What was recalled
This page synthesizes six pentobarbital-in-pet-food events from a concentrated 18-month window. The February 2017 Evanger’s event covered Hunk of Beef and Against the Grain Pulled Beef canned dog food after the Mael family (Washington) reported five pugs becoming acutely sedated after eating Evanger’s, with one dog (Talula) dying; finished-product testing detected pentobarbital. The March 2017 Against the Grain event shared a co-packer with Evanger’s. The April 2017 Party Animal Cocolicious event was triggered by independent third-party lab testing commissioned by a Texas retailer detecting pentobarbital in Cocolicious Beef & Turkey and Chicken & Beef cans; Party Animal subsequently sued Evanger’s in June 2017 alleging Evanger’s was Party Animal’s co-packer and the contaminated beef arrived from the same supplier.
The February-March 2018 J.M. Smucker / Big Heart Pet Brands wave was the largest in scale, beginning with an ABC7 Washington (WJLA-TV) investigation commissioning lab tests on Gravy Train after the Tomlinson family reported their Shih Tzu Tito’s death. FDA testing confirmed pentobarbital in Gravy Train cans; the recall expanded to cover Kibbles ’N Bits, Walmart Ol’ Roy private-label canned varieties, and Skippy Premium Chunks. The FDA joint inspection with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture at the JBS USA Souderton, PA rendering facility (starting March 13, 2018) found pentobarbital in 4 of 9 samples, definitively traced the contamination source to rendered beef tallow, and produced a Warning Letter to JBS USA documenting violations of FDA tallow-sourcing requirements.
Why it was recalled
The 2017-2018 events shared a single underlying root cause: rendering supply chains accepting euthanized animal carcasses (typically dairy cows euthanized at end of productive life, or downed-animal carcasses) into tallow and meat streams destined for pet food without segregation from human-edible material. Pentobarbital is the most common large-animal euthanasia drug; it persists through rendering temperatures and is detectable at parts-per-billion in finished tallow. Pentobarbital is a schedule II controlled substance in the U.S. and has no FDA-tolerated level in pet food — any detection constitutes adulteration under FDA Compliance Policy Guide section 690.300.
The clustering of three brands (Evanger’s, Against the Grain, Party Animal) in 60 days in spring 2017, followed by the multi-Smucker-brand portfolio event a year later, points to shared rendering supply infrastructure rather than per-brand quality failures. The 2017 events surfaced through consumer illness reports + independent retail-channel lab testing; the 2018 event surfaced through investigative journalism (ABC7) commissioning lab testing. The detection mechanism is significant: in all six cases, FDA regulatory surveillance did not detect the contamination first. The 2019 Food Safety News investigation at its May 2019 reporting alleged JBS USA had knowingly distributed pentobarbital-adulterated tallow after internal testing detected contamination — reframing the events as supplier-level willful misconduct rather than testing-protocol failure.
Health risks for your pet
Pentobarbital toxicity in dogs presents as sedation, ataxia, slurred or wobbly gait, decreased respiration, hypothermia, and at high enough doses respiratory depression and death. The 2017-2018 events documented at least two dog deaths (Talula Mael at Evanger’s February 2017; Tito Tomlinson at Gravy Train February 2018) and multiple consumer illness reports of rolling household clusters where multiple dogs became simultaneously sedated after the same meal. Pentobarbital’s half-life in dogs is approximately 4-8 hours; clinical signs typically resolve with supportive care within 24-72 hours unless the dose was lethal. The dose-detection threshold in pet food testing is parts-per-billion; clinical effect requires substantially higher exposure. The cumulative dog-illness count across the 2017-2018 wave was never definitively tallied because pentobarbital exposure in canned food consumption is hard to retrospectively associate without sample testing.
What to do if you bought affected product
The 2017-2018 pentobarbital recalls are completed and affected product is no longer in distribution. Current production from the implicated manufacturers (Evanger’s, Party Animal, Big Heart Pet Brands) is post-recall and uses tallow from sources that JBS USA and J.M. Smucker have restructured under post-2018 verification protocols requiring third-party testing for pentobarbital. If your dog develops sudden sedation, ataxia, or unexplained slow respiration after a meal of canned dog food — particularly if multiple pets in the same household show signs after the same product — contact your veterinarian or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (888-426-4435) immediately. The FDA Safety Reporting Portal remains the official channel for pet illness reports tied to specific products.
How this affects KibbleIQ’s grade
The brands affected by the 2017-2018 wave (Gravy Train, Kibbles ’N Bits, Ol’ Roy, Skippy, Evanger’s, Party Animal Cocolicious) are partially scored or absent from the KibbleIQ database per our published methodology; current grades reflect current ingredient lists rather than the historical pentobarbital events. The 2017-2018 wave was a shared-supplier root cause — the JBS USA tallow stream was the contamination source, and any brand sourcing tallow from that supply chain during 2016-2018 had exposure risk. Modern Big Heart Pet Brands and JBS USA tallow sourcing has been substantially restructured since the 2018 event. Recall-history scoring under our planned methodology v2 will treat the 2017-2018 events as a category signal — supply-chain-driven rather than per-brand quality-systems failure — while still applying a penalty for finished-food manufacturers’ quality-control failures that allowed contaminated tallow into their finished product.