Poisonous Pet Food

Most humans and animals are well equipped to handle a certain amount of toxicity in food and drink without serious difficulty. Let me illustrate. For people, accidentally eating a few apple seeds is not likely to do irrevocable harm. Eating a quarter of a cupful could easily kill you.

Like many children, animals sometimes develop food preferences and they can be pretty stubborn about it. Some insist on a single brand of food to the exclusion of all else. Some pet owners are even told that they should feed their animal only one particular food. I don't believe this is a good idea.

The animals lost in this contamination tragedy were very likely to have been those confined to such an exclusive diet with no dilutions. If one of my cats eats a rodent my neighbor has poisoned with a commercial toxic bait, unless it is a very large rodent or the cat eats several over a short period of time, he is not likely to come to a lot of harm if the poison is a blood thinner, for example, instead of something like arsenic.

Among my outdoor feral colony and the few indoor cats there are only a few picky specialized eaters. The ones I lost were these few. The list of recalled foods was long. When I first heard of the recall, I had perhaps six brands of animal feed that had been the largest part if what the animals ate. It would not have been feasible to take all of this food back to the markets.

What I did instead was add a lot of chicken, turkey, eggs, and even some beef and liver to the rations, diluting any possible contamination as much as possible. The dead or missing cats were all from the group of stubborn picky eaters who absolutely refused to change their eating patterns.The remaining cats are more robust than ever and seem delighted with their new menu.