Mars Petcare to Purchase Orijen and Acana

“When does it become a monopoly?”…It IS a monopoly!! Between controlling the food and the vets, it’s becoming terrifying to ask
a vet a nutrition question. Their income is so tied to telling clients to feed the products now owned by the monopolies. It’s really kind of sad about Orijen and Acana. I used to buy it occasionally back in 2007-2008 because it was actually imported from Canada and I thought ( mistakenly) it was safer from the Melamine poisonings. I quit buying it when the recipes changed and the price went to the moon. It’s like $5-9 a pound now….

I recommend Stella & Chewys frozen 8 oz Pattie’s in the value size 12 lb bags! Any of the proteins! If not that, then primal frozen Pattie’s.

Well time to find a new Canadian Pet food, Quality and product control about to go down. Too bad I trusted these two brands after Two of My Dogs almost Died From The Melamine recall several years ago, I have never bought anything not Made in Canada that I Trust after that

Time to go homemade, dehydrated or raw.

This is classic anti-competitive and predatory behavior, that was in the original spirit of the Sherman Antitrust Act’s intention to prevent. An act that was gutted 40 years ago during the Reagan presidency, under the advisement of Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics mythology that a monopoly is only a problem if it’s “injurious to consumers” e.g. higher prices, and that indeed is what Senator Sherman was really all about many years ago, which was a blatant lie. This myth also made believe that competitors would fill the market, if monopolists behaved poorly, and consumers would “vote with their wallets”, no problem. It was unfounded abstract BS then and is not based on real outcomes now, as a relative few corporations consolidate entire industries with vertical or horizontal integration. This is happening in seemingly all industries… big tech, in particular… also big ag, big food, banking, finance, etc. The bad news is that the Bork doctrine is basically a secular religion now and approximately 40% of the Federal judiciary is “educated” along this narrow view of antitrust, as they’ve been to Chicago School boot camps in Florida for decades. The good news is that Chair Lina Khan at the FTC is very much about tossing out this doctrine and returning antitrust and anti-competitive enforcement to the original spirit and intent of the Sherman Antitrust Act. She is particularly interested in Big Tech, but this seems very much in her wheelhouse, too. She wrote a groundbreaking legal paper in The Yale Law Journal titled, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”, available free in PDX format. You can notify the FTC about this at antitrust@ftc.gov