Poor quality food is pet hate of owners

Consumer associations accepted a total of 6,617 complaints related to pets from January to June, an increase of about 89.17 percent year-on-year. Pet food safety accounted for more than half of the complaints, according to the Legal Daily.

The causes for complaints were that some cat and dog foods had led to animals falling ill or even killed them. Theoretically, consumers can claim compensation from the pet food sellers for that according to law. However, it is often difficult for consumers to prove the causal relationship between pet food and the undesirable results they claim, and the merchants usually attribute the sickness or death of the pets to poor health.

Even if the consumers succeed in obtaining compensation, the amount of the money cannot effectively make up for the spiritual and material losses of the pet owners. It is therefore important to strengthen supervision over the production of pet food to resolve the problem at the root.

Although there are eight national standards and industrial standards related to pet food in the country, most of them are unbinding and lack force in law. This has resulted in nonstandardized management of pet food manufacturers and a lack of quality control. This in turn had compromised the quality of some pet food products as companies reduce their production costs to chase profits.

The Standardization Law stipulates that compulsory national standards shall be formulated for the technical requirements to ensure the safety of personal health, life and property, national security, ecological and environmental security, and to meet the basic needs of economic and social management. The quality of pet food is directly related to the safety of public property and should fall under the remit of the law, so there should be mandatory national standards for pet food.

The China Feed Industry Association started soliciting public opinions on standards on labels and hygiene of pet food in 2015, which were intended to be implemented nationwide as binding industrial standards. But the work has produced no results till now.

Relevant departments should make mandatory national standards as soon as possible to effectively standardize the pet food market development, and improve the quality and safety level of pet food.