Rat Poison in Food?

Many American dogs and cats have died and thousands are sick from poisoned pet food. Canned pet food manufactured by Ontario, Canada-based Menu Foods has been killing pets. The government, with their typical incompetence, reports that there are only 16 "confirmed" deaths of pets. One local veterinarian has collected more than 250 reports of dead pets in his practice area alone. The cause of death has been tracked down to contamination of the pet food with a rat and mice poison called Aminopterin. This compound was once used as a cancer drug in the USA in small quantities, but is no longer used for reasons that should be obvious today. Read story

So how does rat poison not used in the USA get into American pet food you might ask. Blame international trade and either ignorance or lack of due concern. Some decades ago when Bob was 15 year old he worked in the wheat harvests, doing a man's work. [By the way, young men should be out working, doing a man's work, instead of wasting years in state prisons called "schools." For more on schools see "Burn Them Down." http://bobstruth.blogspot.com/2007/01/burn-them-down.html Young men and women in general learn more from a few months of real work than in several years spent in the state holding cells.] When we had cut all the wheat and trucked it into town to the elevators the last truck load was processed as seed for next year's crop. The ten tons of wheat was shoveled by hand into a machine that mixed mice and rat poison with the grain, and then fed the grain into gunny sacks. The sacks were carried into a shed and stacked for storage until the next planting season. You shovel and stack ten tons of grain and you've done a day's work.

The wheat was coated with rat and mice poison was used to prevent mice from eating the seed. It only takes about 6 weeks for a newborn mouse to become a breeding mother mouse. One pregnant mouse can breed into a million mice in only a few months. Without the poison twenty tons of seed could turn into twenty tons of mice much like the little furry Tribbles from the original Star Treck. The rat and mice poison we used was colored bright purple so that nobody would mistake the poisoned seed grain for human or animal feed. Rat and mice poison used on seeds does not kill the plant seeds because their biology is fundamentally different from animal biology. When the grain grows the poison is not transmitted to the new plants, at least the poison we used in the USA in the 1950s wasn't. Its been done that way for many years. Many farmers also buy their seed from commercial firms instead of using their own production. Either way, seed grain is commonly treated with rat and mice poison.

Aminopterin is used in China to poison seed grain, but not in the US or Canada. Canada imports grain from China. A lot of grain, perhaps the majority of grain, is used to feed cattle and other animals. Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada, buys grain in bulk to add to its pet food. Somewhere along the supply chain someone got the poisoned seed grain mixed up with grain suitable for feed. It might have been done accidentally. Somewhere in China, or Canada, or somewhere inbetween during shipping, storage, and re-shipping the paperwork or knowledge of the poisoned grain may have gotten lost or mixed up. Seed grain looks like grain. Grain is not like lettuce, for example, where the seeds are a different part of the plant than the product. Grain is the seeds of the plants, so the seeds for next year's crop can not be distinguished from the produce of this year's crop. When I was working on a farm in 1960 we dyed the seed purple, and the farmers thereabouts knew that purple grain was poisoned. But, does some illegal immigrant farm worker know that purple grain is poisoned? Does some pet food processing plant wank know that purple grain is poisoned? Do the Chinese dye their seed purple when they add the Aminopterin to keep mice from eating the seeds? There are a lot of places that a poison seed grain could have accidentally gotten mixed up with feed grain.

On the other hand it very well could have been deliberate and reckless conversion for profit. Some functionary along the way may have had a load of outdated seed, or deteriorating seed grain, and seen a way to recover his cost by selling it as feed grain. Or a merchant may have found a "good deal" on surplus or deteriorated seed grain and bought it to use for feed thinking that a few dead cats and dogs wouldn't matter. Bob's best guess is that grain traders lost track of the poison, didn't know that seed grain is poisoned, and/or didn't know that this load of grain was seed grain. Once the grain is poisoned it needs to be carefully tracked from poison to soil, and kept out of the food or feed chain. I seriously doubt that the management at Menu Foods knew that they were using poisoned seed grain in their products, but they did know that they were buying "good deal" cheap grain of undetermined origin.

These days with the international trade, the NAFTA agreements Canadian or Mexican laws (or lack of laws) replace the US laws which protect consumers in our country. Canada apparently allows seed grain poisoned with Aminopterin to be imported from China, and then to be carelessly or recklessly sold back into the feed chain. When we throw open our gates and leave our borders wide open we get whatever unscrupulous or careless products are tolerated in other countries.

This year the rat poison ended up in pet food. But who can say that the manufactures of "natural" granola bars, wheat flakes, or other human food haven't gotten a "good deal" on a load of Chinese seed grain being resold by an unknowing merchant in Canada or Mexico? Who can say?