I'm Killing My Dog!

Time To Meet Your Doggy Maker

Moments before being executed by Beneful.
Their crime? Being too adorable.

I'm kidding. I'm not killing my dog. But that's been the conclusion of a lot of people when they've seen some horrifically irresponsible news articles circulating about a lawsuit against Beneful, a popular dogfood maker.

In Federal Court in  Bahston Boston, a class action suit was filed against Beneful alleging that the dog food was slowly poisoning dogs. Such a law suit is like porn for click-bait obsessed media outlets. It's got puppies, death and TOXINS. Those three things get people fired right up. You know that lady who lets her dog fly on the plane with her just drove home from work and began forcing her dog to purge because she fed it Beneful three summers ago.

What does this lawsuit even mean? Aren't lawsuits serious?

Well, at this point, the law suit doesn't really mean that much in the way of facts. In our great country, you can basically sue anyone for anything. While lawsuits are serious and should be responded to, the fact that one is filed doesn't make the allegations within remotely true. Each side of the lawsuit filings are going to read incredibly different. 

I think the best way to describe the initial filings of a lawsuit is to imagine two children telling their side of the story as to why they were fighting. Only those children use boring language and legal citations. 

This is precisely why the the media outlet, I think, is failing. It gives you the salacious part of the lawsuit and doesn't ever bother to try to explain what the legal ramifications are. I'm sure most people would probably ignore the law part like they've ignored the end of this article. It's completely understandable that people would assume the filing of a lawsuit meant something big because courts and the legal world are serious places. And there are rules, damnit. This isn't 'Nam. But no. They don't have to have any merit behind them at all. 

Yeah, but what if they're really toxic?

Let's think this through logically as to why it's probably not toxic. 

1. These people are in the lawsuit are relying on anecdotal evidence and internet science. The guy in the lawsuits admits that he'd been feeding his dog Beneful for 3-4 years, but now the dog suddenly died from it. That's like saying my childhood dog Buffy was killed by hose water because he died after we had been feeding him hose water for 5-6 years. (Let's ignore the fact that my aunt ran him over with her Pontiac). This isn't science. It's an anecdotal example that confuses causation and correlation. 

I won't go over the science here, instead I'll let a veterinarian talk about it here. If you think you know more than veterinarians about your animal's health, take Jimmy Kimmel's challenge and stop taking your animal to the veterinarian.

We won't let Dingo eat our baby, so he settles
for baby residue.

2. Dogs are animals that would eat their own poop if we let them. They are disgusting scavengers that we have invited into our home. You could feed them organic dog food, but they'd rather have a bite of the rotting possum carcass that has been rotting in your work parking for three days because Brenda, the building manager, doesn't think it's her job to call someone to remove it. I feed my dog its own hair and he's just fine. Look at him. He's standing in a baby chair, eating baby food residue. You really think phantom mold could stop him?

3. Why would Purina want to kill its consumers? This rumor has been floating around since 2007. They'd have plenty of time to fix the issues and keep moving on. More living dogs, more Purina sold. Not only that, if they had this long to fix the issue and didn't and continued with a massive cover-up that required thousands of people to stay silent, then they'd have the largest animal lawsuit we've seen since the Circus Animal Peanuts for Pay Lawsuits of the 1910's, which was tried and won by Pebbles the Elephant.

4. The secondary dog meat market. If the dogs were full of toxins, would we be able to have a secondary dog meat market where you sell the remains of your dog to local vendors? What's that? You don't have that in your town? Oh man.

Should I feed my dog Beneful?

I have no idea. Talk to your veterinarian. I started feeding my dogs Beneful about a month ago and they seem to love it. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on this case being a losing one. Then again, I'm the same guy who finds it amusing to feed his dog the dog's own hair.