From: rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner)
Subject: Re: Friskies cat food
Reply-To: rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner)
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 92 20:01:52 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.022448.29066@unixland.natick.ma.us> marcotte@unixland.natick.ma.us (Louis E. Marcotte) writes:
>This posting is to alert cat owners of a problem 
>that has been encountered with some Friskies brand cat food.  
[long message about rubber bands in Friskies 6-oz. tins removed for brevity]

We buy this product for our girls from the PetSmart in Albuquerque. But we mix 
wet and dry food together in the bowl, mushing up the wet with a spoon as we 
do so, and have never found any sign of bright blue (or any other color) rubber
in the food. Was it perhaps all one flavor of the wet food? We don't have all
of them available to us there.

I don't want you to think that I'm excusing Friskies on this nasty slip in 
their quality control, because I'm not; they definitely screwed up. But I do 
think that expecting them to do a recall at this stage is not reasonable. If 
they were going to do it at all, it should have been done early in the year 
when they first figured it out.

What are the chances (and I'm asking seriously because I don't know the answer)
that a piece of rubber as wide as this (you say 1/3") and 1-2 inches long could
injure the cat? It sounds like it is being either vomited back up or passed in 
the feces undetected, since apparently the cats didn't suffer any noticeable 
physical problems as a result. I agree that it was very irresponsible of them 
not to have given you all the information they had earlier, and that something 
in their Q.C. slipped badly last November; but on the other hand, asking them 
to spend tens of thousands of dollars (at least) in an attempt to recall a 
product which doesn't *appear* to be causing any actual harm is probably a bit 
much. Cats vomit frequently; is there anything to indicate specifically that 
the rubber caused the occasions you saw, rather than that it just happened to 
be in there that time the cat barfed? 

In any case, recalls on this kind of thing tend not to produce much in the way 
of results (even recalls on potentially-fatal defects in expensive cars aren't 
totally successful); and I bet they're right in assuming that the vast majority 
of those few days' production has already been consumed. The pet food industry 
is a big one and stores do move a huge volume. Most people do not stock vast 
amounts of food (about a month's supply is as much as I ever buy) and would 
use it up fairly soon after buying it, rather than saving it for months.

I always look at the food, wet and dry, before giving it to my cats. Frankly,
I don't trust *any* food production, for pets or humans, to be 100% safe 100%
of the time. There are too many points where someone can screw up. I once
found a *huge* chunk of pure mold inside a new bag of potato chips. There
have been many reported incidents of people finding ground-up glass and other 
cheerful things inside food products, not to mention insect parts and so forth.

Yes, the product manufacturer has a major responsibility to ensure that the
product is safe for consumption, and should ultimately be held responsible 
when it isn't. But I also think consumers have a responsibility to themselves 
to be careful as well, to avoid the potential harm if at all possible. Caveat 
emptor, whether it be food for you or for your pets.

OK, time to don the old flame-proof suit - what's left of it, anyway :-).
-- 
Ruth Milner                          NRAO/VLA                  Socorro NM
Computing Division Head      rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu
Newsgroups: rec.pets