Petco, Petsmart Phasing Out Sales of Chinese Pet Treats

Food Poisoning Bulletin

May 21, 2014 by Linda Larsen 

Petco and Petsmart have announced plans to stop carrying pet treats imported from China after last week’s FDA announcement that they can’t find the cause of 4,800 dog and cat illnesses. The government has been researching this issue for seven years and cannot figure out what is going wrong.
Veterinarians and the government are reminding pet owners that these treats are not necessary to a pet’s nutrition or health. Safety advocates have been asking the government to ban these imported treats for years, but nothing has been done.
Food & Water Watch commends Petco and Petsmart for taking this step, but say that they should remove those products from their shelves immediately rather than simply phasing them out. More than 1,000 dogs have died after consuming these treats.


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FDA Approved pet treats that may be poisoning your dogs and cats with toxic heavy metals.

Pet treats found contaminated with heavy metals - Health Ranger releases shocking data on lead, mercury and cadmium in dog and cat treats

Monday, April 21, 2014
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
(NaturalNews) My food science research in the Natural News Forensic Food Labs has turned up yet another alarming discovery... and this time, it's about pet treats that may be poisoning your dogs and cats with toxic heavy metals.
Over the last several months, I've been testing popular brands of pet treats sold by retailers like Amazon.com, and what I found is downright alarming:
• An astonishing 1.8 ppm of lead in Mundy Rawhide Gourmet Dog Treats made by a company called Cadet. The treats are made in China and labeled "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION."
• A startling 6 ppm of cadmium found in "Red Shrimp" reptile treats made by Zoo Med.
• A shocking level of mercury -- over 0.5 ppm found in "Ocean Whitefish" cat treats made by PureBites and labeled "100% natural" and "made in the USA."
• Over 1.5 ppm lead found in "Natural Rawhide Rings" dog treats from a company called PetSafe. The product package says "Protect. Teach. Love." and is made in Taiwan.
See the full results right now for over 16 products at the Natural News Forensic Food Labs results page.
All results were achieved via ICP-MS laboratory testing that I conducted myself, using EPA-approved methodology variations. The Natural News Forensic Food Lab is in the process of achieving ISO 17025 accreditation.

Watch out! You may be poisoning your pet

What these results show is that high levels of toxic heavy metals are commonly found in pet treats. Even worse, these heavy metals are invisible to the human eye, and because they aren't labeled on products, there's no way to know how much lead, mercury, cadmium or arsenic you may be unintentionally feeding to your pet.
The picture on the right shows chew sticks that contain alarmingly high levels of lead, but you don't see the lead in the photo, do you?
Shockingly, manufacturers never disclose heavy metals content on product labels, and retailers almost never test for heavy metals. To my knowledge, Natural News Store is the only retailer in the world that tests everything we sell for heavy metals. Amazon.com never tests what it sells, and don't expect other retailers to, either.
See the PetSafe natural rawhide rings on the left? They're made in Taiwan from rawhide, sorbitol and potassium sorbate. But they also contain over 1.5 ppm of lead.
Just to give you an idea of what that really means, just one rawhide ring weighing 8 grams would expose your dog to over 24 times the daily lead limit set by California Proposition 65. That's almost a month's worth of lead in a single pet treat.
See the full results right now at the Natural News Forensic Food Labs results page, where more than 16 pet treats are detailed.

Contaminated pet treats can kill your favorite dog or cat

Contaminated pet treats can kill your dogs or cats. The FDA openly warns about this on its website(1), saying:
Since 2007, FDA has become aware of an increasing number of illnesses in pets associated with the consumption of jerky pet treats. As of September 24, 2013, FDA has received approximately 3000 reports of pet illnesses which may be related to consumption of the jerky treats. Most of the reports involve jerky products sourced from China. The majority of the complaints involve dogs, but cats also have been affected. The reports involve more than 3600 dogs, 10 cats and include more than 580 deaths.
Over the years, thousands of family pets have been killed by contaminated pet treats, and more deaths will occur until this industry is required to meet stringent quality standards.
Sadly, the FDA still has no limits on heavy metals in pet treats or pet food, so a company can legally manufacture pet treats containing almost any level of heavy metal toxins while legally selling that product at Amazon.com or your favorite pet store.
The USDA, similarly, has no limits on heavy metals in certified organic pet food. So even "organic" pet foods and treats can contain extremely toxic levels of heavy metals while being certified organic by the U.S. government.
And while heavily-contaminated pet treats can kill your pet in a matter of hours or days, pet treats with sub-acute levels of heavy metals can still cause long-term chronic poisoning over time, where the heavy metals build up with each cumulative exposure.

Are there any pet treats with low heavy metals?

Yes! In fact, my laboratory research was able to verify that the "Real Meat Healthy Gourmet Dog & Puppy Treats" product made by the Real Meat Company(2) was remarkably low in heavy metals, registering zero cadmium, mercury and arsenic while showing only a tiny trace of lead.

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Hundreds of dogs killed by contaminated jerky treats made in China; FDA still mystified by cause

Thursday, October 24, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
(NaturalNews) Thousands of family dogs across the USA have been sickened by pet jerky treats made in China, and nearly 600 dogs have died. The FDA has issued a warning over the deadly jerky treats but has not forced any sort of product recall.
So far, the cause of the fatalities remains a mystery. The FDA says it has tested jerky treats for heavy metals, pesticides, antibiotics, chemicals and even Salmonella but cannot find the cause. The agency is warning pet owners to watch their pets for symptoms of poisoning which may include "decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea (sometimes with blood or mucus), increased water consumption and / or increased urination."
Click here to view the FDA's fact sheet on contaminated jerky treats.
According to USA Today, the deadly jerky treats "come mostly from China," and the number of dogs sickened or killed by these treats has been rising all year.
The treats causing this epidemic of death, says USA Today, are "made of chicken, duck, sweet potatoes or dried fruit."

Beware of pet treats made in China

Most consumers do not fully realize that pet treats do NOT have to list their country of origin. Many pet treats are highly deceptive on their packaging, sometimes showing a logo of the continental USA and claiming to be "made with beef from the USA" even though the treats themselves are manufactured in China using toxic chemicals.
The FDA has not issued a recall on the brands it suspects are causing these deaths. This is one of the problems with the agency: it already knows which products are killing dogs, but it has so far failed to release that information to the public. As a result, as more and more people learn about this, all pet treat manufacturers will suffer because consumers will shun the entire product category.

Read More Here

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Meat scrap leftovers now being reprocessed into ice cream: The dismal future of food

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Natural News

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) There appears to be no limit to how far the processed food industry will go to maximize its profits, even if it means reprocessing animal meat waste and adding it to completely unrelated foods like ice cream. This is the latest endeavor by industrial food researchers in Italy, Belgium, and elsewhere, who are right now developing novel methods to turn meat industry leftovers into protein-rich powders and slurry for the factory food industry.

As disgusting as it sounds, unused muscle tissue, tendons, bones, and other animal byproducts are loaded with proteins and fats that typically end up in landfills. According to FoodProcessing.com, up to 50 percent of the animal weight processed by the meat industry is composted, discarded, or incinerated. But modern science is hoping to basically recycle this waste and turn it back into food.

But this so-called food will not be recognizable as its own entity, at least not in the traditional sense. All those bones, meat trimmings, and poultry leftovers can effectively be converted into what the food industry has dubbed "animal protein hydrolysates." These hydrolysates are basically liquified or powdered protein and fat blends that can be added to all sorts of other processed foods to boost their overall nutritional content.

'Pink slime'-type animal gruel to be added to processed foods

Sure, various types of hydrolysates are already added to some processed foods currently on the market. But these hydrolysates are typically made from plants or milk, while the new animal protein hydrolysates are derived from actual animal flesh and bone, which puts them in a whole different league. Hydrolyzed whey protein, for instance, is merely derived from the whey of animal milk. But animal protein hydrolysates are essentially ground up and enzymatically processed animal flesh - recall an image of the infamous "pink slime" and you will get an accurate idea of what we are talking about here.

"It appears that the lipid-rich bonanza of 'disused' reject animal bits can easily be turned into a nutritious gunge, paste or gel of some type, apparently ideal for pumping by the [hecatombe] into processed foods such as ice cream," writes Lewis Page facetiously for The Register about the concept.

"Despite the heroic efforts of the meat biz, in which every particle of jelly and gristle may be jetwashed out of the spinal column of a dead animal for later consumption - perhaps in sausage, pie or meat-paste format - and (as we have lately learned) the odd shortcut may be taken with respect to any dead horses that might be lying about, nonetheless huge tonnages of less-attractive meaty nourishment such as guts, eyes, tendons, cartilage, other connective tissue of various kinds, brains, hooves, genitals, etc. etc. all tend to go to waste."

Industrial food processors claim reusing animal waste is 'adding value' to food

To the food industry, though, turning animal waste into food will add value to foods that might be lacking in nutrition. Belgium-based Proliver, for example, already manufactures a lined of chicken- and turkey-based "protein powders" that can apparently be injected into other meat products and used to thicken or enrich other foods:
http://www.proliver.be/nl/home-1.htm

A Russian company has openly admitted that it plans to use animal protein hydrolysates to "enrich" ice cream. According to reports, the company, known as Mobitek-M, has already constructed a manufacturing plant in the Belgorod region of Russia that is capable of processing one hundred tons of "functional animal protein" per day.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foodprocessing.com.au

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130520094846.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/22/surplus_meat_ice_cream/

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