@davis

nice to come across another person who is p!ssed. actually, garyp is also p!ssed, but he seems to be primarily p!ssed at me. as they say, when going gets tough, the... the non-tough turn on each other.

thank you for the welcome to the forum. but, as this thread has confirmed, forums and i don't mix that well. this is my last post. take good care of your cat, give it lots of attention.

nick

hara kari

hara kiri.

The corrupt Chinese officials are to blame. The greedy Chinese businessmen who should be tried as murderers for deliberately selling POISON to their own people, let alone as ingredients for pet food, are to blame.

yeah, if it had happened in the US (or any other democratic country), we'd know their names, the names of their companies, and they'd be in court, and in jail.

but the crimes in china are coming out of this amorphous evil entity. everything is so damn murky in that country. which is why they are getting away with murder. it's, as i said, systemic. the only way to deal with this issue is to crack down on china, hard. sanctions. visa restrictions. stop welcoming PRC officials at the white house. seize PRC assets in american banks. you know, the usual way a superpower flexes its muscles.

it genuinely puzzles me why nobody in govt, neither in the executive nor the legislative branches, is calling for free and fair elections in china.

The AMERICAN corporations who put profit before all else are to blame.

look, it's not as if they were manufacturing this stuff in china, or purchasing manufactured pet from from china. if that had been the case, of course they should have been stringently checking ingredients and standards. all they did is buy commodities, in bulk... if i had been the ceo of a major US pet food corporation, i don't think it would have occurred to me to say "hey, joe, check that shipment of wheat gluten from china, make sure it's not some industrial chemical". i mean, it's so surreal what those chinese did. it's clear off the scale in terms of corporate bad behavior. it's totally unthinkable.

i am not a big fan of US corporations. i hate the way they pay their ceo's more than, say, the entire staff of their mexican factory put together. but in this case, i think people are too quick to blame corporations. the underlying cause here is political. the unholy marriage of communist totalitarianism and rampant capitalism.

Or, we could just blow shit up. America is still pretty good at that. (It's just been the wrong shit, lately.)

agree with you there.

nick

Unfortunately the media has anointed Dennis Kucinich as someone who can't win;

didn't he already prove that?

As an fyi, it has been reported that a "You Tube" question was submitted regarding poison pet food & solutions. CNN chose not to use it.

it figures. not enough outcry. even in this forum here, for some reason i seem to be the only one who is major pissed with the chinese. i don't get it.

in general, there is none of the anger that the people had in the '80s with japan. and japan wasn't even exporting shoddy goods! they were just exporting a lot... and you had people smashing japanese cars on TV, this happened all the time. now, even though the chinese are doing things the japanese never came close to doing - nobody ever got killed because of japanese products, unless you count those who went into convulsions and dropped dead after listening to their pop music, which is unbearable - there is almost zero outcry against the chinese. i guess this iraq thing is a little distracting.

nick

thank you to those who posted messages of sympathy.

Although, nuking all idiots would be a good start. Unfortunately, they walk among us, and can remain undetected for years.

it's not about nuking idiots. its about punishing something that is purely evil.

besides, if you nuke all idiots, you'd be left with no-one.

I would like to ask you to tone it down a bit with your posts. I realize you're upset with the Chinese, but keep in mind that there are people in China who are suffering because of tainted products also. Nuking all Chinese people isn't the solution.

therese, i would like to ask you to join me in making a fuss about the chinese. there have been almost no repurcussions for the chinese. it's business as usual. if more people were acting like me, perhaps the US might have slapped a few santions on the PRC a long time ago. all the talk is about sanctions for iran, but when is the last time iran poisoned american pets? china is a more evil presence than iran.

in the '80s there was a huge media outcry over a little incident called tiananmen. it was a case of a big bad totalitarian commie leadership killing innocent students, and everyone was mighty upset. but time went by, now it's 2007, and everyone has turned around 180 degrees. for some reason now it's ok to treat china like any other country, even though the exact same regime is still in place, and their lack of freedom and democracy means that you have things like the fake pet food, fake malaria drugs, and so on.

i'm surprised i should be taking flak for criticizing china.

as for the millions of poor innocent chinese, a good number of them are probably guilty, and the rest are a bunch of spineless cowards who could have stood up to their government a long time ago. it is perfectly possible for an oppressed population to overthrow its government. it happened in the philippines (in 1986), and it happened in eastern europe. i thought tiananmen symbolized hope for china, but it was a one-off, and since there have been so few chinese with enough guts to stand up their repressive totalitarian unjust government , that the few who did so ended up in jail, dead, or in exile. or maybe the majority of them are perfectly happy with the status quo, which makes them guilty in my book.

the crucial thing about the fake pet food ingredients, is that it's not a one-off. it's systemic throughout the country. they export fake aids or malaria drugs to africa, fake tires, etc etc etc

nick

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were JAPANESE cities not CHINESE.

what's your point, its ok to nuke the japanese but not the chinese?

Are you listening to too much right wing talk radio?

i have never listened to right wing talk radio. i do not live in the US. i guess logic is something that is hard for you to follow. corporations will always look for lower prices, and that's natural. you can't blame them for the fact that the chinese passed off melamine as wheat gluten. if it weren't for corporations, you'd still be living in a medieval shack without any amenities. and burning cats alive.

Stop buying cheap junk and our leaders will stop importing it.

it happens to be the only stuff available, and the only stuff i can afford. if i had an easy way out of this situation i wouldn't be as frustrated and pissed off as i am.

nick

That's because you're an idiot.

sure let's make this personal. insult me.

but by calling me an idiot you are by implication also calling the leadership of the USA in WWII idiots.

nick

[constantly increasing rate]

@ kimS, @ sylvia

About the US corporations, they are under hard pressure from their shareholders to not just deliver profits, but a constantly increasing rate of profits. Plus, I can't blame them for seeking suppliers who offer lower prices if lower prices are available. I mean, I look for cheap stuff too. I shop around. That's normal.

I think the blame rests squarely on the Chinese. They know full well melamine is for plastics and not for animals. They have betrayed the trust of the buyer, knowing exactly what they were doing, because they are morally bankrupt, as soulless automatons tend to be. They were cheating the buyers, snug with their own cleverness as all conmen are wont to be ("Haha, those stupid Americans! Paying a lot of dollars for pet food it's only plastic!").

@ garypen

About the billion or so innocent Chinese, civilian casualties didn't bother the US government when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so what's the difference now? The idea then was to send a strong message, "Let's end this now or we will annihilate you." Send the Chinese the same message now. Nuke Hangzhou or Kunming  or any one of their cities, maybe the Chinese will get the message. If they don't, nuke another one. There's plenty of Chinese to go around before they land on the endangered list. I know it's not realistic (duh!), but that is my sentiment. If I had my finger on the button, I wouldn't hesitate even for a second.

Nick

P.S. Coincidentally, after I posted the first message in this thread, I went home to find one of my cats dead. No visible injuries. He was fine when I left home, playful and active as always, and he had a good appetite. I feed my adult cats, of which I have six, only once a day, when I get home. But this guy was still a kitten, so I fed him a bowl of dry food before I left. Did I kill him? Maybe. Maybe not. I will never know. There will always be in my mind the possibility that a Chinese person killed him, aided and abetted by me. I will always think about this anonymous Chinese factory owner, fat and rich, tooling around in his Volkswagen, who snuffed out the life of a very loving and very happy cat.

I just wish a really big earthquake would hit Beijing right now. Or a typhoon. A couple of nukes would do fine. Did you hear me Strategic Air Command???

It's the damn hypocritical so-called Communist but actually rapidly Capitalist people running the PRC, by which I mean the People's Republic of Corruption, and their repressive totalitarian system that has caused a formerly great culture to become 100% morally bankrupt. Even the mafia has morals, but these people in China, I wouldn't even call them human. They are evil money-seeking automatons, that's how I would describe them. They are not fit to be called members of the human community.

I scrimp and save to buy imported (from the USA) pet food, and it turns out I might well have been poisoning my pets instead. The people who feed their pets scraps from the kitchen table, and sometimes nothing at all, it turns out they were right. And I was wrong! What gives???

There is this neighbor's dog, it looks like it came straight out of Auschwitz, it's just skin and bones, with patches of fur here and there, it looks as if it's about to expire any second. Incredibly, it's been like this for weeks! I suspected that my neighbors weren't feeding it because, I don't know, they got themselves into debt, or they preferred to feed their new cute little puppy, or whatever... I reckoned all this dog could get was the occasional bit of human faeces it could lick off the dirt, after the main course was devoured by one of the fitter starving dogs in the neighborhood.

So I started giving this half-dead dog, who actually has a name, her name is Banong, I started giving her imported pet food. Not easy because dog food costs 90 pesos per kilo, to give you an idea, the minimum wage is 200 pesos per day but most companies pay way less than that. I earn about 250 pesos per day. So every day after work I deliver half a kilo of Pedigree to this dog, and make them point its nose at the bowl till it finds it, because it's pretty much blind.

But after three weeks, there's no change! Nada! Zilch! If anything, the damn thing looks even skinnier than before. Now I find myself wondering, all those sacrifices I made to deliver the bag of dog food every day, was I actually delivering melamine? Or some useless filler crap with zero nutritional value? Sometimes the local merchants here they substitute fake stuff for the real thing, when it's sold by the kilo out of the sack. So I could get it by the sack, unopened and untampered with. But what if the sack is fake? Or it's real, from the USA, but full of fake ingredients from China?

I don't know what to do anymore. I just wish something would wipe China clean off the map.

Nick

Assuming I've been feeding my cats ped food laced with melamine, how would it affect them?

Just want to make sure I can recognize the symptoms, since I can't figure out if the pet food I buy has
melamine in it or not.

Yeah i did write them but they haven't written back and its been 2 weeks. I'd call them if I lived in the US. Heck, I'd probably march into their office if I lived in the US.

i had a hard time following this thread... did anyone actually get a lab to test their pet food?

Special Value Cat Food is a US-made product sold here in the Philippines. It is distributed by Unified Western Grocers, Inc of California. The name of the manufacturer is not given on the package.

I like this brand because it does not contain food colors - the only other dry foods available here are Friskies and Whiskas.

As of now I have not been able to find any info about whether this generic brand was affected by the recall. I have switched to Friskies temporarily but would like to go back to Special Value.

Does anyone have any info?

Nick