Bo Knows Tomatoes
by Michael Schaffer

Thank God for Gina Spadafori. The executive editor of PetConnection.com is a serious reporter who happens to be an animal lover–and not, as is too often the case in the pet-related media, a pet lover who simply enjoys writing about animals.  The fact that she’s someone who can cover City Hall or the police department was crucial back when she was blowing open the pet-food poisoning scandal, and it has popped up again and again since then as she covers a realm that’s perpetually hamstrung by misinformation and by views that are shaped by emotion rather than facts. This week, Gawker goofs on an official potrait/baseball card of Bo the Dog that was recently released by the White House. The card lists the dog’s favorite food as tomatoes. “So we took to the internet,” writes John Cook, “and sure enough—they’re poison!” The post was quickly picked up in the Christian Science Monitor, and we were on our way to that greatest of media events: A presidential pet scandal! Except that, as Gina notes, it isn’t:

Would have been nice if Gawker or the CSM had checked with the experts at the ASPCA’s Animal Poison Control Center, which reports that tomato plants may be a minor problem, but ripe tomatoes are not.

PS: John Cook just emailed to take umbrage to this post. He notes that he actually picked up the phone and interviewed a Colorado State U. vet school professor who said: ”Mother nature didn’t design dogs to eat them. One or two tomatoes is not going to do anything to a large-sized dog, but no—they’re not a good food. The glycoalkaloids could cause colic and bloating—they stop the activity of the intestinal tract.”

He’s right. What I was glad Gina did was get ahead of the thing before Cook’s comic riff about dangers to Bo’s life, when whispered down the lane, blossomed into full-blown doggy scandal elsewhere in the media.