Why you should care about the pet food recall

My Pet Connection colleague Susan Tripp sent me a note today that "pet food recall" is Google's number one search term this week.

Then right after I read Susan's email, I read this commentary by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, author of How Would a Patriot Act? It's about the coverage of the US attorneys scandal, not the pet food recall, and laments the poor quality of journalistic coverage of government wrong-doing:

Beltway media stars really aren't bothered by any of this in the slightest. It's how their world works. Initially, they even refused to talk about the story at all, insisting that there was nothing worth seeing here, and were all but forced into writing about it as a result of the tenacious coverage in the blogosphere, led by TPM's Josh Marshall. Their instinct is to lash out at anyone who suggests real wrongdoing on the part of the Republican political machinery that has ruled their town for so long.

Journalists, he said, "are supposed to be, by definition, eager for investigations of government misconduct. That is supposed to be their purpose, embedded in their DNA."

My DNA's been tingling since this story broke. And I am absolutely positive that only the "tenacious coverage" of bloggers and those posting on various internet forums and email lists has kept any pressure on the media to take this story seriously.

Well, you might ask, why SHOULD they take it seriously? It's very sad that people's pets died, but this isn't that big a thing. Is it?

Yeah, it is.

This is, of course, a story about people who have lost what is sometimes the most precious thing in their lives, a companion animal. But let's say you don't care about that. At all.

This is also a story about corporate ethics. About a possible cover-up. About a suspicious delay in issuing a recall. About a timeline that raises a lot of questions.

It's a story about the food supply. The HUMAN food supply. Even if the suspect ingredient, wheat gluten, was sold as "for animal consumption only," as we are being told, what was it about this food item that earned it that designation? What are the parameters for "unfit for human consumption"?

What constellation of events kept this from happening to baby food, and is that a repeatable chain of protection? Were we protected by chance only, or was there a system in place that channeled this stuff into our dogs and cats instead of our children? And is that system reliable and robust, or were our pets canaries in the coalmine of industrial food production?

And what if it's NOT the wheat gluten? The FDA and other agencies are not confirming that's the causative factor here - or that there aren't additional contaminants in that or other ingredients. Today, the ASPCA Poison Control Center issued a warning that there may well be other contaminants, or other contaminated ingredients, involved.

It's a story about government oversight and reporting. We've been operating a self-reporting database over on PetConnection.com since the recall was announced, in the hopes of getting an idea of the scope of the problem. Because of our connections in the veterinary field, we knew that this problem was nationwide and far more widespread than was (and is) being reported. And we've taken some flack for this, because there are limitations - which we have always explicitly acknowledged - to self-reporting. (Although we put some controls in place to minimize some of the known issues.)

We also told people to talk to their own vets - none of whom had heard about this crisis anywhere but from the media or other vets at that point - and we begged them to report their pet's illness or death to the FDA.

Except that was really hard, because the FDA had no easy mechanism in place to take those reports, and pretty much no one could even get through to them at all, especially in the beginning. And of course, even now, when it's obvious that the numbers here will be in the thousands or even tens of thousands - as predicted by many credible, knowledgeable sources - the FDA continues to say that there are only 15 confirmed deaths.

The same confirmed deaths that came out of Menu's test kennels that led (a month later) to the recall. That's right. Not one of your dead or stricken pets is being considered "confirmed" yet.

That's as it should be, perhaps, as at the moment we don't actually know how to "confirm" a case of what vets are now calling FARF, for "food associated renal failure." But it begs the question, what do we do, as journalists and as pet lovers, in the meantime?

We talk. We dig. We agitate. We investigate. Apparently some of us also indulge in conspiracy theories, but that always happens. We dig some more, agitate some more, find someone with some credibility who can speculate knowledgeably and rationally, and we do our best to keep the focus on the real issues here: Food safety. Accountability. Ethics. And, no offense to the fluffy puppy haters out there, the human-animal bond.

Because this is also a story about the media, and what the job of a journalist really is. When I saw Dan Rather speak at the South by Southwest conference a couple of weeks ago in Austin, he said that we as a culture need to answer that question, but for him, the job of a journalist was not to wait for press releases and official government statements, but to ask tough questions - including tough follow-up questions - of politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate officers on behalf of all the people who couldn't ask. Who didn't have his access or his background (or, if you ask me, his balls). Not to just be a channel for press releases and official statements.

And let me repeat that the job of a journalist is not to wait, but to start pressing in the beginning. What do you suppose would have happened if the Washington Post hadn't let Woodward and Bernstein publish the stories about what we now know as Watergate until the Nixon White House had come out with its official statement?

And this is where the part of me who went to journalism school in the post-Watergate glory days starts looking at me like I'm crazy. I am, after all, a pet writer now, who also writes about music, TV shows, and movies on the side. 

But I'm a journalist nonetheless. And I know that the job of a journalist is to ask questions, dig, and be suspicious. As Rather said, "The role of the journalist is to bark. Not to always do it right, but to always be barking."

Woof.

Comments

[Gina]

This dog says, "Woof."

Translation: Amen.

[Cate]

Thanks for keeping at it. Some of us out here really appreciate it.
Cate

[Laura Bennett]

You and Gina are two of the few who have anything sensible to say about this awful event. Whatever support you need, I'd be happy to help.

Laura

[Shari]

Spot on,with the same good journalistic questions your thoughtful readers have.

We trust you to get and report some answers.

We trust you not to let this little announced-on-a-Friday story of thus far under-reported pet deaths die.

We hope you will encourage veterinarians to question and remedy their seeming inability to gather statistics as a profession, their reliance for information on press releases.

We'd be lost without you, without Gina, without PetCon. Keep it up!

Shari

[Cathy]

Christie, I read your piece yesterday, then while I was listening to NPR this AM, mentally filtering everything else out but "Pet" I heard someone saying, "We just want to know what they knew and when they knew it." Of course they were talking about the attorney general "scandal", not the pet food issue. Same questions though.
Cripes, these people's lives do not extend beyond the Beltway, and personally I think their thinking apparatus has slipped considerably below the beltway if they do not understand the implications of this event.
Thanks for all your hard work.

[Cathy]

Oh, I just have to post this.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20036
Note to Readers: The following column is intended as satire.
Almost News
by Larry Elder
This just in . . .

As family pets continue to die as a result of tainted pet food, congressional Democrats demand a federal investigation. In the meantime, they have requested that all new pet food be first tasted -- by Vice President Dick Cheney.

......sounds like a good idea to me!

[Anon]

I am provoked to add this comment after reading Christie Keith's comments about investigative journalism. Where is a ferocious terrier of a journalist when we need one?

It is hard not to come to negative hypotheses about the FDA's refusal to name the American corporate source of the contaminated wheat gluten. At the very least, the FDA should explain why it is refusing, at this point, to name the source. Absent that information, it is tempting to hypothesize worst cases -- including possible FDA fears that there is widespread use of this wheat gluten in the human food supply, and lack of knowledge about the effect of the contaminent on human health.

The longer it takes the FDA to name the source, the worse the outrage will be if it turns out there is contamination of the human food supply. This is Risk Communication 101.

See the case study of the Belgian animal feed dioxin contamination cover up:

Lok C, Powell D. The Belgian dioxin crisis of the summer of 1999: a case study in crisis communications and management. Food Safety Network, Technical Report #13, 2000 (http://tinyurl.com/yq5bqv)

Abstract: http://tinyurl.com/29mkkr

Quote about candor and transparency, from the World Health Organization Outbreak Communication Guidelines:
http://tinyurl.com/fl9wb

"Total candour should be the operational goal consistent with generally
accepted individual rights, such as patient privacy. The key is to balance
the rights of the individual against information directly pertinent to the
public good and the public's need and desire for reliable information.
Announcing the limits of transparency publicly, and explaining why those
limits are being set, is usually well tolerated provided the limits are
justified. But if limits to transparency become excuses for unnecessary
secretiveness, the likely result will be a loss of public trust."