Lessons and Opportunities of the Pet Food Recall

As someone with Buddhist tendencies, I see life through a lens of personal responsibility, karmic or otherwise. In other words, everything that happens to us is of our own creation. Our karma has dictated that we have certain lessons to learn, and we’ll manufacture situations that give us the opportunity to learn those lessons. This includes illness, death, the death of a spouse or child, and the death of a pet.

Does this mean we consciously want death and the suffering of the survivors that comes with it? Of course not. But if it’s here, it’s here for a reason, and we must respect it by learning from it.

I’m a bit of an expert on animal death, as over 150 animals have come to me and died shortly thereafter. Frogs, ducks, geese, cats, dogs, a wolf, and even a black bear. My pets, other people’s pets, feral animals, animals injured from hunting–you name it. They’re coming to me to die, I realized after nearly 100 deaths, and they’re going to keep coming as long as I can give them what they need or I recognize they’re giving me something I need (that I probably have no idea I need).

The loss of a pet, in particular, can be devastating. But really, it’s just the passing of a physical body. The energy of the pet and the soul of the animal merely take on a different form and continue to exist. It’s the suffering prior to the death that is most difficult to deal with. But if death was the final stage, the only suffering that still exists is the one being kept alive in our minds.

You can choose to allow a death to destroy you, or you can choose to recognize that it is painful (or not) and that you have experienced a loss, but that you will move on. After all, for all you know, death was the best thing that could have happened at that moment. All–ALL–events are neutral. But we then assign "good" or "bad" to them based on what’s going on in our own heads. Death is neutral. It simply is. And you decide what to do with it. You can become attached to the idea of the life and the death and never move beyond that, or you can acknowledge whatever it is that you are feeling, which frankly has nothing to do with the death as it’s really about you, and wish the deceased a pleasant and fulfulling journey.

I see several important, pivotal moments created by the turmoil and suffering of the pet food recall.

• Americans are finally examining the contents of their pet’s food and researching the company that makes it. This has been a long time coming. Commercial pet food–even when uncontaminated by toxins–has been made with garbage for years. When most brands are manufactured and packed  by the same couple of companies, and they exist to maximize profit, they cut corners with ingredients, and they use the cheapest suppliers, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens.
• It’s disturbing that it would take this kind of precipitant, but this could be an opportunity for Americans to rethink the property status of cats and dogs (I’m not so delusional to think that we’d go beyond them to other species at this point). This might occur because the damages that pet owners can obtain from pet food manufacturers are limited to the price paid for the animal. Pet owners are wanting compensation for "pain and suffering." (But really, that money is still for them and they’re saying that their animal has a higher worth than the courts are willing to allow, so the issue seems to still be about [value of] the property.) I’m not sure how this will play out regarding property status, however I do know that for the first time in a long while, Americans are discussing the issue.

Death is an amazing teacher. If we allow ourselves the opportunity to be educated and transformed, death is respected. And in that, life is respected.