Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Does this tell you anything about the pet food you feed your pets

Pet Food Recall: China Has Been Spiking Cat & Dog Food All Along
By Jeff FreelandMay 1, 2007

While Americans are panicked over the pet food recall - it has been revealed that China has been spiking dog and cat food all along. For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here, reports the New York Times.
Pet Food Recall: China Has Been Spiking Cat & Dog Food All Along
Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.
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"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation." The Times reported that powdery scraps of melamine -- a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizers -- were secretly mixed into animal feed in China.
“The melamine powder has been dubbed ‘fake protein’ and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutritional value,” The Times reported.
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The newspaper also said the practice is widespread in China, which has little regulatory supervision. The paper also notes that evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.
The Chinese government disputes reports that melamine-tainted products from its country caused pets to die. But on Friday, that country banned the use of melamine in wheat gluten, rice protein, and other vegetable proteins exported from China or used in domestic food supplies.

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