Wellness Pet Food Recall: Nevermind!

Well, I for one will never buy Wellness again. They stole the last bits of life from my beloved cat Pebbles and had they fessed up to their negligence* two weeks earlier, the vet might have caught it without expensive blood tests we can't afford and she would have had more time with us.

I had an ill 18 year old cat, a purebred Ocicat rescued from death row by a rescue group who'd been my best friend for 14 of those years. Wellness was all she could eat without triggering IBD (and the inevitable nasty output). She also had hyperthyroidism but did not respond to medication (and we couldn't afford any more anyway) and was allergic to anesthesia and so was not a surgical candidate. Pretty much all she wanted to do anymore was eat, and we had to watch her go from a healthy 10 pounds down to 6, but at least she was still with us and still running around and chatty and Empress of the Universe.

[My husband and I live on very little money with my adult disabled son after both losing our jobs and having to take scut work and move from our wonderful home in the suburbs to a falling down hovel in the city (we are now moving to a trailer back in the burbs. O, Yippee!) but if and when we have the $$ we will spend it on extraordinary care for the cats. Nowadays, though, it's all being spent on euthanasia and cremation, since we don't even have a yard to bury them in. So forgive me if I'm even more bitter.]

But recently, Pebbles started to slow way down. She got wobbly. Her pupils were dilated. She started having diarrhea even though we knew she wasn't getting any other food (being very strict about feeding her and the other separately, locking the trash can, etc...). We thought it was just The Inevitable. After watching her do nothing but hunch up in a tiny ball by the heat vent, and then have trouble keeping even the Wellness (chicken or turkey only) down, we made the incredibly painful decision to have her put to sleep before anything worse happened. Our vet sadly concurred.

Then two weeks later I heard about the recall. I went to a Vet med site and got the symptoms for thiamine deficiency and it hit me like a truck. The new things we had attributed maybe to liver failure or other organs shutting down ... there they were! I had one can left because I was feeding it to my other cat who had a UTI and it was in the recall range, but fortunately, she was getting other food mixed in or else I'd be driving to wherever Wellness is located to express my disgust personally. I threw the can in the trash but believe me, I really wanted to bust some smug company exec's window with it.

I did contact them but all I got back was an automatically generated email response. Sorry, but it is UNCONSCIONABLE that a product that purports to be so carefully constructed in an industry now renowned for its shoddy nutritional products can let something this bad get through. And now retracting their offer of help? Charming. But I would have had nothing left to ship back but a small box of ashes anyway.

*come on, we all know what they probably did. Someone wanted to save money so bought something on the cheap, sans thiamine, from China or some other unscrupulous place. No one wants to discuss how this happened and of course we'll never hear it from the company. It's a lot more serious than Ooops, we made a boo-boo! A lot of us turned to them after the LAST China pet killing scare, so shame shame shame on them.