Today marks the official launch of Multi-Billion-Dollar Pet Food Fraud: Hiding in Plain Sight.
Writing commenced in November 2020 on the Qwerkywriter keyboard given to me by Dr Mei Yam on the 28th of October 2020 when she took over the Bligh Park Pet Health Centre.
Just how the information travelled out of my head, down my arms and out of my fingertips, I don’t really know. Somehow an organic activity assumed a life, was recorded and preserved in the computer. By September 2021 the first rough draft was ready for editorial input. Laurel Cohn and Helen Williams came to the rescue and provided some well-considered advice (bordering on instructions). Thereupon I consulted a lawyer and made some significant structural changes. Got lucky again and via the internet found Simon Goodway in Brighton England. Simon turned lines of text into 24 quirky cartoons.
By February 2022 the manuscript was ready for the copy edit. By dint of great good fortune Professor Juliet Richters was available and so ensued lots of back and forth until the manuscript was ready for design and typesetting. Joy Lankshear of Lankshear Design suffered an accident and could not start right away.
Joy had performed all the wonderful design and typesetting of Raw Meaty Bones back in 2000/1 and followed up with stellar work in 2005 on Work Wonders. I needed to wait until Joy was fit. Fortunately, Joy’s injury healed relatively soon, and she set to work on the manuscript. With the typesetting complete it was again the turn of Juliet Richters to proofread and index the book.
Fortunately, the Gods were with me and quite by chance I discovered Palamedes in London. They agreed to build a new website and re-vamp the original two titles and provide all three books with new covers. For four months commencing at the beginning of January, Palamedes have been hard at work learning about the intricacies of the Raw Meaty Bones Trilogy and giving it a facelift in readiness for the launch today 2nd May 2023.
Whilst the foregoing describes the outline of the print and e-Book journey of the Trilogy, we should acknowledge the special work of Simone Feiler of Sydney Audiobook Production. Simone introduced me to Esper and Joanna at Safe House Recording Studios in Arndell Park, Sydney. Although renowned as a Hip Hop recording studio, Esper and Joanna have immense skill and patience enabling me to record all three books over a period of about six months. The idea of having a theme tune took hold and within weeks lyrics took shape and my son Luke and his friend Nick Woodford of the eponymous band ‘Woodford’ recorded the rock ballad Work Wonders.
Simone then edited all the tracks, spliced in the Work Wonders musical introductions to the chapters and uploaded the finished audiobooks to the internet. A big thank you to Simone for boundless enthusiasm, hard work and creativity throughout the process. It’s another world recording audiobooks. I encourage anyone to give it a try, it’s ‘unworldly’.
Which brings me to the synopsis of Multi-Billion-Dollar Pet Food Fraud: Hiding in Plain Sight. As best I can tell you, it’s what the book is about. I hope that you will check it out and form your own view.
Happy reading.
Multi-Billion-Dollar
Pet Food Fraud:
Hiding in Plain Sight
At first glance the book raises questions, and is designed to raise questions, however, it also provides plenty of answers about the global pet-food fraud hiding in plain sight.
Part memoir of Dr Tom Lonsdale’s 30-year campaign to expose and overcome the junk pet-food/vet/fake animal welfare collaboration, part textbook for vets and pet owners, part a series of indictments and prosecuting briefs for those ready to take up the struggle. The book draws together much that hitherto was scattered in the historical record.
Twelve chapters in all, with seven appendices, the chapters each stand on their own and can be read independently of the rest of the book—a necessary function given the density of the information provided and that it upends conventional viewpoints. The junk pet food/vet/fake animal welfare fictions are repudiated and replaced with essential truths.
The early chapters provide the reader with a grounding in animal health and veterinary care—necessary for pet-owners needing to function as their own vet in the face of mass veterinary incompetence and corruption. Vets and allied professions will find vital new information that the veterinary establishment has effectively suppressed until now.
Chapters 6 through 10 reveal a veterinary profession lost without a moral compass gripped by a paralysis of its own making. Opportunists exploit the vacuum in veterinary integrity and leadership, all of which is aided and abetted by an indifferent media, politicians and regulators.
The chapters are sprinkled with vignettes, line drawings and photographs. There are two letters from Buckingham Palace. Taken together, the book is a series of parables within one larger parable about systems failures and human doublespeak. It’s an attempt to get the pets’ voice heard.
Despite sensational revelations of endemic cruelty and fraud, the book avoids sensationalism. Chapter 12 contemplates some of the community-wide changes needed to spark the pet-feeding, pet-health revolution.
As both an educational resource and brief of evidence Multi-Billion-Dollar Pet Food Fraud: Hiding in Plain Sight will reward close study in conjunction with the two other titles in the Raw Meaty Bones Trilogy, Raw Meaty Bones: Promote Health and Work Wonders: Feed your dog raw meaty bones.
