Sheep Guarding Llama

Nutro, who’s low grade tainted dog food poisoned out Boston Terrier Oreo, Sophie in Pennsylvania, Rocky in Chicago and countless others is now being sued in federal court over the death of a dog from Long Island.  With the serving of the suit, Nutro is no longer claiming on their website that their food has not had any complaints against it.  Apparently the courts can still contact them even if their customers cannot.  Nutro has been accused by a writer to Dogster of sending out their account representatives to attempt to restock their tainted products in pet supply stores against the wishes of the stores in order to unload the bad food.  It is reported that pet supply store manager(s) have needed to force Nutro to leave.

So be cautious – by NO products from Nutro as we cannot be sure that they have not been sneaking contaminated foods back onto shelves and as Nutro was not disclosing the source of their ingredients previously we cannot trust their products now regardless of whether or not they are believed to be covered by the recall.  As it was Nutro held back some of their high-end brands like Nutro Ultra until after many of their customers had checked the recall list.  We are very blessed that Dominica decided to check the list again and found that Oreo’s food was not added until many days after the initial recall.

In an article from “The Bostonist” they use a picture of our Oreo in an article about Menu Foods tainted dog food.  I don’t think that the article’s author was aware that the picture they were using belonged to a Boston who was actually affected by the recall.  The picture used is under the Creative Commons License and is available from Flickr.

Oreo’s fame continues to grow.

Last night was barely even a night of sleep for either Dominica or I. Dominica went to bed at a fairly normal time, around midnight, but wasn’t able to fall asleep pretty much all night. I decided that going to bed and just lying there worrying about Oreo wouldn’t do me much good and I had a lot of work that needed to be completed so I ended up staying up until after two in the morning working on the new Zimbra email server. The good news is that after all of that work the email server appears to be working just fine and I am very happy with the progress. We are on schedule still for moving the email this week.

After my first week of working with Zimbra my impression is that I still really like it. The interface is great, the features are great and the administration is pretty good. Not great but it isn’t that old of a product either. We are running on version 4.5. I do wish that they would produce two or three really cool skins similar to their “steel” skin as their generic skins are pretty weak considering what a sweet interface they have built. But that is purely aesthetic. And I wish that they had slightly more documentation but they do have a wiki and a forum that mostly take care of that stuff. I wish that I had more time to run Scalix side by side with Zimbra and do a real comparison but time is not on my side and I just can’t do that right now. Scalix doesn’t quite meet our needs because of licensing differences between the two products but for most people that I talk to the licensing would in inconsequential and Scalix might be a better choice but I would only be hypothesizing at this point.

I checked with the hospital before going into work this morning but they want to keep Oreo all day. Oreo will be very unhappy about that because he really enjoys his days at daycare but we don’t want to take any unnecessary chances with his health right now. Hopefully if anything is really wrong at this point they will catch it today while he is at the hospital. They are constantly watching the specific gravity of his urine as that is the biggest indicator right now of kidney problems. I believe that he will continue on the IV all day just to be sure that his fluid levels stay high. The “med-port” in his leg doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He is so good about things like that.

Today it was discovered that yet another Movie and/or Recording Industry heavyweight was guilty of violating the copyright laws that they are so involved with promoting. This time in the midst of Viacom’s litigation against YouTube for unknowingly hosting Viacom owned content it is discovered that Viacom’s own video hosting site, iFilm, has been illegally hosting other companies’ content and is doing even less to protect it than they are expecting YouTube to do. This really demonstrates the double standard in the MIAA. Everything is a “do as I say, not as I do”. Viacom is just suing YouTube because it is obvious that media companies like Viacom haven’t worked out the model and are not effective online.

Dominica picked Oreo up from the hospital around six this evening.  He was ever so happy to see her.  The vet was very happy to be able to send him home.  They were really scared that they were going to lose him to kidney failure.  Apparently it really was as bad as we had thought.  But they think that he is doing better now.  His blood work all seems to be okay.  They want us to watch him carefully and they need urine samples on Monday to see how he is progressing.  But they think that he is out of the woods.

Oreo had a lot of pent-up energy tonight and was bouncing all over the apartment.  He hasn’t had much chance to play while being at the hospital and normally he would have been at daycare to exhaust him but he didn’t get his normal dosage of daycare last week or this week so he is ready to play regardless of how sick he may or may not be.

We spent the evening snuggling with Oreo and watching the first season of Family Ties.  We went to bed early as Dominica and I were really tired.  Oreo was just happy to get to snuggle.

Pet Connection, as of yesterday evening, was already reporting over 600 sick animals and close to 250 dead from poisoning by Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada.  This is only a single reporting database that is privately help.  The FDA knows of more reaching back for months and Menu Foods has been killing their own animals internally as well.  The real death tools could be many factors higher as animals have been dying for months without anyone knowing why.

Pet Connection is collecting data on animals that have become sick and/or died due to neglect or possibly malicious intent from Menu Foods in Ontario, Canada.  If you dog or cat has become sick from the tainted food please report to this database as it helps to track the total numbers when companies like Menu Foods and Nutro have stopped taking responses from their customers so that they do not have to report how many have actually died.

Please do this IN ADDITION to reporting to the FDA.  Pet Connection is a private database.