Dogs may not care what their biscuits look like, but Canada Post certainly does.The Crown corporation has successfully lobbied a chain of pet stores to stop selling its popular biscuits shaped like letter carriers.
The president of Pet Valu Canada, a chain with hundreds of outlets in Ontario and Manitoba, said yesterday that the company has decided to stop carrying Bark Bars after receiving a letter from the legal department of Canada Post.
The dog treats come in flavours such as Parmesan cheese, fish and chips, and garlic and are shaped to represent the age-old prey of dogs – cats and letter carriers.
The design of the letter carrier is crude, but the idea was enough for Canada Post to get its dander up.
Pet Valu president Ed Casey said the product has provoked no formal complaints from cat lovers, but that his company received a cordially persuasive letter from Canada Post.
The Canadian head office decided to stop selling the product after the company was accused of being insensitive to the dangers posed by dogs.
The order affects the more than 290 stores in Canada but does not apply to the separately operated U.S. chain.
A spokesman for Canada Post said he was unaware of any official position taken vis-à-vis the dog treats.
But nonetheless he disapproved strongly of products making light of dogs' supposed proclivity for chasing mail carriers.
"I know we had some concerns with it, particularly in light of the fact that we've had some very serious dog-bite attacks this summer, one in the Chatham area where a lady actually had part of her ear ripped off and two wrists broken. This is a very serious thing for us," John Caines said.
"I will tell you, personally, I think it was in very poor taste, considering the hazards that our carriers have out there every day . . . when you get in the summertime and dogs are running a little more freely and people don't have an eye on them and we have some very, very serious dog bites and people are hurt quite badly. I thought it was in extremely poor taste."
Mr. Casey said the letter his company received was courteous and did not threaten legal action.
Instead, it drew attention to the dangers letter carriers face from dogs and asked that the company withdraw the product voluntarily.
He said the letter caused the company to revive an old but lapsed policy not to use a letter carrier motif in any of its dog products.
Bark Bars are made by a U.S. company and are not thought to have been withdrawn from any market other than Canada.
In the United States Postal Service, some letter carriers reportedly hand the treats out to dogs on their routes.
Mr. Casey said there had been no complaints about the product, other than the letter from Canada Post, and that no other shape of treat had caused any problems.
An employee at one Toronto outlet said, though, that it wasn't the postal-themed treats that tended to annoy customers the most.
"We find more customers find the cats offensive, the fact that dogs would eat cats," said Rachel Jermyn, who works at a Pet Valu in the east end of Toronto.
"People make comments about both, we do have a lot of postal-worker customers, but they [usually] make a comment and laugh about it.
"I don't think any of our actual customers were upset by it."
