The Pet Schooled Press

I will admit, from the very beginning, I had my doubts. It was years ago when an FDA FOIA (freedom of information act) employee asked me to have a "phone only" meeting with an "ombudsman" group called OGIS. The FDA FOIA employee Sarah Kotler stated that OGIS is "a neutral arbiter of FOIA related issues for government agencies and requesters". This was in December 2018, and I had spent the greater part of the year documenting how FDA was regulating one sector of the pet food industry with their "opinion" they called a "compliance policy". At the same time, they were regulating the major dry pet food sector of the pet industry using "enforcement discretion", which translates into "looking the other way" as major violations of federal law occur. Part of what I had come across in my documenting was how FDA would routinely get certain pet food manufacturers (who were not breaking the law) on the phone, threaten them, then...

In emails obtained through the freedom of information act, FDA employees have had questionable meetings and conversations throughout the years with representatives of AFIA ( American Feed Industry Association ), the largest lobbying group in the pet industry. For decades, FDA has not been holding public meetings to develop pet food ingredient definition regulations. This is a very important aspect of democracy and the regulatory process, and it seems that FDA should be proudly engaged in this official process. Yet, they're not. It could even be argued that FDA is taking the opposite approach, doing everything in their power to ensure that a private organization "AAFCO" continues to hold onto the process of making "official regulations" in a private setting. FDA has long been a member of AAFCO , an association of public "regulatory" employees at state and federal levels. AAFCO is a private corporation, even though its board consists entirely of "pu...