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Remembering The Recall: A Reading List

March 14, 2008
By Candace Schilling

The pet food recall in March 2007 did more than change everything
I believed about the “right” way to feed pets. We lost our cat, Kisses.
Sometimes grief competes with happy memories when I think about
her, a sad trend which seems to slowly improve over time.

As this unpleasant anniversary approaches, a friend suggested I focus
on the season as a new beginning –- appropriate advice for spring.
Kisses will always have a special place in our hearts, and the two cats
who joined our family after her death are unique, irreplaceable gifts.
Her legacy includes the information I gathered while working with
our wonderful vet to prolong her life.

After Kisses was gone, I sent friends the titles of all the books I
discovered during her illness, and I share my bookshelf inventory
with Itchmo readers now to honor her memory. I also dedicate this
entry to thousands of other grieving pet parents.

Note: Books containing recipes for cats have one asterisk* and those
with recipes for dogs and cats have two asterisks.** If you’d like to
pick up a few toys along with your books, consider pet supply shops
like Only Natural Pet Store (see the Hard Goods category) or Robbins
Pet Care. Used booksellers such as Biblio.com are a great way to
locate out-of-print books. Older titles may recommend certain
commercial foods that have changed ingredients and/or ownership
over the years. Use caution.

I read The Nature of Animal Healing by Martin Goldstein, DVM,
after Kisses became ill, and it was my first exposure to pet food
problems and dangers beyond the recall. (His brother and sister-
in-law wrote The Goldsteins’ Wellness and Longevity Program for
Dogs and Cats). His explanations of holistic techniques and the
chapter, “The Death of a Pet,” were extremely helpful, and the
book led me to several other authors, including Ann Martin.

Martin’s works, Food Pets Die For** and Protect Your Pet: More
Shocking Facts,** are riveting. Like Goldstein, Martin showed me
I had bought more than pet food over the years: I had swallowed
a false message that commercial food is the only way to maintain
optimum health for our pets. The second book, Protect Your Pet,
contains a chapter titled, “The Controversy of the Raw Meat Diet.”
Martin explores limited nutritional changes when meat is lightly
cooked or stewed, and she highlights concerns about raw meat.

A newer book is Pet Food Nation,** released during the recall. In
this easy-to-read paperback, veterinary clinical nutritionist Joan
Weiskopf offers quick hits on topics such as pet food history,
regulation and labeling. Like Martin, Weiskopf has reservations
about feeding raw meat.

Author Sandy Arora includes raw meat recipes in Whole Health
for Happy Cats.* Recipes are only a small portion of this book,
and I appreciated the colorful layouts which make information
easy to locate when you return to the book later. One sidebar
lists vegetables which can be included in cat food and one lists
those to avoid. I underlined a warning to avoid using essential
oils with cats in the “Home Care and Minor Ailments” section.

Another raw meat diet supporter is Elizabeth Hodgkins, DVM.
In Your Cat: Simple New Secrets to a Longer, Stronger Life, she
devotes a chapter to feeding raw meat to cats, a choice she has
made for five feline generations as a breeder of Bengals.
Hodgkins also explores the connections between the diets we
choose for our pets and common ailments such as obesity and
diabetes. The chapter on obesity contains seven tips for switching
your cat from dry to wet food.

More veterinary advice is contained in The Veterinarians’ Guide
to Natural Remedies for Cats* by Martin Zucker. Like many other
holistic pet care resources, the first portion of the book is
dedicated to feeding pets, with good food as a foundation for
good health. Keep Your Cat Healthy the Natural Way* by Pat
Lazarus is another excellent resource. Rather than a cookbook-
style approach, most of the recipes in these two books are based
on percentages and formulas (such as how much protein to use)
which let the caregiver select individual components.

Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and
Cats** by Richard H. Pitcairn, DVM, and Susan Hubble Pitcairn
features more than 400 pages of information, such as suggested
remedies for common ailments. The first quarter of the book is
dedicated to feeding pets, and my copy is full of scribbles. One
highlighted quote: “Lead is one of the biggest concerns…because
lead is deposited and does not break down. It is interesting that
bone meal meant for human consumption (sold in natural food
stores) cannot be derived from U.S. cattle, because there is excess
lead in their bones. These same bones, however, are used in pet
food, and the more fed, the more lead exposure there is.”

Donald Strombeck, DVM, wrote Home-Prepared Dog and Cat
Diets: the Healthful Alternative,** first released in 1999. The
writing is more technical than most of the other resources, but
still readable and accessible. More than 200 recipes are the simplest
parts of the book, clustered within related sections such as “Feeding
Normal Dogs and Cats,” “Food Intolerance and Allergy” and “Diet-
Induced Disease.”

Homeopathic Care for Cats and Dogs by Don Hamilton, DVM, is
an interesting resource even for those not interested in homeopathy,
which uses highly diluted substances to treat illness and restore
balance. Hamilton often lists non-homeopathic options, explores
which traditional medications might be used and suggests which
ones to avoid. Each system of the pet’s body is explored in turn,
and Part Three of his book is “Vaccination: Helpful or Harmful?”
Tables showing the decline in death rates due to measles and
whooping cough before vaccines were introduced are particularly
interesting.

Several books on my shelf explore the spiritual connection between
animals, their caregivers and their health, including The New
Natural Cat* by Anitra Frazier and Your Pet Isn’t Sick, He Just
Wants You to Think So by Herb Tanzer, DVM.

Four Paws, Five Directions by Cheryl Schwartz, DVM, applies Chinese
medicine to pet health, and herbalist Juliette de Bairacli-Levy is the
author of The Complete Herbal Handbook for the Dog and Cat.

Pet massage techniques are detailed in Getting in TTouch with
Your Cat by Linda Tellington-Jones and The Healing Touch for
Cats by Michael W. Fox, DVM. I particularly appreciated Fox’s
comments about multi-cat households, such as “…I have found
that cats who live only with humans more often become dull,
obese and sickly than cats whose social environment is enriched
by the companionship of other affectionate, playful cats.” His
words reshaped my view of a multi-cat environment. Although
some cats want to be queen or king of the castle, most seem
to benefit from feline companionship.

If you’re adding another feline, I loved Pam Johnson-Bennett’s
books Think Like a Cat and Cat vs. Cat. In How to Be a Cat
Detective, British behaviorist Vicki Halls discusses common
problems in multi-cat households and outlines how to collect
and deposit facial pheromones from your cats throughout your
home as if the cats are already buddies.

I always have a stack of books to read, and one item in queue is
Pets at Risk: From Allergies to Cancer, Remedies for an Unsuspected
Epidemic by Alfred J. Plechner, DVM. I heard about another book,
Natural Nutrition for Cats: The Path to Purr-fect Health by clinical
nutritionist Kymythy Schultze, but I have not seen a copy yet.

Learning more about feeding our pets teaches us how to better
meet our own needs. The pet food recalls reignited my interest
in organic foods, and we eat “locally” as much as possible. I like
shaking hands with the families who raise the vegetables and
meat I consume. To find foods not available locally, The Ethical
Gourmet by Jay Weinstein is a good resource.

I noticed an interesting comment related to the human food
supply while reading Food Not Lawns by H.C. Flores a few weeks
ago. Flores quotes a communications director for one of those
familiar agri-giants who said, “‘[We] should not have to vouchsafe
the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of
it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.’” The original
source of the quote is a New York Times article from 1998, “Playing
God in the Garden.” More about the company’s response to the
article is available on Michael Pollan’s Website.

Flores wrote, “This is like saying a car company doesn’t have to
make sure its cars are safe, but the Department of Transportation
should take responsibility for any accidents that occur because of
equipment failure or bad design. The solution is obvious: If the
suppliers of our food cannot be responsible for the safety of that
food, then we need to take that responsibility into our own hands.”

I agree. Legislation moves slowly, but information is already available.
We can equip our minds to make informed decisions, right now.

Some foods are unhealthy or poisonous for certain species; onions
are poisonous for cats. Contrasting opinions about topics such as
feeding bones, garlic, raw meat and more may seem overwhelming
at first, but remember: you already wade through all sorts of data
about how to feed yourself and human family members. Whether
you choose to create meals for your pet, carefully select and
monitor commercial foods, or a mixture of both methods, trust
your ability to make decisions based on information instead of
marketing. You can do it. We all can.

Losing a pet teaches us things, too, like who our friends are and
how great our vet really is (or, sadly for some, is not). I am so
thankful for online resources like Itchmo, Pet Connection, the Pet
Food List and more. From insightful articles to equally insightful
and spirited comments, these sites were my lifelines during the
recall.

A section of the Itchmo forum is dedicated to making your own
pet food and home remedies, and another section is dedicated to
memorializing recall victims.

May we all find comfort as we pay tribute to lost friends. Our
garden will soon feature a memorial to Kisses, with new shrubs
or a tree to offer berries, insects and shelter to all the birds she
loved to watch.

Photo of Kisses: Candace Schilling
We bought a disposable camera on a vacation, took more photos
when we returned home to fill it up and forgot to develop the film
until recently. After Kisses died, I wished for a picture of her in a
favorite red chair. We must have taken this one a few years ago,
and it turned up at just the right time.

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