(US) Pet-owning bloggers mobilize on food front

[Guest guest]

Pet-owning bloggers mobilize on food front

By Elizabeth Weise,

USA TODAY

June 5th, 2007

 

The online mobilization of a nationwide community of animal lovers may have

begun with the Pet Connection, a longtime pet-care website run by writer Gina

Spadafori and veterinarian Marty Becker, who together write a syndicated column

that runs in 65 newspapers nationwide.

 

On March 16, after Menu Foods announced a massive recall of pet foods,

www.petconnection.com began posting details about what was happening and what

owners needed to know.

 

Spadafori, based in Sacramento, spent 20 years at the Sacramento Bee as a copy

editor before moving to the Web. " We've been accused of feeding people's

emotion. But there's a lot of stuff here that's just flat-out good reporting, "

she says.

 

America's pet owners — 56% of U.S. households, according to the American

Veterinary Medical Association — were hungry for information as news spread

that thousands of dogs and cats might have died after eating ingredients

exported from China that were laced with an industrial chemical called melamine.

 

What they found was often piecemeal, difficult to find in one place. There were

daily stories in newspapers and on TV. Press releases announcing recalls were

scattered on a dozen pet-food maker's websites.

 

Then came the accidental bloggers. Within a week, a front line of websites

sorted themselves into a news-and-information collection-and-dissemination

machine.

 

Within two weeks, there were two simple, easy-to-print (and take to the

supermarket) lists for owners. One listed all the foods that had been recalled,

neatly divided by brand, and one listed foods that were safe.

 

A key service was simply counting how many animals had been hurt. Early on,

there was extreme confusion about the number of pets that had been sickened or

killed. The Food and Drug Administration had been reporting fewer than 20, while

anecdotal reports indicated numbers well into the hundreds, if not thousands. In

human cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would track such

numbers. But there is no such reporting system in place for animals.

 

To fill the gap, the Pet Connection team created an online database where owners

could list their pets, symptoms, outcome and veterinary information. The numbers

stand at 2,527 cats and 2,365 dogs dead.

 

Because no " official " number has ever been released, their figures became the

only ones available, and are likely to remain so until academic veterinarians

begin publishing their research, which could take another year.

 

The site also started an innovation that became surprisingly popular — live

transcripts of FDA phone news conferences. It was something of a shock to people

listening in when they began getting e-mails about something a federal official

had just said seconds before.

 

Pet Connection, it turned out, had elected its fastest typist, contributing

editor Christie Keith, to " live blog " the teleconferences. She was typing a

verbatim transcript onto the site as the officials spoke.

 

Thousands now log in for every press conference, Spadafori says.

 

From tiny to tenacious

 

Ben and Emily Huh had been writing Itchmo.com as " a fun little pet site, with

some product information, pet humor, funny pictures, " he says. They got " about

two visits a month. "

 

The couple, who live in Bellevue, Wash., first posted news in February about a

recall in the Northwest of salmonella-tainted cat food. " A month later, Menu did

its recall, and it's been crazy-wild ever since, " Ben says. Crazy as in close to

a million and a half visitors.

 

Emily quit her job and worked on writing the blog full time. Their site has

focused on coordinating news tips, and more recently, doing tests of pet foods

for melamine and related compounds

 

" We're not like a traditional blog where we spout our opinions. We straddle the

link between news sources and newspapers, " says Ben, who has a reporting

background.

 

Three weeks ago, their site was banned in China. " Some government minder in

China decided to look up Itchmo.com and decide that we're a threat to Chinese

politics, " Ben says.

 

The Huhs also get calls directly from reporters asking for background on the

pet-food recall. " They'll say, 'I'm a beat reporter in business, I've got a call

with this guy in 15 minutes, and I don't know anything about this.' I've gotten

more than a dozen calls like that, " Ben says.

 

The site's name, by the way, comes from their dog, Nemo. " He lies on his back

and says 'Itch me more!' so we decided to use that name, " Ben says.

 

Now, when he calls in to FDA teleconferences, he finds it a little silly, but,

" You just can't forget the name, " he says.

 

Gathering the facts

 

Kim Duke was a life coach in Santa Fe when the recall hit. She was frustrated

that there was no easy way to create a list of all the recalled foods. Years as

a project manager gave her the skill set to wade through a dozen press releases

and put one together at PetFoodTracker.com.

 

Therese Kopiwoda of Austin created a mirror opposite site, of the foods that

were safe.

 

She ran PetsitUSA.com, a site where owners and pet sitters could find each

other. " I had a lot of people e-mailing me and asking me, 'What can I feed my

animals, what's safe?' " she says. She began compiling a list of foods that were

not on the recall list.

 

" I called the pet-food companies and asked them for information. " Some

threatened to sue her for posting information about them, but she persevered.

The list started getting so much traffic that her pet-sitting site crashed, so

she created ThePetFoodList.com on April 4.

 

In the process of sharing information, she became fast friends with Duke and the

other bloggers, none of whom she'd ever met. " We work a lot together, " Kopiwoda

says. " Kim might call me and say, 'I think this company's about to recall,' or I

might call her and say, 'This one says this company is doing a recall but we

need to check it out.' "

 

They even hold meetings. " We e-mail pretty much every day, new tips, new leads

we're investigating, " Ben Huh says. " People come out of the woodwork finding

things, and we go on a chase to see if we can validate it. The person who got it

first publishes it, and then we all link to it. "

 

Not that the blogs were perfect. There was rumor and innuendo, often wildly

inaccurate. When the story homed in on China, xenophobic and racist postings

became such a problem that several site owners waded in and began weeding them

out.

 

Bloggers sometimes stated tips as the truth, leaving journalists to track them

down and disprove them. But all in all, it was " crowd sourcing " at its finest,

says Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media Program at the University of

California at Berkeley. Pet owners assembled information sources that drew

millions of readers, almost all of them for no pay.

 

" It's heartening to see that people did it, " he says.

 

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