To the UK cat community, given the negative posting concerning our company, I thought it may be appropriate to provide a quick posting from Champion. As is often the case in circumstances like these, facts often give way to misinformation.
I would like begin by telling you that we are a family-owned and family oriented, award-winning pet food maker here in Alberta, Canada. We have a long and proud tradition of producing innovative foods from fresh regional ingredients since 1985.
Like most of you on this site, we are pet lovers too. Every member of the Champion family shares their home with dogs and cats (dachshunds for me) and that’s why we make the kind of foods that we do. Just like you, we are shocked and terribly saddened at the situation that unfolded in Australia.
As there are some errors regarding the situation in Australia, I’d like to clarify on a few points.
First, the recall is limited to Australia and results from the high level of irradiation (61kGY) that our foods were exposed to when entering the country. This irradiation process is unique to Australia and our foods in other markets are not affected.
Australia does not irradiate all pet foods – only those made with fresh ingredients (like ORIJEN) and/or cooked at low temperatures (like ORIJEN) are irradiated.
The unique nutritional make-up of ORIJEN foods (including high levels of long chain DHA and EPA omega-3 fatty acids from fresh fish) make ORIJEN highly susceptible to the effects of irradiation treatment. Delicate long chain fatty acids are easily compromised by high irradiation, which in turn causes the formation and release of toxic oxidative by-products.
When consumed by cats, these oxidative by products have a profound effect on the nervous system. Unfortunately, due to the obscure nature of this problem, no one in the industry – including Champion - was aware of the potential danger irradiation posed to our cat foods. Indeed, even after we discovered our foods were to be irradiated, we were assured by government authorities that the process was safe.
When we began to receive strange reports of cats falling ill in Australia, we subjected all foods shipped to Australia to a complete battery of tests. These tests included every known toxin and a complete chemical screening to identify any possibility that our food may have contributed to the reported illnesses. All tests showed the foods to be fine.
Enquiries into all other markets (50 countries) where ORIJEN is sold revealed there were no reports or problems with the foods anywhere else – including foods from the very same productions that were sold in Australia. As the symptoms reported from Australia are indicative of a wide number of possible health problems, we decided to put a stop sale on our cat foods in Australia and send a staff member to Australia to investigate first hand.
Realizing the problem was unique to Australia, we started to investigate for local factors ranging from water supply, gardening chemicals, spider bites… a vast number of possibilities.
It wasn’t until we began running tests on ORIJEN cat foods irradiation chambers here in Canada that we began to strongly suspect the high levels of irradiation were causing the problems. Indeed, like everyone else we had assumed that irradiation process was safe.
We began to research irradiation and cat food and found one single published study linking irradiated foods to the same problems that were reported among cats in Australia. Since then, one more study has been published that draws the same conclusions in the dangers of irradiated dry cat foods.
These studies are available on-line and can be accessed through our website at championpetfoods.com (click on the Australia icon)
We understand the criticism directed at us for the events that occurred in Australia. We have also done our best to be open, honest and transparent. All of our actions, investigations and subsequent findings were (and still are) posted on our website.
Our mistake was trusting that the irradiation process was safe. Our sales in Australia were a very, very, small fraction of our sales worldwide, and our exports to Australia were and are not “greed motivated”.
In retrospect, we wish we would have known more about the process, and how our food in particular would be affected by irradiation.
To support cat owners in Australia, we established the ORIJEN COMPASSION FUND to provide financial assistance to offset medical and related costs up to $2000 for each affected cat, announced a $10,000 donation to support homeless cats in the Sydney area, and will publish the research we have compiled in the hopes that others can learn from this tragic event.
We have since changed our export policy and will never again ship to a destination requiring irradiation, or any other unnatural process, as a precondition to market entry.
To set the record straight, we made 2 shipments to Australia. A third shipment was made but stopped before it entered the irradiation chamber and returned. In total, less than 3 pallets of ORIJEN cat food were sold in Australia between November 20, 2007 and the recall date of November 2008. This compares with thousands of pallets of the very same food shipped worldwide during that same period.
Champion Petfoods and my family personally are very sorry for all of the families in Australia who have been affected by this terrible circumstance. We hope that of this tragedy a new awareness and understanding of the potential effects irradiation has upon cat foods. We pledge never again to allow our foods to be compromised.
Sincerely,

Peter A. Muhlenfeld
Champion Petfoods Ltd.