1500 hundred dogs in China dead of food contamination!
Food checker insuring that products made from dairy are safe for people and animals!
According to news information from China, 1500 dogs have died as a result of eating food tainted with the chemical, melamine. If you recall, melamine has been recently found in the milk supply, which caused thousands of Chinese children to become severely ill and resulted in the deaths of four children in that country. Chinese authorities are concerned because they don’t fully comprehend how widespread melamine is now in the food chain.
Racoon dogs are a breed of dog that is specific to eastern Asia. The dogs are bred so that their fur can be used to trim coats and other clothing. Not a topic I want to discuss here, but that practice seems barbaric to me anyway. The dogs who died were found to have melamine in their system and had developed kidney stones that led to kidney failure. According to Zhang Wenkui who performed the autopsies on about a dozen of the dogs, “First, we found melamine in the dogs’ feed, and second, I found that 25 percent of the stones in the dogs’ kidneys were made up of melamine.” Most of the dogs have died over the past two months.
It is believed that melamine is added to the food as a nitrogen source rather than an authentic source of nitrogen, because the melamine is significantly less expensive and therefore the profit margin increases significantly for those who manufacture the food.
Unfortunately, the racoon dogs are not the only ones that have suffered as a result of the melamine. A lion cub and two baby orangutans, in a zoo near Shanghai have developed kidney stones. They were being nursed with milk from a company that is closely tied to the tainted milk crisis.
Let’s hope that China’s central government can get a hold on this situation before any other animals or people succumb to the products produced as a result of greed and lack of compassion.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Thanks for talking about this tragedy on your blog. Putting the lives of children and animals at risk is criminal. It’s absolutely frightening when you stop and think about all the foods that may contain that tainted milk…
To see the bad milk affecting innocent baby orangutans is shameful. Orangutans are already facing a senseless extinction at the hands of the palm oil industry in Borneo and Sumatra. Now these gentle creatures can’t even drink their milk in zoos and sanctuaries without suffering from kidney stones! What is the world coming to?
To learn more about orangutans and find out how you can help protect them, please visit the Orangutan Outreach website: http://redapes.org
Thank you,
Richard Zimmerman
Director, Orangutan Outreach
Reach out and save the orangutans!