You’re reading those numbers wrong. That’s not 5% of all the pets treated at Animal Medical Center, much less 5% of all the pets in the region AMC serves, but 5% of the pets treated for kidney failure at AMC. In other words, 95% of the kidney failure cases they’d seen were NOT attributable to the contaminated pet food. The vast majority of pets living in this country currently don’t have kidney failure from any cause.
YOU are reading those numbers wrong too. As you said, thousands of pets across the country are diagnosed with kidney failure every week. So an additional 5% is ALOT of additional sick/dead pets.
Furthermore, AMC reviewed cases for the period from March 17-20, which is a 4-day period immediately after the recall (March 16). The recall happened on a FRIDAY (16th), and everyone at FR knows why companies/Govt release bad news on a Friday - so that very few people hear it and so it will be old news by Monday (19th). So the cases that AMC reviewed most likely don’t represent a large influx of paranoid pet owners, and they also most likely don’t represent an accurate percentage of recall-related cases because pet owners didn’t yet know what symptoms to watch for as indicators of ARF... so a pet owner who saw their cat get lethargic and skip a meal or two on Monday didn’t recognize those as potentially fatal, EMERGENCY symptoms, so they didn’t take their pets to Vets until the story had been in the news for awhile.
Many pets died at home without even seeing a Vet, so they would never be counted in an AMC-type statistic. In other words, 5% more kidney failure cases than “normal” at AMC is HUGE.
17% of the animals who ate the contaminated food in Menu Foods’ own taste tests died! Menu Foods’ food feeds 5 million pets.
Imagine if the human kidney failure rate was increased by 5% due to a food contaminant. Would you be minimizing that? And please don’t reply with anything that resembles “No, but cats and dogs are not humans.”