I'm not a dog hater. I have one who sleeps in my bed every night. But I also have four cats and they deserve protection, too.

We got a Cavalier King Charles puppy a little over a year ago and the breeder strongly recommends BARF because the breed has issues with artificial food. We already had an older dog, which has allergies. It just seemed the thing to do was to feed the older dog (a cocker-lab mix) well, too. She dog does seem to have gotten healthier--certainly, much thinner--on the new diet.

Tell me about it. That's what we're feeding our dogs. We actually bought a meat grinder and were making it ourselves but the vet convinced us we were better off with the commercial stuff.

My post on this story from yesterday (currently the first blog post listed when googling “dogfood recall”) is getting quite a little flurry of activity.

Yep, it's rather odd how that works. The combination of a relatively high PageRank, the use of permalinks, and some strange dynamics tend to make blog posts rank high in searches.

And then there are the commercial foods based on the BARF (bones and raw food) regime. Those are expensive.

Has anyone else noticed another aspect of this recall? From various news reports, it certainly sounds like the most & least expensive cat pet foods on the market may have the same formulas. So much for the "value" of the expensive brands.

A safe animal feed supply helps ensure healthy animals and people. To that end, the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) monitors and establishes standards for feed contaminants, approves safe food additives, and manages the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) medicated feed and pet food programs.

Offhand I'd guess that the number of inspectors is far below what's required for the enormity of the task, most of the inspectors are probably concentrating on feeds for commercial livestock, and whatever compliance there is is de facto mostly voluntary.