Retired real-estate developer Don Earl wasn’t interested in playing detective when his cat, Chuckles, died in December of sudden and mysterious kidney failure.
Earl, a resident of Port Town send, Wash., said he suspected he knew what happened to his 6-year-old orange-and-white long hair when he heard reports of thousands of similar dog and cat illnesses last winter and the recall of tens of millions of containers of pet food.
But his cat’s food never made the list. Earl called the Food and Drug Administration, offering to send officials unopened samples of the food for testing, but he said they declined.
So Earl took matters into his own hands and found a private lab to conduct tests at his own expense.
“If anything comes out of this, it’s going to be through the efforts of people like me doing the research and testing on their own,” Earl said.
FDA officials and other experts, however, don’t recommend the path taken by Earl, saying that consumers don’t have the means to determine whether a lab is reliable.
Earl sent his samples to ExperTox Inc. of Deer Park, Texas, which said it found traces of the pain medication acetaminophen in several pet-food samples, including Pet Pride Turkey and Giblets Dinner made by Menu Foods, which was one of the products Earl fed Chuckles.
Menu Foods disputed ExperTox’s findings, however, and said FDA tests were negative.
