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Discussion of Nutro / Natural Choice Dog Food Products

Welcome to the Nutro and Natural Choice dog food discussion board. Please only post topics that pertain to Nutro or Natural Choice Dog Food Products. This board is mainly for the recent recall of the pet food and how it pertains to the safety of our pets. Nutro and Natural Choice Wet dog food was recalled. This message board is particularly interested in hearing from those that believe their animal has fallen sick due to the consumption of the DRY dog food that has not been recalled.

This board is not affiliated with the Nutro or Natural Choice Company in any way. This is a discussion board for informational purposes only. Messages posted on this board do not reflect the opinions of Voy or necessarily the board owner. Messages posted here may or may not be proven facts and could be opinions, observations, or fictional stories posted by and/or about unknown or non-existent individuals.

Please try to only post TRUE stories and facts. Share your stories, vent, but please do your best to stick to the facts.
Do not use foul language.

We hope the information on this board will be informative for other pet owners. We do not get paid for this board. We have no budget and receive no compensation.

Important Links

Menu Foods Recall List

FDA Pet Food Recall Topics

Nutro Products Website

Report Pet Food Complaint to FDA

Place A Pet Food Complaint To Federal Trade Commission

Hub Pages Discussion 1

Hub Pages Discussion 2

Pet Food Tracker Blog

Consumer Affairs Nutro Complaint - Submit A Pet Food Complaint

If your dog has consumed Nutro or Natural Choice DRY dog food and has became ill, please post your story to the message board. Please include your name, dog breed and age, the type of dog food that was consumed, the dog's symptoms, and how long the symptoms have been shown.

Upon calling the Nutro Company - 05.08.07 -- Board Owner, 15:29:50 05/08/07 Tue [1]

Upon phoning the Nutro company today, we were informed that the phone numbers Nutro provided are outsourced by an independent call center, hired by Nutro to screen all the calls. No representatives from Nutro, nor C.E.O.s, nor owners, are directly accepting calls from consumers. They have taken the high road.

This information was provided by a woman by the name of Cathy, an hourly worker who does not work for Nutro. Kristy, another phone representative that does not work for Nutro also provided this information. The only call center supervisor was Vicki. She was NOT available. Cathy stated she did not know supervisor Vicki's last name. How do you work with someone and not know their last name?

We are beginning to wonder if any actual Nutro employees exist?

BTW - We phoned Nutro today to tell them that many pets are still sick and dying after eating the dry dog food. Again, we were told the food is safe. They say all tests on the dry dog food products came back clean. We do not believe them. They asked us AGAIN to send in more samples of the dry dog food. If they are so confident the food was not tainted, why would they need more samples?

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*As precaution, do NOT feed your dog Nutro dry dog food. Please realize that since the recall of some Nutro products, the company has BEEN SOLD! The company is more evasive than ever before.

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NEWS STORY -- NEWS, 13:52:13 05/08/07 Tue [3]

Beloved friend or simply property?Chasing justice in pet-food lawsuits

By Emilie Lounsberry
Inquirer Staff Writer

GERALD S. WILLIAMS / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Goliath's owner vs. pet-food Goliath: Michelle Nocito says, "You can't put a value on what he meant."

As Goliath lay dying, Michelle Nocito told him she was sorry. Twice a day, she had fed the 9-year-old Italian mastiff a heaping bowl of Nutro Max chow. One hundred twenty pounds of hearty appetite, he always wolfed it down. Only after his kidneys failed did she learn that the brand was among dozens suspected of chemical contamination. By then, it was too late. On March 27, she had to have him put down.

To the grieving, guilt-ridden Nocito, both she and Goliath had become victims in the largest pet-food recall in history. Today, the Voorhees woman also is a plaintiff in what is quickly building into the largest wave of animal litigation ever to sweep into the American court system - one sure to pit ancient legal notions of an animal's practical worth against the emotional value of the new "fur kids" like Goliath.

Attorneys for hundreds of pet owners nationwide already have taken aim at some of the companies that have recalled more than 120 varieties of dog and cat food since March 16. By far, the target of choice is Menu Foods Inc., the Canada-based manufacturer of about 100 of the tainted product lines.

As of Friday, at least 50 class-action lawsuits had been filed in federal courts; most are in New Jersey, where Menu has a Pennsauken plant. State courts are likely to be hit, too. For while the Food and Drug Administration has confirmed only 16 deaths, informal tallies by veterinary groups and pet Web sites put fatalities above 3,000, with possibly 10,000 more sickened after eating batches made with melamine-tainted wheat gluten from China.

Only days ago, panic struck again with the recall of rice protein, also from China, shipped to U.S. pet-food makers. The importer said it, too, might contain melamine, used in fertilizers and plastics.

"It's just getting bigger and bigger," said Casey Srogoncik, a Northeast Philadelphia lawyer who is gathering up clients.

The owners' lawsuits seek compensation for costs ranging from burials to ongoing care of survivors. State Rep. Mark Cohen and his wife, Mona, of Northeast Philadelphia, nearly lost their Yorkie bichon, Cookie. They've joined a federal class-action lawsuit that, while typically not stating a specific dollar amount, asks for such relief as a fund for medical monitoring and treatment of lingering health problems.

How about a kidney transplant for Baby? Debra Waldauer, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., has signed on to one of the class actions in hopes of getting Menu Foods to pick up the tab - usually about $5,000 - for her black cat's surgery.

But the big-ticket question is not who will pay the vet bills, legal experts say. It's whether owners will be entitled to damages for emotional distress.

Historically, courts have viewed animals as property, with bottom-line market value.

"Few judges have allowed owners - or guardians, as we call them - to recover for the [emotional] value of the dog or cat to that person," said Joyce Tischler, founding director of the nonprofit Animal Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy group based in California.

If judges are of a mind to plow new legal ground, "then there is money to be made in those lawsuits," she said. If not, "then you'll see [them] settle out very fast."

A Menu Foods spokeswoman told The Inquirer last week that the company had no comment on the suits. Nor did Del Monte Pet Products, named in one federal class action. A Nestle Purina spokesman said he knew of a few pet-food lawsuits against the company, but also declined to comment.

Plaintiffs' lawyers have not been nearly so reticent.

Some have built reputations as champions of animal rights, and see the litigation as an opportunity to advance their crusade. They include the likes of Adam P. Karp, professor of animal law at the University of Seattle and the University of Washington and vice chairman of the American Bar Association's animal-law committee. He has filed a suit on behalf of a couple whose dog, Shasta, died after eating chow made with the suspect wheat gluten from China.

A deluge of cases, Karp said, "will force courts everywhere, simultaneously, to really wrestle with these core questions" of animals' value as companions.

The recall also has drawn lawyers who specialize in class-action and mass-tort cases involving injury to complainants of the two-legged variety, such as the gargantuan litigation over the diet drug fen-phen and the pain reliever Vioxx.

For the Menu Foods filings, they are pulling in plaintiffs through Internet ads.

William Audet, a San Francisco lawyer who already has filed three federal suits on behalf of hundreds of owners, has a memorial page on his law firm's site. There, clients can post photos and eulogize departed pets. As of Friday, it held homages to ChaChee, Taco Bell, Jesse James, and 85 others.

Margie Hilgreen of Northeast Philadelphia lost her toy fox terrier, Sarah Lee, last month.

"[Pets] become your children," she said. "You can talk to them all the time, and they don't sass you back. They listen to all your problems."

Hilgreen said she wanted Menu held accountable not only for the death of "my baby" but also for any delay in notifying the public that something might have been wrong with the food.

Speculation about a time gap has heightened since the recent disclosure that Menu's chief financial officer, Mark Wiens, sold nearly half his shares in the company three weeks before the first recall announcement. The stock, which brought almost $90,000 then, would be worth about $53,000 now.

A Menu spokesman denied a connection, telling the Associated Press that the CFO "feels just awful that this link has been made."

Nonetheless, the question of "what they knew and when they knew it" could help propel the pet owners' lawsuits, said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and mass-tort expert.

It will still be a tough road, he added. Legal fees can quickly drain the resources of plaintiffs who go it alone. In the economy-size class actions, lawyers generally take their cut from any monetary award. But those cases cannot even get into court unless the lawyers show that their many clients share "common issues," directly linking the pets' illnesses to the recalled brands.

Because individual animals might have eaten other foods, suffered other diseases, and been affected by a myriad of other factors such as old age, "I think it's going to be fairly difficult to prove," Tobias said.

If the owners get over that hurdle, larger ones loom - with the possibility, at least one expert cautions, of a double-edged dog bone at the end.

Western judicial views on animals' worth are rooted - some would say mired - in antiquity.

Plato, a vegetarian, argued that animals should be treated with respect. But Greece's philosophical rank and file asserted they had been created to benefit humans and were property.

That concept has stuck for millennia, even as animals have migrated from the barnyard to the backyard to the master bedroom. An estimated 60 million to 70 million U.S. households have cats or dogs or both, but "the legal system has really lagged behind how people feel," said Jonathan Lovvorn, vice president of animal-protection litigation for the Humane Society of the United States, in Washington.

Animals in Europe have fared somewhat better recently than their American cohorts. In 2002, Germany included animal rights in its constitution. In 2005, France enhanced their status in its civil code by making them "protected property."

But even in the United States, a movement within the legal profession to win them rights and protections has picked up such steam, Lovvorn said, that it is the "hot public-interest ticket."

The Humane Society can call on a stable of at least 500 lawyers to litigate a burgeoning caseload, often involving mistreatment of farm animals. Many, Lovvorn added, work pro bono.

Law schools now routinely teach animal law; at least a handful have animal-law litigation centers. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has student chapters at the law schools of the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State, Temple, Rutgers, Villanova and Widener Universities. Last month, Harvard University hosted a sold-out conference on the "Future of Animal Law."

As more counselors take up the cudgels, some courts have opened the door to the edgy issues of emotional distress. And they've allowed animals to be cast as higher-value property - in much the same way that an heirloom broach is worth far more to its owner than the $10 of tin with which it was made, said Gary Francione, a Rutgers University professor who specializes in animal law.

A California jury awarded $30,000 in "special value" damages for a dog that died in a veterinarian's care; the dog's fair-market value was $10.

In Oregon, a jury awarded $5,000 in damages for emotional distress to the owner of Max, a cat set afire by a local youth. The state Court of Appeals last year not only upheld the award but set a new legal principle: "malicious injury to a pet" can be factored into damages for emotional distress.

"I don't believe courts are blind to the emotional attachment that people have" for pets, said Alan Calnan, a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.

But at the same time, he said, many judges are "very fearful" of setting off an inevitable stampede of claims.

The pet-food recall appears to be doing it for them.

Calnan also cautioned that more courtroom clout for animals could mean problems for humans: higher malpractice insurance rates for veterinarians, rising medical costs, even legal complications for owners who want to euthanize their pets.

"There's all kinds of consequences," Calnan said.

Michelle Nocito also is thinking about consequences - for Menu Foods.

She had started feeding pouches of Nutro Max to Goliath around Thanksgiving. Her other dog, Cohiba, an American bulldog with a sensitive stomach, ate a different kind.

Goliath had two seizures soon after, she said, but only in mid-January when he started to lose bladder control did she realize something was terribly wrong. His thirst was unslakable and his lethargy so profound that he slept 16 hours a day.

When news of the recall broke, she checked the list. His food was on it.

"The guilt eats at me every day," said Nocito, 30, a financial adviser who is five months pregnant with her first child. "At night when I come home and Goliath is not here, it is rough. My house seems empty."

If she receives any monetary award from the class-action suit she has joined in New Jersey state court, it will go to the shelter where she adopted Goliath, Nocito said.

But "it's not about the money. It's more about [Menu] being accountable," she said. "You can't put a value on what he meant."

To see the complete list of recalled pet foods,go to http://go.philly.com/pets

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Replies:

[> Re: NEWS STORY -- Angelique, 09:11:19 05/08/07 Tue [1]

Please contact me at zeusleo@yahoo.com if you have had a loss like mine described below.

My dog (only 4 years old) died (Monday, April 30th) within 4 days of me buying a new bag of Nutro Max Dry Dog Food. It was purchased on 4/25 (started feeing him on the 26th from this new bag). It was purchased from Pet Supermarket located at 927 N. Federa This is not on the list of recalled foods but this was the only major change in his diet and he was never out of my sight. He was fine on Sunday until 2 am when he started having diarreha, vomiting, lethargy, bloody diarreha and by the time I took him to the hospital at 1pm the next day he was in shock. His system shut down and he died at around 430pm. The company refuses to acknowledge there is a problem, but if you just to a search on the internet you will find many, many people saying the exact same thing happened to them. This food needs to be recalled now. I am hoping you can help because no one should have to go thru what I and Makito went through.

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[> [> Your dog -- Board Owner, 13:52:13 05/08/07 Tue [1]

Angelique, we are sorry for your loss. We agree that something is not right. Too many people are reporting their dog as having the same exact problems from eating the dry dog food. Please save the dog food and the bag (if you still have it.) File a complaint with the FDA. This is the link to contact them: Click here. The FDA will walk you through the steps needed to file the complaint. Thank you for sharing your story.

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Updated List of Recalled Pet Foods As Of - 05.03.07 -- Board Owner, 08:50:44 05/03/07 Thu [1]

View May, 3, 2007 updated recalls

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New about the Nutro Company -- Board Owner, 08:41:56 05/03/07 Thu [1]

05.03.07

News about Nutro:

Mars, Incorporated today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire the global pet food operations of Nutro Products Inc., a leading manufacturer of high nutrition, high performance dog and cat foods sold in pet specialty and farm and feed stores. Closing of the purchase of Nutro from funds advised by Bain Capital Partners LLC, a global private investment firm, is subject to normal regulatory approvals which are expected to be completed within a few months. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The transaction will bring together two of the most recognized names in the petcare industry. Nutro will operate as a stand-alone organization within the Mars family of companies and will maintain its commitment to the pet specialty channel.

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For the latest recalled pet foods, visit the link below -- 4.30.07 - Update, 15:11:09 04/30/07 Mon [1]

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/petfoodrecall/

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Hello -- Board Owner, 20:57:13 04/28/07 Sat [1]

I have received an overwhelming number of replies to this message board. I am working to reply to everyone. Thank you for your interest. Please do not think I have forgotten about you.

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Sick Dog -- Debbie Rich, 10:39:31 04/24/07 Tue [1]

I started feeding my small dog chicken and rice Natural choice dog food thinking I was finding something more heathy. She seemed like it bothered her alittle with vomiting and runny stool so we changed it to the sensitive stomach kind. Her vomiting continued a few times a week, and gassy stomach has gotten worse and now the vomiting has increased to once a day. Not seeing a recall on that brand at first I thought it had to be heathy. Now I think your dry food has a problem. She likes the food and when I change to it she wasn't liking the kind she was eating.
I fear she is getting more ill and I have a Lg. bag of this but I think I will stop feeding her this dog food now, and have her see a vet for the problems before I lose her to this.

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Natural Choice High Energy Dog Food & Natural Choice Adult Lamb Meal & Rice -- Jen, 10:41:53 04/21/07 Sat [1]

my greyhound has been eating nutro natural choice high energy dog food and nutro natural choice lamb & rice dog food for five years. she is ALWAYS well behaved and has NEVER soiled in the house.

she is now acting sick. she is crying all the time, asking to go out frequently, she's urinating in the house. she paces, she acts uncomfortable. shes drinking TONS and TONS of water. she begs to go outside and eat grass. she then throws the grass up. i called nutro natural choice company as soon as the recalls of the wet food were issued. they assured me that the dry food was safe to feed. i continued.

this week, i called nutro natural choice on april 18th and they told me to continue feeding the dry dog food. they again said it was safe. they also said their dog biscuits were safe. i fed my greyhound the dog biscuits too. today, april 20th, i called nutro natural choice and spoke to connie. she said the dry dog food would not be recalled.

i dont know what to think. im SO worried. my gut feeling tells me something is terribly wrong with the dry food but the company claims the food is okay. i have now stopped feeding my greyhound any nutro natural choice products.

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i realize they have not recalled the DRY nutro food yet. i called them myself. my concern is IF it will eventually be recalled...

i'm reading and learning that some dogs that ate the DRY dog food are showing signs of having the same problems as the ones that ate the WET dog food. this is including my own dog. she is not well. she only eats the dry food. my concern is for the possibility that the dry food is making animals sick. if it is being tested, that takes time. in the meantime, the animals are still eating it. this means there could be more dogs to fall ill. i hope that is not the case but i am very worried. reading online, i see that at least two dry cat foods were recalled. this means more dry foods MIGHT be recalled soon. its always a possibility.

as of last week, my dogs are no longer eating any nutro products.

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