Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I stayed up last night down in the Media Center in our apartment and watched the Channel 4 News for Manhattan.  They did a close up of Oreo at the Rutherford Animal Hospital and even announced his name.  He was on once as the star and in another shot he was sleeping in his cage in the background.  He was quite the star and oh so cute.  They definitely picked him out for effect – so cute but clearly scared and shaking.  The footage was taken while we were just pulling up in the car so he hadn’t seen us for a couple of hours.

Dominica and I went to the Rutherford Animal Hospital and spent about an hour visiting with Oreo.  We are very scared and he isn’t too happy about the situation either.  He was in pretty good shape while we were visiting with him.  He has been on the IV getting rehydrated for over an hour so he was a little bit more chipper although he has been generally healthy so far.  We wanted to spend some time with him too so that he would be more comfortable being stuck at the hospital all night.  And we wanted to see how he was feeling.

The word from the veterinarian was that his general and kidney bloodword were looking pretty good.  His urine specific density is low and the vet is somewhat worried about that and there is concern about his liver as whatever is contaminating the dog food is starting to show up in livers now.  But that blood work has to go to another lab and will not be available until tomorrow.  So we won’t know anything about that until tomorrow.

Just as we were getting to the clinic we saw the Channel 4 News crew leaving the hospital.  It turns out that they were filming Oreo for the eleven o’clock news.  He is so cute I guess that they couldn’t resist.  So now everyone in the New York Metro area (well at least those that watch the local NBC news at eleven) will see our baby in the hospital.

We aren’t likely to hear anything more tonight.  Hopefully we will have some good news from the vet in the morning.  We can’t wait for our little boy to come home.  We are asking everyone to keep him in their prayers.

Today we discovered from Menu Food’s newly expanded list of contaminated pet foods that Oreo is one of the dogs affected from the new recall that happened over the weekend. We don’t know how bad he is yet. He seems to be mostly healthy but he has been “going outside” more than twice as often as he used to starting on March 3rd – which coincidentally is the same day that he fell off of the futon. That raises the questions: Did being sick cause him to fall off of the futon? Did the fall make him have to go outside more often or did the dog food? Have the several “accidents” that he has had in the past week been caused by a kidney infection?

So far the need to be taken out more often is not listed as an official symptom of the tainted dog food but it seems that it could be very likely and because of the extreme hardship that it is for us to take him for a walk, especially in winter and especially since his fall he hasn’t been to daycare nearly as much, might make us notice the issue much more quickly than other dog owners. One of the official symptoms is vomiting which he has done twice this past week. Fortunately he has not lost his appetite nor is he acting strange so we are sure that everything is okay but you know how we worry about our baby.

So Dominica took off from work early this afternoon to rush Oreo to the Rutherford Animal Hospital to get some emergency blood work done to determine if anything is wrong. We will be in Geneseo this weekend and he could visit his normal vet there but we didn’t think that it would be wise to wait at all at getting his blood work done due to the sensitivity of the situation. We are very worried about our little boy.

Dominica got Oreo to the hospital at half past four and they quickly determined that he was in trouble and that he would have to stay there. Oreo is being put on an IV to keep him hydrated and they are doing emergency blood work to determine how bad things are. We are really scared.

I left work at half past five and raced home as quickly as I could. Dominica was a mess. She had been crying for hours. I got home and we dug out Oreo’s old blood work so that we could take it to the hospital so that they would have a baseline to compare his blood word against. As requested by the FDA, I called in to let them know that Oreo had had contaminated food and was sick. Then we rushed out to the hospital to see our little boy.

New news from Channel 4 NBC here in New York City says that after receiving numerous complaints of animals becoming sick and/or dying after eating Menu Foods manufactured pet foods the pet food manufacturer conducted an in-house test in which they showed a 14% fatality rate among dogs that were fed their contaminated food products.  For weeks after this test Menu Foods continued to manufacture known lethal dog and cat food and providing it to the ninety-one companies that relabel and sell their food.  It was not until the FDA received complaints of ten connected pet deaths that they stepped in and forced a recall of the contaminated food products (remember that many people also eat these pet foods and this could amount to manslaughter on behalf of the Canadian manufacturer.)

Seventeen of the top twenty pet foods sold in the United States came from Menu Foods and include brands such as those sold by Wegmans, Walmart, Nutro, Iams, Science Diet and many others.  It also has come to light that these companies are involved in horrible animal testing practices as well.  And some of these brands, like Nutro, claiming to be high end pet food manufacturers are using the same low end fillers and ingredients as the cheap grocery store brands.

But the worst part is that these companies KNEW that they were going to kill your pets.  It took weeks from the time that they knew for sure that their products were lethal until the FDA forced them to recall the products.  That means that they knew at a minimum in the first few days of March if not in late February that pets were dying.  They didn’t care and not only didn’t recall their products and not only didn’t stop selling their contaminated stocks of bad food but they continued to manufacture more contaminated foods!  Since they were testing internally and were killing their own dogs by early March it means that they probably had to know about the bad food for at least a month before that. That means that at very least since January they have been knowingly endangering and killing your pets!

We learned this morning that the company that makes Oreo’s dog food, Nutro, has instigated a recall of the food because of unknown contamination that has already killed a few dogs. We went through all of the cans that we had and none of the ones that we had on hand matched the list that they had published of known bad batches. The company is Menu Foods and they have a page to check to see if your pets have been eating contaminated food. Menu Foods makes over 48 brands of pet food – if you have a pet please be sure to check and make sure that they have not eaten any of this food. They do not yet know exactly what the problem is but the result can be kidney failure and death. It is critical that all pet owners check this list as it covers dog and cat foods from numerous big name companies. Be especially aware if your pet begins losing its appetite or vomits more than usual. [On Monday a new list was released from Menu Foods with even more items on it. Oreo is one of the affected dogs. 🙁 ]

Shortly after getting up this morning I heard the distant strains of bagpipes coming from our open windows (yes it is really that warm) and so I got my shoes on as quickly as I could and grabbed the camcorder and ran down to the street. The Newark Saint Patrick’s Day Parade was coming down Broad Street right past our building. I managed to video tape the entire parade from beginning to end – at least I think that I did. I am not a consummate cinematographer at this point and noticed later today that I managed to record an entire vlog entry with the camcorder completely zoomed in on my nose. How did I do that? I have no idea. I didn’t have enough time to grab the tripod though. That would have made for a much better video. But at least I managed to get something good. I have been wanting to make a video of some Newark local events for a while and I was glad to finally have the chance.

We went out to Walmart to do some shopping today. We were running low on some basics – namely water. We picked up some television shows on DVD as we have run out of everything at the house. We finished watching Jack of All Trades with Bruce Campbell this morning. We got a good collection including the first seasons of Bosom Buddies, Beauty and the Beast and Family Ties. We also got Dukes of Hazard: The Beginning which is probably awful but at least it should be cute.

After shopping we hit IHOP for some lunch since we were already out and about in the car. Otherwise it is too much effort to get the car to go out anywhere.

Dominica did some reading in her Systems Analysis and Design text book today.  Her class at Empire State College starts tomorrow.  She is really looking forward to this class.  It was my favourite at ESC.

I did some additional work on my RIT class but not too much.  People don’t seem to have gotten into the class much yet and my book will probably not arrive from Amazon until next week.

We watched Bosom Buddier and Family Ties before going to bed.  We went to bed early as it is back to the grind tomorrow morning.  I wasn’t very tired though so I watched Donnie Darko on my Creative Zen Vision W.