>To be on the Safe Side, check the back and/or front of any pet food or >treat package, for the Country Of Origin. Automatically reject any pet >food or treat manufactured in China, India, Pakistan and/or any Asian >Country. That isn't so simple. While entire products themselves may be made elsewhere many of the compounds that go into foods are now made outside the country. In fact, a few are no longer made at all in the U.S. and many are made almost entirely outside the country. China, for instance, is the source of many of the vitamins used. We really, really NEED Congress to push to undo all the budget cuts to the FDA which Bush inserted year after year, to get the FDA to rehire who they can of the people who had been fired due to money cuts, and to train new people to take the place of those who can't be rehired. That affects both human and pet food quality. The FDA is responsible for inspection of about 80% of the food items used in the U.S. but it has been getting less than 25% of the inspection moneys due to the repeated budget cuts they have had in each of the last half dozen national budgets the Administration wrote. Their money got so low that for a while they had almost completely restricted themselves to inspecting the two most common origins of fatal food infections: slaughterhouses and factories for raw beef and chicken. We also need consumers and companies to think more in terms of federal quality control in relation to items which can kill (foods, food ingredients, etc.) or which affect national security. A recent example which is critical to national security are hard disc drives, which are now mostly made in China. Hard disc drives are in everything from your home, to your hospital, to your vet's equipment, to your power networks (SCADA), to fighter jets, etc. Hard disc drives can be back-doored (hidden and not so hidden entrances to get in to cause trouble or to spy). Almost all hard drives are made in Asia, esp. People's Republic of China, and China is at least as able to be successful in cyberwar as we are. (There is at least one past example.) Heck, we don't even make power grid transformers in the U.S. any longer. Talk about foolish national security errors. Pinching pennies to lose dollars (and potentially much more)... Some industries it just pays to have home-based. There are some industries that it would make sense for the federal government to financially support to restart or grow in the U.S.; among them are vitamins, food preservatives, non-lithium batteries, power grid transformers, and hard drives. There are also some segments of the federal government for which underfunding can badly hurt us all. Some examples: FEMA (turned around by Katrina but it had been gouged for a few years before then), Walter Reed (also turning around after the problems became too apparent) and more, including the FDA which has also suffered major budget cuts, with the bad pet foods and pet treats being among illustrations of what can go very wrong. So, it is not just a matter of where the final product is made, but also remembering that components may be made elsewhere. Sukie (not a vet) but sure opinionated on some things Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html [Posted in FML 5733]