Agreed. I just want to be sure that reason and perspective don’t cause it to be minimized because of the over-use of certain “down-playing” phrases/numbers, like repeating the “16” number over and over again.
And of course the “most important thing” to an individual pet owner who’s animal(s) are sick/dying/dead from this is different than the big picture “most important thing.” But yes, obviously this is a canary in a coal mine and should be a wakeup call regarding our entire food supply, pets and humans.
And I’m still not clear whether it was just chance that put this contaminated wheat gluten into the pet food supply rather than the human food supply, or whether it was intentionally diverted from the human food supply because SOMEONE knew there was a problem, and pets are “just animals” so it wouldn’t matter if some of them died. We need to know the answer to that. Did pets draw the short stick and it was just chance, or did pets get killed on purpose because someone knew this stuff would be deadly to humans?
Given that the contaminant seems to have originated in China (though that isn’t absolutely confirmed, last I heard), and that the Chinese have on several recent occasions responded to a spike in human rabies cases by having officials go out and bludgeon to death as many pet dogs as they can find, often right in front of their owners, I can see how an attitude of “it’s just pets” could be part of the decision-making process over there. Somebody may have learned that melamine had gotten into a big batch of wheat gluten, and decided that rather than throwing it all out, they’d make sure it went only to pet food manufacturers and their suppliers.
In defense of these hypothetical decision-makers, it’s possible they looked up the research on melamine toxicity in animals, found that the research showed minimal toxicity in dogs and rats, found nothing about cats and so assumed the same toxicity level as dogs/rats, and therefore figured that with very small amounts of melamine present (vs. the very large amounts generally used in toxicity studies) there was essentially no risk of serious harm. It’s worth keeping in mind that veterinary experts are still perplexed as to how melamine could have caused the severe effects that have been seen in many dogs. If they haven’t figured it out yet, some poor middle management schmuck in China probably didn’t stand a chance of recognizing a huge risk in this contamination, even with some honest effort to check on that possibility. And if the poor schmuck lived in one of the areas where he’s seen government officials bludgeoning hundreds of pet dogs to death (maybe even seen his own bludgeoned to death), his measuring stick for what constitutes a major risk would be quite different from ours.
On a related note, I saw a report on the feline renal failure list today from someone who had microwaved the contents of a recalled can of IAMS food (in a microwave-safe dish), and it threw sparks. She was inquiring as to whether this could have been due to the melamine. I don’t know. Hard to imagine that small particles of melamine spread out in the food could produce this dramatic effect, but I’d be interested to hear if you see any other reports like this. Melamine dishes do behave oddly in microwaves (the dish heats a lot more than the contents), but I’ve never seen one throw sparks.