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24 Feb, 2015

Class action lawsuit

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A class action lawsuit is filed in a California federal court by plaintiff Frank Lucido alleging that Purina’s Beneful dry dog food causes illness and death to thousands of dogs. Jeff Cereghino, one of the attorneys representing Lucido:

If it’s a hundred or so, it’s like, ‘Okay, a lot of dogs eat Beneful; things happen.’ But when you start getting into the thousands… The long and short of it is the complaint pyramid is such that even with the Internet–easy access to complain about things– there’s still a very large percentage of folks who simply don’t complain, or whose vet tells ‘em, ‘We don’t know what happened,’ and they’re not drawing conclusions or leaping to assumptions. But when I look at 4,000? Holy hell, there’s a lot of people out here. There seems to be somewhat of a singular event. [The dogs] are vomiting. They’re having liver problems, failures. I’m not a vet, but you look at some of this stuff and say, ‘OK, we’re starting to have similar symptoms across the board, and we’re starting to have causation.

Lawsuit response

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Purina responds to the class action lawsuit that alleges Purina’s Beneful brand dry dog food causes illness and death to dogs. Keith Schopp, Purina’s vice president of corporate public relations:

We believe the lawsuit is without merit and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves. Beneful is a high-quality nutritious food enjoyed by millions of dogs each year and there are no product quality issues with Beneful.