherry Conisbee, co-founder of the organization, said they almost had to give up when they realized it would be difficult to send Rice to Albuquerque.
Pinnow was determined to get Rice and Adam together.
"Because I felt it was a perfect fit for Rice, I knew that we could find a way to get him there," she wrote. "I didn't doubt for a minute that we could do it."
Pinnow sent an e-mail to all Soi Dog volunteers. A volunteer in Boston knew someone in Los Angeles, whose daughter picked up Rice.
She also found a Crittenden, KY. pet transport company that would bring Rice to Corrales for a discounted price of $200 instead of the normal $500.
Rice embarked on his journey Aug. 13, leaving Bangkok and traveling to Amsterdam, where he got to stretch his legs and take a potty break before he was on his way to Los Angeles.
He arrived in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, spending the night with the daughter of the volunteer.
The next day, he was in hands of Gale Lang from TLC Pet Transport, Inc.
Around 11 p.m. on Aug. 15, Rice arrived at the Furr's Family Dining parking lot by Coors Boulevard and I-40. The entire Wasserman family greeted the new arrival.
"He just seemed to know Adam was his person," said Patty Wasserman, Adam's mother.
Ten days after Rice arrived, boy and dog ran around the grassy backyard, chasing each other. Rice enjoyed chewing on a green tennis ball, slightly smaller than normal to fit his mouth, or on a denim bean bag.
And he nipped his human; Adam didn't mind. That was part of the fun.
Patty made sure Adam washed the bite.
"I've gotten a lot of dog bites and never washed them," he told her.
Even the two other Wasserman dogs adjusted to Rice, although they still believe they are the boss of the home, Bob Wasserman said.
Oh, and Matt the cat isn't too thrilled.
The Wassermans, for their part, are happy they rescued Rice from a place not known for its humane treatment of animals.
Conisbee, who started Soi Dog Rescue in 2002, said Bangkok is home to around 300,000 stray dogs.
"The vast majority of Thai people have no education about animal welfare or the humane treatment of animals - even the educated, middle-class ones - and the neglect, apathy and abuse is shocking and commonplace," she said in her e-mail.
No laws govern humane treatment of animals. There are also cultural differences that prohibit euthanasia, and promote dumping of puppies when they mature and killing or cooking dogs.
"He probably would have ended up on someone's dinner plate," Patty said.
The dog bed meant for Adam's new puppy is too small for Rice, now 5 months old, but the hippo toy is Rice's favorite - a sign, the family says, that the match between Adam and Rice was meant to be.
"It's just a love story," Bob said. "Adam was just looking for a dog to love, and it happened to be from Bangkok."
Boy and dog have since started obedience school at Petsmart.
Thanks again to all who helped get Rice and Adam together. They're quite a pair, and both continue to thrive!
Cheers, Robert
To learn more about the Soi Dog Rescue:
Smart Box
About Soi Dog Rescue
Translation: Soi means street in Thai
Adoption fee: $495, includes vaccinations, spay or neuter surgery, travel paperwork and customs costs, although the price can be higher depending on the travel destination.
Paperwork: Application and reference check. Soi Dog Rescue fills out paperwork for an export license to send the animal out of the country.
International pet travel: Requirements vary depending on the country. In Thailand, the animal must pass a health inspection by a government vet at least seven days before the flight. After the check, a health certificate and an export license are given to the organization and fees are paid for live cargo travel. Customs fees are paid when the dog arrives for the outbound flight. Usually, a dog must be 3 months old before it can fly.
Exceptions: Some airlines have a period of time, usually during the summer, when they will not fly animals as cargo due to heat conditions. Soi Dog will sometimes arrange for an animal to fly as carry-on with a passenger, although this is rare. Some airlines require an organization to use a handling agent to send animals as cargo, which can add another $100 to $200 in fees for the adopting family. Soi Dog Rescue has so far been able to send animals without a handling agent.
Volunteers: Volunteers across the world help get the pet from Bangkok to its new family. Soi Dog Rescue has volunteers in England, the United States, Australia and other countries. Volunteers in Bangkok make sure the dogs are socialized with people and crate-trained, so they will be able to endure a long plane flight.
interesting facts how old is my dog and cat ?????????????????
Contrary to popular belief, one "dog year" does not equal seven human years. We've seen many 20-year-old dogs in our practice, but we are yet to even hear of 140-year-old humans. Along the same line, a dog that is two years old is an adult. A 14-year-old teenager is just that....a teenager.
The most accurate way to determine the relative age of your dog is to know the life expectancy of your dog's breed. Small breeds tend to live longer, frequently 14 to 17 years or longer. Giant breeds, like Great Danes, have a life expectency that is significantly shorter. Even with that knowledge, however, there is no easy multiplier you can use to determine the relative age of your pet because of the many variables in the aging process of canines, particularly in the first few years.
While it is fun to know the relative age of your pet in human years, it can also help you understand your dog's behavior, his special needs as he gets older, and different nutritional requirements as he progresses through life.
The chart shown below is a fairly accurate measure of the relative age of the average dog when compared to human.
The good news is that pets, like people, have a longer life expectancy today that ever before: primarily due to better healthcare and nutrition.
AGE OF DOG HUMAN YEARS AGE OF CAT HUMAN YEARS
1 year 15 years 1 month 5-6 months
2 years 24 years 2 months 9-10 months
3 years 28 years 3 months 2-3 years
4 years 32 years 4 months 5-6 years
5 years 36 years 5 months 8-9 years
6 years 40 years 6 months 14 years
7 years 44 years 7 months 15 years
8 years 48 years 8 months 16 years
9 years 52 years 1 year 18 years
10 years 56 years 2 years 25 years
11 years 60 years 3 years 30 years
12 years 64 years 4 years 35 years
13 years 68 years 5 years 38-40 years
14 years 72 years 6 years 42-44 years
15 years 76 years 7 years 45 years
16 years 80 years 8 years 48 years
17 years 84 years 9 years 55 years
18 years 88 years 10 years 60 years
19 years 89 years 11 years 62 years
20 years 93 years 12 years 65 years
21 years 96 years 13 years 68 years
22 years 99 years 14 years 72 years
23 years 103 years 15 years 74 years
* information obtained from Doctor's Foster & Smith web site
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