Employees at Mars Petcare kibble manufacturing facility exposed to pesticides on pet food ingredients?

This is an extraordinary story. A group of employees at a Mars Petcare kibble manufacturing facility are suing the company in negligence in exposing them to pesticides and other toxins in the preparation of pet food.

How can employees of a company manufacturing dry pet food (kibble) be exposed to pesticides and other toxins? Well, what they're saying is that the raw materials coming into the factory from which the dry cat food was made had been fumigated. But the raw material was not listed as having been fumigated. It went straight into making the pet food.

The word “fumigated" in this instance refers to being treated with phosphine gas. Phosphine is a pesticide.

So pesticides were being introduced into the facility. There are monitors in the factory to detect these pesticides. This by the way proves that it is commonplace to have carcasses treated with pesticides.

The employees claim that the monitoring of the presence of pesticides was illegally or fraudulently tampered with to hide the high levels of phosphine. The records were incomplete.

In addition some records indicate levels of phosphine at 30 times the safe upper limit at 5.85 parts per million.

Further there appears to have been high levels of mould.

One Facebook visitor commented that the factory had killed his/her father.

“I always said that placed killed my dad…”

There appears to have been quite a lot of chat surrounding the hazardous nature of working at this facility.

The hazards were reported to the authorities and no action taken.

There was also a hole in the roof. I am guessing but this is also claimed to be a source of contamination.

The Missouri Department of Agriculture says the plant is now closed.

The law suit is in court on January 2nd 2017.

Clearly interested parties to this legal action are concerned about the rights and welfare of the factory workers. However, all cat and dog owners are also concerned at the claim that pesticides went straight into dry pet food. An astonishing claim.

Not only were the employees in danger of being poisoned so are pets in the long term.

The case may blow the lid on the opaque practices of the pet food industry. It may shed some light on the murky methods employed by the big pet food manufacturers.

We know that animal welfare is not their first concern. It may be worse than that.

This is a heavily summarised post. The source is the Truth About Pet Food.