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.

For its part, P&G fixed a pre-emptive first salvo with its November 2000 disparagement and unfair competition suit against Nutro. That followed what P&G claimed in court documents was Nutro president and chief executive officer Jerry Sicherman's November 2000 trip to P&G's Cincinnati headquarters and threats of "unwarranted litigation" unless Iams modified its feeding guidelines.

P&G claims Nutro launched a national campaign in mid-1999 to disparage lams products by having in-store product demonstrators falsely claim that Iams products contain road kill, euthanized pets and chemicals that can cause cancer and other diseases.

"These false, offensive and misleading oral statements by Nutro representatives are not isolated or unrelated statements by rogue sales representatives, but are part of a nationwide pattern and practice of product disparagement and denigration being made by Nutro against Iams," P&G's complaint said. The suit seeks unspecified money damages and a pre-emptive finding that P&G has not engaged in unfair competition or false advertising. Nutro denies the charges in court filings and claims that Iams representatives harassed and interfered with Nutro representatives in pet stores.

While one pet food company charging another with spreading rumors of road kill and pets in food is a new wrinkle, the rumors themselves go back many years and often have been applied with a broad brush to a wide range of pet food brands. A Google search of Internet news group postings shows such rumors go back at least to 1997, spread in many cases by animal rights activists.

Bryan Brown, vice president of communications for Iams, acknowledges that such tales have a long history of dogging pet food makers, sometimes fueled by media reports about how broadly such pet food ingredient listings as "animal byproducts" and "animal fat" can be construed legally. Of course, P&G denies road kill, pets or hazardous chemicals are making their way into pet food, and Brown adds that byproducts, while not the most appetizing idea for humans, are quite nutritious.

Questions about pets and road kill making their way into pet food are common enough that the Pet Food institute, the industry trade group, includes a response to them on its Web site, Petfoodinstitute.org, noting that manufacturers do not include such unsavory tidbits in their goods.

But the industry is clearly more divided on how much pets should be fed, or at least on how guidelines should be written. Only two weeks after P&G's pre-emptive first legal strike, Nutro filed its own suit in December 2000 alleging that Iams had reduced feeding guidelines in order to advertise lower feeding costs. Kal Kan followed with a similar suit in March 2001.

The suits make similar claims that the feeding guidelines on Iams products aren't enough to maintain pets' weights. Brown says the changes were made in response to the growing problem of obesity, which afflicts an estimated 40 percent of U.S. dogs. He says Iams reduced feeding recommendations based on the low-stress lifestyle of dogs who live in homes rather than in kennels or on farms, and also based on the fact that many consumers supplement their dogs' diets with treats and table scraps.

Kal Kan's lawsuit claims that independent feeding trials show dogs fed according to Iams' instructions don't receive sufficient nutrition. In her separate suit in Los Angeles Superior Court. Los Angeles resident Karen Pollack is seeking damages based on her claim that her dog lost more than four pounds when she followed lams' feeding guidelines. Nutro's suit similarly claims that Iams' guidelines don't meet dogs' energy requirements.