America:When his cat, Wilhelmina, went off her food last month, my friend Thomas assumed at first that she was sulking, perhaps because he had been having too good a time the previous weekend.
It seemed like a plausible explanation because - although I never mentioned it to Thomas - the cat had always struck me as an unusually solipsistic and resentful animal, even by feline standards.
But as the days went by and Wilhelmina started to get thinner, resisting even the most scrumptious morsels Thomas was using to tempt her back to the feeding bowl, we all started to get worried.
Thomas bundled her up into an old pullover and ferried her across town from Capitol Hill to a swanky vet's office near Dupont Circle.
After a couple of X-rays, an ultra-sound examination and numerous blood tests, the cat was still eating very little, the vet didn't know what was wrong and the bill was approaching $2,000.
"I don't resent the money at all. I'd pay anything to make her better," Thomas told me a little too earnestly. "But I'm starting to worry about how many more procedures we have to go through before we find out what's going on."
What Thomas did not realise was that, across America, thousands of dog and cat owners were going through the same experience as they watched their pets suffer from symptoms ranging from loss of appetite to vomiting and bad breath.
Then, on March 16th, pet food manufacturers recalled nearly 100 brands of dog and cat food, admitting that it had been tainted with an industrial chemical called melamine.
The recalled food, which included house brands for big supermarket chains like Wal-Mart and Safeway as well as commercial brands like Iams, was initially limited to "wet" food sold in cans and pouches.
Manufacturers later admitted that some dry pet foods were contaminated, too, and pet owners throughout the country began to panic, wondering which brand would be next to join the tainted list.
The website petconnection.com said yesterday that 4,346 pets have been reported dead as a result of the contaminated food and countless others have been suffering from kidney complaints, intestinal problems and other ailments.
Pet owners have become increasingly frustrated with the response of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the crisis, complaining that the agency has refused to identify brands it knows to be contaminated until manufacturers voluntarily make the information public.
Although Wilhelmina had not eaten any of the foods on the original recall list, Thomas decided to avoid manufactured food altogether and to prepare the cat's meals himself. According to the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), he was taking an enormous risk in doing so.
"While homemade diets can certainly provide pets with an adequate diet, they do require a substantial amount of work, plus guidance by your veterinary team to ensure that the final product includes a complete nutritional balance," the ASPCA warned.
But as a blogger on petconnection.com pointed out, most Americans manage to feed their families adequately without receiving detailed advice from a team of doctors, so why should they not be able to feed their pets?
This week the story took a sinister turn when the FDA revealed that it now believed melamine may have been added deliberately to wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate imported from China because it helped to boost the apparent protein content of pet food. FDA investigators were awaiting visas to travel to China to find out more by visiting three food plants where the ingredients were produced.
"If melamine was found in all three of those, it would certainly lend credibility to the theory that it may be intentional. That will be one of the theories we will pursue when we get into the plants in China," said Stephen Sundlof, the agency's chief veterinarian.
As for Wilhelmina, home feeding appears to have achieved what expensive treatment failed to effect, and the last time I saw her she was back to her old self, eating heartily and glaring malevolently at all around her.
