Despite years of online allegations as to how dogs are getting poisoned with dog food, it was just weeks ago when those rumors finally gained teeth. A class action lawsuit was filed against one of the most popular dog food manufacturers, Purina, stating that its dog food has killed 4,000 dogs.
If you are unaware of the brand, you can simply search for "Nestle Purina Petcare" in Google and it should get you to the manufacturer's website. The surprising fact is that Purina has over a million likes on their Facebook page, which is a great thing.
But a Consumer Affairs page has over 700 one-star ratings and almost all of them have mentioned the same thing - their dogs are suffering slow, agonizing deaths from mysterious causes.
Frank Lucido, the person who filed the case against Purina in the California federal court alleges that these deaths are too real, and too frequent to be a coincidence.
According to Lucido, all of this began a month ago when his German Shepherd began losing an alarming amount of hair, started smelling strange and wound up at the vet with symptoms "consistent with poisoning." A week later when they found about the internal poisoning in the German shepherd, Lucido's wife found their English Bulldog dead.
The autopsy shows that there was internal bleeding in the stomach and lesions on the liver. Lucido mentions that the shepherd too had similar symptoms and results. Soon after that, their third dog too became ill.
Jeff Cereghino, one of the attorneys representing Lucido in this case says "All these dogs are eating Beneful. And the dogs are all, for a variety of reasons, not in the same house. So you take away the automatic assumption that the neighbor didn't like the dogs or whatever. He was feeding them Beneful at the start of this, and one got sick and died, the other two were very ill. And then he started doing a little research, and he realized the causal link, at least in his mind, was the food."
Cereghino said that if this is not a coincidence, it does not require a lot of digging because there appears to be a clear pattern of allegations. He further said that when he discovered the Consumer Affairs page, he was shocked.
"But when I look at 4,000? Holy hell, there's a lot of people out here." Said Cereghino after reading those never-ending complaints about Purina.
