Boycott Four Paws

There is another thing that has concerned all of us over these tragic and needless events and one of Jan's siblings, an RN, has the same concern......what if a small child picked up one of these balls and put it in his/her mouth? That is what children do!

Four Paws, for what appears to be negligence, lies, lack of empathy and total lack of regard for your customers' safety or welfare, we hope you get your butt whipped soundly!

(s) Jan/Crystal, Cotton, Merci, Cyndi, Percy, Cameron, Buddy, Rusty & Samaritan

Latest update!!! We have just checked Chai's blog again and we are biting back rude words that Jan says we are never to say. This is not a new problem. The company has been aware of the flaw in the toy's design AT LEAST since July 2005 when Cole was euthanized for the same type injury. At that time the company assured Cole's owner the problem was being taken care of. The company's offer is being rejected by Chai's owner, evidently a man of greater integrity than has been shown by Four Paws.

Zinger left a comment on our last post, asking if we had heard about Chai. We followed the link and were so shocked, we unanimously decided to put a warning on our journal, hoping to help other woofies avoid the same situation.

All toys are not safe for cats, dogs or even for human children. But when a danger is found, manufacturers do not want to admit the problem or remove a product from the shelves. Why they would rather endanger lives and risk lawsuits rather than warn the public and recall a product is beyond us. Isn't life - and quality of life - more important than green papers?

That's another rhetorical question. We all know what is most important to too many humans.

We feel that reading the story that goes with the 2 videos is necessary to understand the full severity of the problem. So we are not posting the Chai videos here. We want you to go read the story and watch the after videos together.

Chai is a lab mix who had a serious injury while playing with a small ball with a bell inside. His human chose surgery rather than euthanasia for his woofie, even though this has changed the human's ability to earn a living for the moment. We commend him for loving Chai and investing so much time, effort and green papers in his welfare.

And although we are not surprised, we are appalled that, although Chai is not the only dog to have this same injury, the company refuses to recall it and apply a simple fix.

There is a link to an older case of a German Shepherd getting his tongue caught in one of those balls, but the vet hospital has removed the link. (We would guess there was too much traffic following the link and consuming their bandwidth.) We did manage to google it and see the cached page, which will not be available after the next Google web crawl for pages. That case was not as severe and the Shepherd's injury healed. But the same short video of that dog is available.



For this reason, Chai's human is calling for an international boycott of all Four Paws products. You can read the original story on The Chai Story. And the updates here.

And if you read to the end, you will find a way you can help save other woofies from the same injury.