Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 351 Editor's Choice: 43
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Missing The Point
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why is the answer to the problem always more federal regulation and oversight? What's wrong with holding the manufacturers responsible for the problems they cause?
Why are free market fundamentalists totally disconnected from reality?
The federal government's JOB is to regulate international trade - it's one of the most legitimate, oldest functions of our government. Holding manufacturers "responsible" in lieu of regulation is like closing the barn door after the cow's already gotten out.
It's only going to be a matter of time before ingredients imported for use as "pet food" get diverted for use in human food by some unscrupulous middleman. They'll end up in bread or soup or cookies eaten by you or your family. As you cradle the limp body of your dead child in your arms, after they were poisoned by wheat flour mixed with toxic plastic posing as "wheat gluten", make a mental note never to buy that brand of cookies again. And pray that some other business goon didn't divert the same garbage into the soup you ate last night.
Or, you know, have the government test all this crap as it comes in to our ports, dramatically reducing the chances of having toxin-adulterated food end up in the human (as well as animal) food supply.
You can bet Al-Qaeda is watching this whole pet food fiasco unfold. It's clearly pretty easy to ship vast quantities of poison into the United States disguised as food. If the government doesn't take steps to stop this, you can bet some nut's gonna exploit this free market hole in our defenses sooner or later. Heck, the FDA doesn't even inspect most of the food destined for human consumption anymore - the free marketeers in charge of our government won't fund it.
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"16" Dead Animals - More Corporate Disinformation
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's been widely bandied about that only "16" deaths were "confirmed" due to tainted Chinese ingredients. This number - like most everything else involved with this sad, sorry scandal - is yet another scam. The 16 deaths they're referring to are the 16 animals who died in testing conducted by Menu Foods itself, where they fed their toxic fare to caged cats and dogs.
As to how many pets have died in total - nobody knows. There's no federal agency to track and categorize pet deaths. The big vet hospital chains reported a large uptick in the number of cats being treated for renal failure during the height of the scandal, but it's impossible to say how that translates into numbers in the general population. Hundreds - or more likely thousands - of pets were likely killed, and tens of thousands sickened. Owners have spent a fortune in vet bills, and the longterm impact on pet health is unknown.
And since there's still no regulation in place requiring these ingredients to be tested for adulteration, you can bet this is gonna happen again and again and again until the government finally imposes testing requirements.
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We don't know - that's the problem
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Purina, Pedigree and other grocery store brands are like Wonder Bread, Twinkies or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Are they going to make you sick because the ingredients are tainted? Probably not.
How can we realistically say "probably" not anymore? We now have conclusive evidence that toxin-contaminated ingredients - in this case wheat flour and rice flour doped up with melamine to appear as "gluten" - have been imported into the US. If that can slip in undetected and sicken or kill thousands, possibly tens of thousands of animals, who's to say what's in your Twinkies, Wonder Bread or Kraft Cheeze?
I think 20 or even 10 years ago you could be pretty confident your food wasn't adulterated with toxins to pass as something it wasn't, because most of it was domestically sourced and covered by an extensive network of domestic regulations and inspections. But now as we accelerate our race to the bottom in the brave new regulation-free capitalist wonder world, the regulatory framework Americans developed over the past 200 years is being bypassed. Anything can - and history shows us eventually will - slip by as a result.
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Kibble Cleans Teeth?
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kibble is great to help clean pets' teeth
I've read this assertion over and over again, but where's the evidence? Are there any studies to back this? Just because something is hard and crunchy doesn't mean it cleans teeth. Rock candy is hard and crunchy, but I doubt most dentists would recommend it for teeth cleaning. Most kibble pretty quickly breaks down into mush in water, and most kibble is really high in simple carbohydrates compared to meat. I'd imagine both factors would contribute to tooth decay, not help prevent it.
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It's 1972 All Over Again
[Read the article: The unknown superstars]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]These guys sound like the Three Dog Night of the 21st century. They'll move a ton of records, and be completely forgotten in a decade.
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Zen And The Art Of Sniffing Your Own Crap
[Read the article: I'm younger than that now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you really are just a body/mind you are in a kind of trouble that can't be helped-- no matter what your mental attitude.
Oh please, give it a rest already. Reality can be beautiful and it can get ugly, it can be inspiring and it can be depressing and there's little hope any one of us can figure more than a corner of it out. That having been said, immersing yourself in reality is always, always more interesting and rewarding than the smug, inane prattle of the spiritually deluded.
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Good grief
[Read the article: What you missed while watching "Deal or No Deal"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well, this explains why the GOP wants that ogre Fred Thompson to throw his hat into the ring. What a freak show.