Wheat Glutton

And he followed up with this.  He is in the manufacturing business, works with plastics.  Someone was questioning melamine dishes and he said melamine is a binder to hold molecules or soemthing goether to make the hard plastic and after it is ---i forget the turm--it is perfectly safe and you can't get poisoned from it.  He also has questions about it being the caused of the kidney failure.
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Really, they don't have a clue what's causing it, or why. They don't know where it is, or how it got there. They aren't sure if the dry food is ok or not. Basically, nobody knows anything. None of this makes any sense to me, but I see the poor dog in the cage at work, eating her K/D, and getting her fluids, and failing miserably.

I will not be feeding dog food, for a very LONG time, if ever. I'm absolutely, positively, petrified of the stuff. I'm terrified for all of the wonderful pets that I know and love, that they'll become ill. It's very scary, and STILL not pinpointed. My best friend's cat died, mysteriously, a few weeks ago. She was 14, but healthy all her life. She was eating EVO. The cat's sibling is now on raw.

Yeah, but Jennie they haven't even completely ruled out that it didn't make it's way into the human food supply also. 

And he followed up with this. He is in the manufacturing business, works with plastics. Someone was questioning melamine dishes and he said melamine is a binder to hold molecules or soemthing goether to make the hard plastic and after it is ---i forget the turm--it is perfectly safe and you can't get poisoned from it. He also has questions about it being the caused of the kidney failure.

 
   Melamine is used as a fertilizer in Asia, and the wheat gluten came from China. According to DR. Donald Smith , Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell, melamine was found in the urine and kidneys of the affected animals as well as in the wheat gluten. 
 
"Dr. Smith showed photos of the distinctive crystals found in the urine and sometimes kidneys of affected animals, and said that there are also dramatic changes to the distal tubules - small tubes leading off the back of the kidneys - and few or no changes to the proximal (front) tubules. These changes were to the lining of the tubules, which were full of sloughed-off cells, and caused a loss of the structural integrity in the tubules. The spaces around the tubules were also full of inflammatory cells.
He repeated that he was not making a connection of these symptoms with melamine."
 
   They don't have much information about how toxic melamine is to pets, so they can't say if it was responsible for the deaths or not. I wish they would tell how much melamine was in the wheat gluten; whether it was a strong concentration or not.

Not to sound mean, but I really think everyone should read the articles that these bits and pieces that are being posted come from in their entirety.  It's much easier to make sense of them and reading them this way is only going to cause confusion and cause people to panic from not fully understanding what was said. 
 
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I'm still not clear why we even get wheat from China.... Gads, we have plenty. A trade thing?

Not to sound mean, but I really think everyone should read the articles that these bits and pieces that are being posted come from in their entirety. It's much easier to make sense of them and reading them this way is only going to cause confusion and cause people to panic from not fully understanding what was said.

Sorry Lori; I provided the links in other posts, here's the link for the information above;   
   [linkhttp://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/03/30/pet-food-recall-cornell-vet-school-dean-at-fda-press-conference/]http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/03/30/pet-food-recall-cornell-vet-school-dean-at-fda-press-conference/[/link]

  Also, I just found a link that may explain why more cats are dying than dogs and tells the amount of melamine they've been finding in the wheat gluten;
[linkhttp://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/31/pet.food.recall.cats.ap/index.html]http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/31/pet.food.recall.cats.ap/index.html[/link];

   "I am concerned we have a situation where we have a sensitive species and it is the cat," said Steven Hansen, a veterinary toxicologist and director of the ASPCA's Animal Poison Control center in Urbana, Illinois..
Testing by the FDA and Cornell University has found melamine in samples of recalled pet food as well as in crystal form in the urine and kidney tissue of dead cats. They've also found the chemical, in apparently raw form in concentrations as high as 6.6 percent, in wheat gluten used as an ingredient of the recalled cat and dog foods, said Stephen Sundlof, the FDA's chief veterinarian.

There was a sizable amount of melamine. You could see crystals in the wheat gluten," Sundlof told The Associated Press.

 
  

Here's an interesting article --

[linkWhat>http://www.quikonnex.com/channel/page/Jeanesholistics-WholeDogNews]What the FDA Isn't Telling Us About Melamine[/link]
 
(You'll have to scroll down--it's the second story on the page.)

The bottom line is that the general public is finally being shown how worthless and unhealthy these supermarket dog junkfoods are.  If you take the list of recalled foods, that is pretty much a list of the foods you should never feed your pet anyway. By the time you figure in the advertising, marketing expense, profit margin, store markup, some of these supermarket foods cost about 20 cents a pound to produce.  If you think you can get something decent for your pet to eat for 20 cents a pound, you live in Disneyworld. 

At the dog park I visit everyday, I was suprised to hear people today  talking about Canidae and Natural Balance and EVO instead of Purina,and Beneful and the other worthless landfill foods they have been feeding their dogs...... The dogs will be alot happier and healthier if this knowledge spreads.  In every cloud, there is a silver lining.....

I'm still not clear why we even get wheat from China....

 
We didn't get the wheat from China. It contains aminopterin which is banned in America. Menu Foods of Canada got it from China. Then american companies, such as Innova and Nutro and Purina sub their wet food production to Menu Foods, ship it to the US distribution centers where it gets the Innova, Nutro, or Purina label slapped on it. And companies, such as Innova, Nutro, and Purina say that "we make all our own food right here."
 
All these companies can claim stringent quality control but do they really have it? They should have caught it in their shipments from December. So, what was a problem seemingly only for Diamond food processing is evidently an industry wide problem. And this problem means that each food is not always better than the other, just have different recipes. So, if Innova claims to have low grains, that means your dog or cat got maybe a gram less wheat gluten than maybe Nutro. How comforting.
 
As the company pres of Innova stated in his video, they had to choose between discontinuing wet food or build their own factory. Either way, all the money they thought they were saving by having the wet food "outsourced" will be more than spent trying to recover from this debacle. Same goes for Purina and Nutro. I would personally like to see some people lose their jobs over this. Small compensation for even a few pets losing their lives.

Bob, you need to avoid the ingredient wheat gluten and also IMO menu foods regardless of the brand.  Not sure why you keep going on about the grocery store brands.  Menu is involved with many of our forum favorites too. 

And this problem means that each food is not always better than the other, just have different recipes. So, if Innova claims to have low grains, that means your dog or cat got maybe a gram less wheat gluten than maybe Nutro. How comforting.

Ron, how are you coming to this conclusion?  If Innova is not using wheat gluten then your getting zero wheat gluten not a gram less than what's in Nutro if they use it becasuse not trying to knock Nutro-I've used it and I know you do too--but let's face it it's going to be higher up on the ingredient list than it would be on Innova if they did use it. 

And this problem means that each food is not always better than the other, just have different recipes. So, if Innova claims to have low grains, that means your dog or cat got maybe a gram less wheat gluten than maybe Nutro. How comforting

 
WOW!! that scared me...I just ran and looked at my bag of Innova...No wheat gluten in there..
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ORIGINAL: willowchow

Bob, you need to avoid the ingredient wheat gluten and also IMO menu foods regardless of the brand.  Not sure why you keep going on about the grocery store brands.  Menu is involved with many of our forum favorites too. 

Oh really, which ones?