Without pet insurance, the family faced difficult conversations about how they would pay the unexpected cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a pretty serious talk about what we were going to do because we didn\u2019t really know if he was going to make it,\u201d Thomas said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a huge amount of money to spend that was completely unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was then shocked to discover more than a dozen customers had posted reviews on the Bunnings website describing similar experiences with the product, which is exclusively stocked at the hardware store.<\/p>\n
Flash rapidly became sick after consuming the bone, costing the family $5000 in vet bills. Photo \/ Kat Thomas<\/p>\n
Concerned other dogs could be harmed, Thomas returned to Bunnings New Lynn to purchase the remaining bones before staff agreed to remove them from sale.<\/p>\n
She said staff were unaware of the growing number of complaints, leaving individual stores to deal with them in isolation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a missing step between collating those issues as one big national issue with a major product,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the store owner\u2019s going, \u2018oh well, what do we do? It\u2019s one dog\u2019. But actually no, it\u2019s a minimum of 13 with a product that\u2019s the same product in every store, and no one\u2019s connecting those dots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thomas shared her story on social media despite initially being apprehensive she would be seen as an irresponsible dog owner.<\/p>\n
Other pet owners have reached out to her since the post, including one person who said their review had not been published on the Bunnings website.<\/p>\n
The response to her post left Thomas questioning how many pets were affected.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many are eating treats that are not suitable for consumption?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The Trusty Pork Bone has been pulled from Bunnings’ shelves. Photo \/ Kat Thomas<\/p>\n
A Bunnings spokesperson confirmed the Trusty Pork Bone had been removed from sale nationally as a precaution while concerns were investigated.<\/p>\n
\u201cNatural bone treats are a commonly available pet product sold across the industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, while we investigate concerns, we\u2019ve made the decision to remove this product from sale as a precaution.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Thomas said the number of negative reviews raised questions about why the product had remained on shelves.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re picking something up off a shelf… in a long aisle full of dog food and animal products, you do think that there\u2019s at least some sort of duty of care there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike what if this treat has been manufactured incorrectly or air dried in the wrong way and there\u2019s tens of thousands of these bones across both countries that are going to destroy the guts of our beloved pets?\u201d<\/p>\n
Trusty has also been approached for comment by the Herald.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Without pet insurance, the family faced difficult conversations about how they would pay the unexpected cost. \u201cWe had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[74,1558,14144,52297,10709,9219,3463,71,42,10933,15258,130,43,384,52548,31252,10903,44408,26525,28221,2081,766,23419,100,131,165,40,38,41,39,3257,264420],"class_list":["post-536692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-after","tag-been","tag-bone","tag-bunnings","tag-concerns","tag-dog","tag-dozen","tag-from","tag-headlines","tag-injured","tag-injury","tag-more","tag-news","tag-people","tag-pet","tag-pets","tag-popular","tag-pork","tag-pulled","tag-pulls","tag-raised","tag-reports","tag-seriously","tag-shelves","tag-than","tag-their","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-treat","tag-trusty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}