What Purina dog food is killing dogs in 2024

Purina says its pet food is safe as allegations about sick animals multiply on social media

Complaints that Purina pet food has sickened pets have been circulating on social media in recent weeks, sparking fear for dog and cat owners.

But Purina adamantly denies there are any issues with its products.

Pet parents continue to be understandably scared by an online rumor that there is an issue with Purina pet foods. This rumor is false, and we are saddened to see the confusion and fear that it has caused, the company said in an online statement Monday.

The claims got amplified in a Facebook group for pet owners, called Saving Pets One Pet @ A Time, in early December. Group administrator Kelly Bone wrote in a post that she had received multiple reports of dogs or cats becoming suddenly ill or dying after eating Purina Pro Plan, a pet food formula for dogs and cats that comes in wet and dry varieties.

I started noticing in my group that we started having quite a few pets getting sick, Bone said. When I would follow up with [owners] to say, Well, what are they eating? When were their most recent vaccinations, flea, tick medications, all that other stuff?, the common denominator was Purina.

Bone said she has received 969 reports of dogs or cats getting ill after eating Purina food, including 234 deaths. The symptoms have included lethargy, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle weakness, seizures, rapid weight loss and rectal bleeding, she said.

The theory has also proliferated on TikTok, where users warned about Purina products, citing the Facebook conversations.

Purina said its quality assurance team investigated the rumor and found no data or trend that would indicate an issue.

There are no health or safety issues with our products, and they can continue to be fed with confidence, the company said in its statement.

This back-and-forth has left some pet owners searching for answers including James Diehl, a resident of Long Island, New York.

One of his dogs, Carly, suddenly lost her appetite in September, Diehl said. By the following month, the 14-year-old rottweiler was lethargic and had diarrhea, he added. Diehl said doctors discovered a blood clot in her heart but didnt think it had caused the gastrointestinal symptoms. Carly died in November.

The next month, Diehls dog Petri lost his appetite and was lethargic, he said. The 17-year-old dachshund died two days before Christmas.

Diehl still has two dogs, an 8-year-old dachshund named Bear and a 6-year-old rottweiler named Graham. Bear developed similar symptoms in December, Diehl said, and was in critical care. He is still struggling to eat back at home, Diehl added.

Diehls wife, Irene Nunes-Diehl, said the three older dogs consumed Purina products all their lives. Carly and Petri had been eating Purina Pro Plan wet food when they developed symptoms, she said, and Bear had been eating Purina Pro Plan Veterinary Diets NeuroCare. Graham, however, was adopted from a shelter last month and has not gotten Purina food, Diehl said, nor has he had health issues.

Diehl said his veterinarian couldnt explain why the other dogs got sick. But a friend told the couple about the Purina rumors, and the two now attribute the illnesses to the food.

This is the only explanation I can come up with, Diehl said. I mean, God, to lose two dogs in a month and almost lose a third, theres got to be some correlation. But proving it? I dont know. I dont know if Im ever going to be able to prove it.

Lorie Westhoff, a Purina spokesperson, said Nunes-Diehl filed a complaint with the company on Monday, and it has reached out. Purina plans to request more information, including veterinary records, Westhoff added.

She said the Saving Pets One Pet @ A Time group has not given the company details about the complaints it received.

For example, Westhoff said, Purina spoke with one person from this group who had shared her story and was unwilling to provide us with vet records or food samples and would not allow us to contact her veterinarian.

Without more information, we simply cannot investigate despite being more than willing to do so, she said.

Westhoff further suggested that two people who helped spread the allegations have promoted brands that compete with Purina in the past. One is TikTok creator Rachel Fusaro, who has more than 276,000 followers on the platform and posted videos about Purina that have since been taken down. Fusaros Instagram has featured several paid partnerships, and according to her Amazon page, she may earn commissions on purchases of certain dog food brands. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Westoff also named Dr. Judy Morgan, a veterinarian who partners with a particular dog food brand and is a moderator for the Saving Pets One Pet @ A Time group. Morgan warnedabout Purina products on YouTube and Instagram earlier this month.

There seem to be clear benefits to them promoting this rumor, Westhoff said.

But Morgan told NBC News she has not profited from her warnings to pet owners. She recommends multiple dog food brands on her social media accounts and e-commerce site, she said, adding that she is paying to get Purina food tested in an independent laboratory.

I am not trying to make money off of this. I am actually spending my own money to get this problem solved, Morgan said.

She said she grew concerned about Purina pet food after reading reports in the Facebook group, as well as customer reviews on sites like Chewy and Amazon.

Purina has not recalled any product on the market, and the Food and Drug Administration has not requested or mandated that it do so. The FDA said pet owners and veterinarians can report illnesses via a form online.

While the agency cannot comment on specifics of these particular illness reports at this time, generally speaking when the FDA becomes aware of pet illnesses, we will evaluate them and determine what if any FDA action may be warranted, an FDA spokesperson said.

Kenneth Simpson, a professor of small animal medicine at Cornell University, said he had not heard from colleagues or pet owners about problems related to Purina products.

In my experience the vast majority of commercial pet food producers are ethical and rank diet safety as their top priority, Simpson, who serves on Purinas scientific advisory board, said, adding: If a pet food manufacturer becomes aware of an issue after manufacture when a food is in the marketplace, they will issue a recall.

Purina voluntarily recalled a prescription dog food, Pro Plan Veterinary Diets EL Elemental, early last year due to potentially elevated levels of vitamin D. The nutrient is essential to dogs, but excess amounts can be toxic.

That recall has no known link to the illnesses recently reported on social media.

Purina Rebuts TikTok Rumors About Pet Food Safety

Purina has been forced to rebut what it described as online rumors that have caused a frenzy on TikTok in recent weeks alleging that its Pro Plan food had sickened dozens of pets, mostly dogs.

Days after the company issued a statement in which it said these false statements may be creating unnecessary stress for pet parents, a Purina spokeswoman said on Thursday that there was absolutely no data showing us that there is a pattern of problems with any Purina product.

During the past few days, we have seen an increase in consumers who are scared and reaching out to ask if we have a product recall or issue after seeing this rumor, the spokeswoman, Lorie Westhoff, said in an email. In response, we are informing them that these rumors are not true and that our food is safe to feed.

Purina, which is based in St. Louis and is a subsidiary of Nestl, was responding to unsubstantiated accounts that were shared in TikTok videos that accumulated thousands of views, and in a public Facebook group with 62,000 members called Saving Pets One Pet @ A Time. Dogs were having seizures, vomiting and suffering from diarrhea, according to these accounts, and some were dying, after eating Purina Pro Plan food.

Worried pet owners encouraged a Purina boycott. By last week, the Facebook group had received nearly 197 anecdotal reports that animals 151 dogs and 46 cats had fallen ill, and that 51 of them had died.

Purina said there was no evidence to support those reports.

We know this is a rumor because we have absolutely no data showing us that there is a pattern of problems with any specific product, Ms. Westhoff said. As a company that feeds more than 100 million cats and dogs each year, we dont take risks with pet health ever.

In its statement last week, Purina said the sources of some of the posts were well-intentioned pet parents who are genuinely concerned and trying to be helpful, while others may be trying to create chaos and distrust of certain brands as an opportunity to sell their own products.

In 2022, consumers spent more than $136.8 billion on pets in the United States, where more than 65 million households have dogs and about 46.5 million households have cats, according to a Forbes Advisor survey published last week.

The numbers suggest the potential influence that online communities can have on the pet food industry.

Rachel Fusaro, who has 275,000 followers on TikTok, cited reports in recent videos that have racked up millions of views in recent weeks saying that hundreds of dogs had fallen ill after eating Purina. Ms. Fusaro, whose website says that she has a bachelors degree in nutrition science, referred to some of the descriptions on Saving Pets One Pet @ A Time.

I am not confirming whether there is or isnt anything wrong with Purina, she said in one video on TikTok. But she added that she personally would stop using Purina products despite the lack of an official recall. Ms. Fusaro could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.

In reply to emailed questions on Thursday, Purina said Ms. Fusaro had not offered any evidence of a connection between any illnesses and a Purina product.

Ms. Westhoff, the Purina spokesman, said the company was considering other avenues to address this directly with those who started the rumor.

They have acknowledged in multiple ways that they have no evidence that there is an issue with Purina products but continue to purposefully spread this misinformation, she said.

The Food and Drug Administration does not have a recent listing for a recall affecting Purina products. Purinas last voluntary recall was in March 2023, after a food supplier error resulted in potentially elevated levels of vitamin D in Purina Pro Plan Veterinary Diets EL Elemental prescription dry dog food.

Ms. Westhoff said there was no correlation between the latest rumors and the food we voluntarily recalled last year.

In that case, she said, investigators following up on a pair of consumer complaints found that the cause was an error that took place at a third-party blender.

We promptly made the decision to voluntarily recall the product and notified the F.D.A., she said.

The F.D.A. said in a statement on Thursday that it could not comment on the recent reports about pet illnesses that had been circulating online but that, generally speaking, it evaluates them to determine if action is needed. It encouraged pet owners and veterinarians to report illness or other adverse events associated with pet food directly to the agency.

Purina Sued for Allegedly Killing Thousands of Dogs With Toxic Food

Despite years of online allegations that one of the most popular dog food brands has been poisoning pets, it wasnt until just weeks ago that the cat was let out of the bag in a court filing. A class action lawsuit was filed that blames the deaths of thousands of dogs on one of Purinas most popular brands of chow.

Googling Nestle Purina Petcares Beneful brand will get you the pet food manufacturers website, a Facebook page with over a million likes, and, in stark contrast, a Consumer Affairs page with 708 one-star ratings supported with page after grim page detailing dogs suffering slow, agonizing deaths from mysterious causes.

Internal bleeding. Diarrhea. Seizures. Liver malfunction. It reads like something from a horror movie or a plague documentary, but a suit brought in California federal court by plaintiff Frank Lucido alleges that this is all too realand too frequent to be a coincidence.

But it all relies upon finding a chemical that may be in the foodand has been a staple in dog food recalls in the pastwith an experiment that neither Lucido, his lawyers, or even independent scientists have even begun to conduct.

Lucido said it began last month when his beloved German shepherd began losing an alarming amount of hair, smelled strange, and wound up at the vet with symptoms consistent with poisoning. A week later, his wife found one of their other dogs, an English Bulldog, dead. An autopsy showed signs of internal bleeding in the stomach and lesions on the liver, symptoms eerily similar to the shepherds, according to the complaint. Then their third dog also became ill.

All these dogs are eating Beneful, explained Jeff Cereghino, one of the attorneys representing Lucido in the action. 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 didnt 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.

It doesnt take much digging to uncover what appears to be a pattern of allegations, Cereghino said. Lots and lots of allegations. After hearing Lucidos story, Cereghino checked it out for himself.

We found a significant number of folks who were trying to draw exactly the same causal link. Thousands, he said.

The sheer volume is what made the seasoned lawyerone who said a good part of our business is class action workrealize something may be fishy.

If its a hundred or so, its like, Okay, a lot of dogs eat Beneful; things happen. But when you start getting into the thousands The long and short of it is the complaint pyramid is such that even with the Interneteasy access to complain about things theres still a very large percentage of folks who simply dont complain, or whose vet tells em, We dont know what happened, and theyre not drawing conclusions or leaping to assumptions, he said.

But when I look at 4,000? Holy hell, theres a lot of people out here.

So Cereghino and his partners started talking to those people, comparing more and more of the stories of heartbreak.

There seems to be somewhat of a singular event. [The dogs] are vomiting. Theyre having liver problems, failures, he said. Im not a vet, but you look at some of this stuff and say, OK, were starting to have similar symptoms across the board, and were starting to have causation.

When these dire accusations first started appearing online years ago, the initial accusation was that one of the additives in the food, propylene glycol, was the culprit.

Purina maintains the type of propylene it uses is perfectly safe for consumption, saying on its website: Propylene glycol is an FDA-approved food additive thats also in human foods like salad dressing and cake mix.

Its also the same substance that caused the spiced whiskey Fireball to be recalled in Europe, which found excessive amounts of the chemical, also used in antifreeze, in the cinnamon swill last fall. The tainted liquor was from the North American batch because, in the U.S., much higher volumes of antifreeze additives are OK for humanor canineconsumption.

Its horrible. That is something that you dont want in dog food, noted veterinarian and author Karen "Doc" Halligan when reached by phone. Its controversial. Why do you want to take a risk if theres any kind of chance that that could be bad for them?

But whether its good for dogs or not, food grade propylene glycol has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It also hasnt been linked to toxicity, especially the type being alleged against Beneful.

Cereghino thinks theres another culprit in the mix, and hes named it in the lawsuit. Theyre called mycotoxins.

Translated directly from the Greek words for fungus poison, mycotoxins are, essentially, a toxic byproduct of mold. When it comes to ducking discovery, theyre an especially crafty brand mold byproduct, and one found in all types of grains. In fact, a new study, released this month, indicates theyre even pretty common in breakfast cereal.

Related: The Toxin Hiding in Your Cereal

If you read the ingredients label of Beneful, it sounds an awful lot like breakfast cereal: ground yellow corn, corn gluten meal, whole wheat flour, rice flour, soy flour. Sure, theres some chicken byproduct meal and animal fat preserved with mixed-tocopherols, but the food is certainly more grain than meat.

In the channels of trade, grain is quite a lot like hamburger these days. As in Theres multiple cows in a hamburger, if you will, explained Dr. Gregory Mller, professor of environmental chemistry and toxicology at the University of Idaho and Washington State University joint School of Food Science. Its a mixed and blended commodity. So one farmer, one granary, or one mill, may have not stored their product well, which allowed for mold growth in storage.

Even if a scientist were to stumble upon a load of grain rife with mycotoxins, Mller added, he or she could test it and still miss them.

You can go into a sample that is known contaminated, Mller noted. But the particular sub sample you pull may not have enough on it to actually see. There is that challenge.

This can be exacerbated when the host grain is earmarked for non-human use.

Commodities that are targeted towards pet foods are managed a little bit differently, in terms of the regulatory criteria they have to pass, he continued. It is a very large industry. There is attention and concern about quality, but there is a difference in how the concern is managed.

In laymans terms?

I think whats put forth here is a plausible scenario, Mller said.

When asked about the alleged symptoms described in the class action suit and online, especially the repeated liver failure, Halligan was clear in her potential diagnosis, especially as it pertained to animals of a variety of ages.

Toxins would be real high on my list. If an animal ingests some type of toxin, that can lead to liver disease because the liver has to process it, said Halligan.

But there have not yet been any tests to determine if mycotoxins are in Beneful at allor any other dog food, for that matter.

Cereghino said hes determined to find that out.

As soon as we are able to, and the federal courts move at a fairly rapid rate, we will get discovery, said Cereghino.

Thats when Cereghino will get to find out where Benefuls products come from, how theyre stored, whether theres a connecting piece in the storage or the grain, the sourcing of it all, that sort of make sense. He plans on running tests on the food both he and other members of the class action suit have saved to send over to a lab in the next few weeks.

Thats when theyll know if those potentially dangerous chemicals are in the formula. And, if they are, theyll still have to fight to prove that the mycotoxins are dangerous enough to make thousands of dogs sick.

As for Purina, when approached for comment, Keith Schopp, vice president of corporate public relations, read this statement to The Daily Beast:

We believe the lawsuit is without merit and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves. Beneful is a high-quality nutritious food enjoyed by millions of dogs each year and there are no product quality issues with Beneful.