Are Cats More Sensitive To Contaminants?

A greater sensitivity of cats to a chemical found in plastics and pesticides could explain why they’ve died in larger numbers than have dogs after eating contaminated pet food, experts said Saturday.

The small number of confirmed reports of pet deaths bolstered by a far larger number of unconfirmed anecdotal reports suggests cats were more susceptible to poisoning by the chemical melamine that tainted the now recalled pet food, officials with the Food and Drug Administration and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said Saturday.

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Testing by the FDA and Cornell University has found melamine in samples of recalled pet food as well as in crystal form in the urine and kidney tissue of dead cats. They’ve also found the chemical, in apparently raw form in concentrations as high as 6.6 percent, in wheat gluten used as ingredient of the recalled cat and dog foods, said Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s chief veterinarian.

“There was a sizable amount of melamine. You could see crystals in the wheat gluten,” Sundlof told The Associated Press.

They could see the melamine crystals in the wheat gluten? That’s a hell of a lot of melamine that went unnoticed until someone opened their eyes.

“It has a very low toxicity, at least in rodents. The problem is, we don’t have information in cats, and that seems to be the most susceptible species,” Sundlof said of melamine. Sundlof also allowed that the tainted cat foods could have contained higher concentrations of melamine than did the dog foods.

Seeing that Menu Foods announced that they found aminopterin in their samples of the recalled foods, maybe it’s not just the melamine making the cats sick? If traces of aminopterin and that much melamine made it into the pet food, is it so hard to believe there could be something else they haven’t found yet?

Stay alert people. This story has more twists daily.