signal boost: Purina food could be hurting your pets
Thanks to siderea for pointing me to this post about problems with Purina pet food (dog and cat, at least). After seeing this I read the last several month's worth of consumer-affiars complaints, and older ones about the specific foods relevant to me. (Warning: can be gross.) This goes well beyond "ew, yuck" to "get that stuff out of the house before
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I'm going to respond from two perspectives, the consumer and the signal-booster.
First, wearing the consumer hat:
I drink diet soft drinks even though they contain artificial sweeteners. Given a choice I prefer the ones with Splenda, not because I know Splenda is safe but because I know Aspertame (and Saccharin, if you can still find it) has been implicated in some health problems and Splenda has not yet. Similarly, there are many brands of cat food out there; given a choice among those that have had reported problems and those that have not, if they're nutritionally equivalent and the cats will eat them I'm going to choose the ones that don't have the reported problems. That doesn't mean that Nine Lives is any better than Purina; it, like Splenda, is in the "don't know anything bad yet" category. I originally chose Purina using the same criteria -- "don't know anything bad yet"; there was nothing special about them. Well, now I've heard something bad, with enough volume to be a concern, so it is prudent for me to choose somebody else, at least for a while. I wager that you would have done exactly the same thing if we were talking about baby food (back when yours were still eating that).
Finally (on the consumer thread), if I were doing exactly the same things I've done for years -- purchasing habits, storage, how I feed the cats, etc -- and suddenly I found maggot nests in my food or my otherwise-healthy cats started puking after every meal, you can bet that I'd file a complaint too, with both the store and the manufacturer, and discontinue use. QA does not catch everything.
Second, wearing the signal-booster hat: I heard about this last night but did not post until this afternoon. Knowing the damage that can be done by spreading news that turns out to be wrong, before posting I did a few things. First, I read the consumer-affairs reports (as noted in my entry) and found many (not all!) of them credible. I don't know the person who posted to LJ about this and have no way of knowing if the poster cherry-picked, exaggerated, or just plain got things wrong; that's why due diligence is important. I recognize that the reports are from unreliable consumers, but they're what we have and, gosh, there are a lot of them. Second, I looked for any commentary from Purina, first via their web site and then via Google, in case they had already investigated these complaints and had something to say. Even if nothing is wrong, if people are complaining about your product it's reasonable to think you might say something. I found nothing. Then I looked more generally for news about this, and also specifically for information about geographic distribution because for all we know there's one infested distribution point that's the source of the problem. Again, I found nothing. So, taking all that into account and remembering the problems of a few years ago where the pet food em>was the problem that killed animals, I posted. Note that I used the word "could" in my title. I don't expect anybody who doesn't know me to trust me any more than I trusted the poster of the original entry, but I would rather share what I know and let others decide than sit on it when I had reason to be concerned and perhaps be a contributor to somebody I know having problems through lack of warning. YMMV, obviously, but those are the factors I took into account.
If anybody reading this is more effective than I was at finding information from Purina about this, I will be happy to revise this entry to include that.
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Nowhere in my reply did I say that real problems shouldn't be reported to the company. Of course they should! Infestation is a problem that normally doesn't originate with the manufacturer, but one that should be reported nonetheless. You are right... QA will never catch infestation because it usually originates after the product is out of the company's hands - that is, in stores and homes. That's why it IS important to contact them!
I can say to the fact there were a lot of complaints about Purina: they sell a muck lot of food. The more you sell, the more complaints you get. Volume of sales has everything to do with volume of complaints.
I applaud you for trying to find some kind of response from Purina - you are good at research. However, I would point out that the website in the post is just a sounding board for upset people. The website doesn't send these complaints to the company... it doesn't compile them, look for patterns, do any reporting to companies. What was Purina supposed to be responding to? They responded to the people that contacted them directly, and some of the posts even said they did. If people post complaints to that website and don't send any info to Purina, Purina simply doesn't kow about. Consumeraffairs.com and the hundreds of websites like them (though most not as nice-looking), provide a place for people to sound off anecdotally without any further assistance toward resolution. You and I both know the problems with anecdotal evidence.
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One of my beloved cats passed away unexpectedly not long ago, with two different major veterinary centers unable to pinpoint any primary cause of his dramatic decline. Guess what he was eating?
I don't honestly give a damn how Purina does or doesn't respond to the concerns, and I couldn't care less how anecdotal the evidence is. There will not be any more Purina food in our house unless the company demonstrates a major overhaul of its processes. There's just absolutely no reason to risk it when other brands are at the same price point and haven't had any reported issues.
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But I'm wondering why you think that other brands don't get similar complaints?
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Right now, for me and I presume woodwindy, Purina is at the bottom of the list. They may be no worse than anybody else, but we can only act on the incomplete data we have.
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