It’s important that the food you give to your loved ones is safe, and that includes what you feed your pets. A dog food company in the United Kingdom has had some explaining to do after a customer found plastic and metal bits in the dry food she fed all four of her dogs before realizing the stuff was contaminated. The company is blaming its metal detectors for the issue.

The woman says she bought a bag of food from her local pet store and didn’t notice anything was amiss at first, reports the BBC.

“They tucked right in because it was the morning feed, it wasn’t until I poured it into a container that I could see the bits reflecting in the light. It’s awful and completely unacceptable,” she said. She went back to the store and a manager said the food would be removed from the shelves.

The company that manufactures the food said the contamination was a “total one-off.” But from what a sales director says, it doesn’t seem like the company really knows what happened.

It could’ve been from the tankers used to bring in the meat, and wasn’t detected because of an issue with the screening process.

“Once in our premises we have metal detectors and screens and they’ve been updating and we think there’s been a stray got through during a 15-minute upgrade,” he said.

From the way he tells it, there might not be too many contaminated bags. He thinks.

“The biscuit is made up of 80% cereal and 20% meat, so in a worse case scenario out of 100 bags there might be 20 [contaminated], but because we think it’s during the upgrade we can isolate it down to 10,” he explained. Again, that word, “think.” Dog owners are probably looking for more of a confident reassurance.

He says the company is going to offer the woman some free products as compensation, which she might not even want after what she found.

Making sure your safety systems are functioning correctly before allowing food of any kind to pass by would also be a more effective way to prevent such a thing from happening, as well. Just a thought.

*Pictured dog did not eat the contaminated food. At least, not that we know of and we do hope not.

Dog food contaminated with metal and plastic [BBC]

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