Evangers Dog Food Pug Family Update

Press Release:

Evangers Dog Food released the following response regarding the recent claim that pugs from Washougal, Washington fell ill, with one passing away, after eating Evangers canned dog food. More information and updates will be available on www.evangersdogfood.com.

“In regards to the pugs that were ill in the state of Washington, Evanger’s would like to discuss the events that occurred, and the actions that Evanger’s has taken to launch its investigation into this claim.

Holly Sher and Brett Sher (owners) learned about this at 3 AM on Monday, January 2nd, and started action immediately. As compassionate dog lovers, Evangers fully-funded the YouCaring page to take care of the vet bills, and with the donation, asked the owner to get in touch with Evangers, and to provide the lot number she fed her pets to begin an internal investigation.

We initially learned about this through Instagram. At 3:20 AM, the same day we learned about the incident, Evanger’s contacted the pug owner asking to contact us directly so that we could work together to investigate this matter. Other members of Instagram asked the pug owner to contact Evanger’s directly as well. Evanger’s has contacted the customer through Instagram, her FundMe Page with Evanger’s contribution, and the News Outlet, but had yet to be contacted by the customer directly.

Through a third party on Instagram who forwarded the information to us, we obtained the lot number of the food that was fed. The Lot Number is 1816E06HB13, and was purchased at a local Washougal, WA pet store. It was manufactured back in June 2016. We traced this batch and found that the entire lot went to one distributor in Washington State, and no other cans from this lot would be anywhere else in the country.  We asked the distributor if they had any product left of this same lot number, and they did not.  An Evanger’s representative contacted all 376 stores that the distributor sells to in order to find out if any product is still on shelves.

One store got back to us, and she informed us that the pug owner purchased the cans at her store, and she still had some product on her shelf.  We dispatched FedEx to pick up the remaining cans of the same lot number and had it sent directly to a third-party accredited laboratory for testing yesterday. We have offered to have the remaining unopened cans that the pug owner fed sent in for testing, and are still awaiting a response. The lab confirmed that pathogen and toxin testing will take 13 days for the cultures to show any results. Evanger’s plans to share the results as soon as it becomes available. Although every single batch is reviewed by a graduate from the FDA Better Processing School before it leaves Evanger’s facility, we have pulled all processing records for review and have found that this particular batch was, as expected, cooked in compliance with Evanger’s FDA Scheduled File Process.

Hunk of Beef is our #1 seller. Pets consume over one million cans of Hunk of Beef per year.  Evanger’s has not had one single call from any other pet parent about any pets getting sick from this lot number, and at this time, we believe that at least 200 dogs have already consumed this food. At this time, we have nothing to show that there is any issue with the food such as a veterinary report. We believe that other factors are involved that we are not aware of at this time, but will come to light when we are able to have a dialogue with the customer. We feed this same product to our own family dog, Lilly, as do almost all of our office, manufacturing, and sales personnel.  We also fed a retained sample to one of our employee’s cats, being confident in our food, and the cat shows no signs of illness.

In 81 years we have never had a recall and we anticipate at the conclusion of our investigation the test results will come back negative for any pathogens or toxins.

Last night, Tuesday the 3rd, at 10:03 PM local time, Ms. Mael reached out to Evanger’s via email to notify us that 5 dogs became ill.  We are grateful to have communication, and to be fully transparent, have requested that all emails between Evanger’s and Ms. Mael have the FDA in copy so that we can openly continue our investigation with scientific evidence of what truly happened in this tragic situation.

Nevertheless, we cannot imagine how terrible this must be for the owner, Nikki Mael and her family, and are compassionate towards her situation. Evangers, of course, stands behind our products 100%. Please keep in mind that any other flavor of canned food or dry foods manufactured by Evanger’s are not affected by this in any way, and are entirely safe to feed your and our own pets.

We take safety very seriously at Evangers and are doing everything possible to determine what happened. If we made a mistake, we will take full responsibility, but are hoping that the pug owner cooperates with us and sends us the scientific evidence from her Vet that we have requested, to see if this was or was not the food that caused her pets to get sick.  We will keep everyone updated as best we can as this unfolds.”