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ST. LOUIS - Ron Hayes, who owns six cats and two dogs, said he hasn't changed their diet since learning about the country's first confirmed case of mad cow disease.
"It's called mad cow disease, not mad dog disease, right?" he asked, but then checked to see if his pet foods contained beef ingredients. He spotted beef tallow on a bag of dry food.
"I'll have to think about it now," he said.
Federal regulators and experts say there's still no reason to worry about pets getting sick from pet food and no evidence to suggest any tainted meat has made its way into the pet food supply.
Experts say the chances of cats in the United States contracting the disease are slim, though not impossible. There has never been a reported case of a dog getting it.
Since 1997, the United States has banned the practice of feeding cattle, sheep and goats any food that contains brain and spinal cord material. Eating contaminated feed is the only known way the disease spreads among livestock.
The Food and Drug Administration sought comment last year as it considered a ban on using cattle brain and spinal tissue in food for dogs, cats, pigs and poultry. An FDA spokeswoman said no final decision has been made.
Mad cow has been found in a small number of cats - about 100 - in the United Kingdom, as well as a handful in other European countries.
Officials in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have said they suspect the cats got the disease by eating cat food tainted with infected meat. That suspicion is bolstered by evidence that British cats contracted the disease at about the same time, and in the same places.
In the United States, pet food is closely inspected for quality and safety, in part because some of it ends up eaten by humans, said Dr. Niels Pedersen, a specialist in feline infectious diseases at the University of California at Davis.
"It would be highly, highly unlikely that nervous tissue would end up even in pet food," he said. "It's one of those products that is as vigorously inspected and quality-controlled as canned tuna."
In a statement released Tuesday, Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the Food and Drug Administration, said some animals declared unfit for people can be used in pet food. "But they must be processed in such a way that they are deemed safe for the pets. This generally means that the pet food must be heat-treated or the animal-derived parts must be rendered to destroy any pathogens," he said.
The nation's $12-billion pet food industry feeds 76-million cats and 61-million dogs, according to the Pet Food Institute.
On Wednesday, the Agriculture Department said that it had located some of the 81 cows that the authorities suspect were shipped to the United States from Canada with the one that turned out to have mad cow disease.
Nine of the cows are still on the farm in Mabton, Wash., where the infected cow had lived.
"And we have good leads on all of the remaining animals," said Dr. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinary officer for the Agriculture Department. He said the leads have all been to farms in Washington, but the tracking is not yet finished.
It is important to trace the other animals in case they, too, are infected, so that they can be kept out of the meat supply.
The infected cow is thought to have contracted the disease from contaminated feed, and animals raised with it might have eaten the same feed.
DNA test results to confirm the infected cow's origin should be available next week.
- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.