Both Checkers and Opallo's own dog, an 11-month-old Bichon-Shih Tzu cross named Taco, had been eating food from foil pouches sold under the Nutro brand name, one of the products on Menu's list. Test after test proved inconclusive, and only after Mississauga, Ont.-based Menu Foods issued its first recall of contaminated food on March 16 did the penny finally drop. Checkers began vomiting incessantly and defecating blood, sending the sisters on a series of futile visits to a local veterinarian.
Then, in mid-February, the family was thrown back into crisis. As the months passed, it became clear that Checkers possessed healing powers no psychiatrist, friend or relative could equal. "That dog filled a very big void in her life," says Opallo, 47, who lives with her 45-year-old sister. Frantic for ways to help, the family took a flyer on the dog, and their instincts proved correct. The previous week, DiGregorio's 16-year-old son, Louis, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. It was here in the Long Island suburbs that Donna Opallo and a couple of relatives brought home Checkers, a chocolate-eyed beagle puppy, three years ago, figuring she might lend solace to Opallo's grief-stricken sister, Debbie DiGregorio. But if an animal's curative effect on the human heart plays any part in the calculation, the courts might start at a small house in Floral Park, N.Y., where the wounds wrought by the poisoning epidemic will stay raw for a long time to come.
There was considerable legal debate on this topic even before the current uproar. Sometime in the next couple of years, when the public gaze has drifted from the tainted pet food epidemic and we've all forgotten what melamine is, a judge in Ohio or California or Ontario will take up the daunting question of what a dog or cat is worth. "Pet Food Scandal", Last Edited December 15, 2013,
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