Dog eat dog & cats? Fur flies as charges of canine cannibalism and willful malnourishment roil pet industry. (Food Business).

Pet food has become a dog-eat-dog business. Cat-eat-cat, too. Quite literally, some people say, or at least allegedly say.

Therein lies one of the problems.

In a lawsuit, Procter & Gamble Co., maker of the Iams and Eukanuba pet food brands, claims that in-store demonstrators

City of Industry, Cal.-based Nutro Products and Mars Inc.'s Vernon, Cal.-based Kal Kan charge in separate lawsuits of their own that Procter & Gamble Co.'s Iams business has purposely lowered feeding recommendations in order to make the per-serving cost of its own premium food seem lower. Separately, a California consumer claims her dog was malnourished and lost four pounds because she followed the Iams feeding instructions.

Needless to say, all sides deny wrongdoing. Sorting it all out will be the courts, primarily U.S. District Court in Dayton, Ohio, where the three suits brought by P&G, Nutro and Mars have been consolidated. As sensational and outlandish as some of the claims may seem, all three suits have survived motions to dismiss and are scheduled for trial beginning as soon as September, as executives undergo depositions during the discovery process.

Welcome to the strange new world of pet food, which, despite all the fuss, has become one of the most sought-after aisles of the store, increasingly pitting some of the world's leading packaged goods competitors against each other. Following P&G's $2.1 billion acquisition of Iams in 1999, Mars added to its pet food lineup with last summer's $730 million acquisition of the French pet food concern Royal Canin, and Nestle bought Ralston-Purina for $10.3 billion in December.

The increasingly heated competition may be at the heart of the matter. Iams originally reduced recommended feeding instructions for many of its Iams and Eukanuba products in 1998. For instance, feeding guidelines for Iams Chunks pet food went from two to two and a half cups daily for an average adult dog to one and a half to one and three-fourths cups. But the false advertising suits against Iams weren't filed until December 2000 and March 2001, after P&G had bought the company and expanded the base Iams brand from pet specialty stores into food, mass and drug outlets, boosting sales by more than $400 million and taking share from many players.