posted February 09, 2017 11:06 AM            

She quickly rushed them to the local emergency vet, where the four dogs were placed in the intensive care unit.

“When they got there, they were just limp,” she said. “They weren’t moving or anything.” Tito was still suffering from seizures days later, and Talula — one of the pugs that ate the most canned beef — died.

A toxicology report later revealed the cause of her death. A drug called pentobarbital, a euthanasia agent, was found in both the dog’s stomach and the Evanger’s dog food. “If this sample came directly from a can,” the toxicologist wrote, “this is an urgent matter.”

According to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration statement released Friday, Evanger’s, a family-owned-and-operated cat and dog food business, decided to voluntarily recall five lots of the product — all of the Hunk of Beef products that were manufactured that same week. The products were distributed to retail locations and sold online in 15 states: Washington, California, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Hunk of Beef is Evanger’s best-selling food. Pets nationwide consume more than one million cans of the product each year, the company said in a statement. By the time Evanger’s heard about the New Year’s Eve incident, it believed that at least 200 dogs had already consumed the food from the same lot number, but no other household in the country aside from Mael’s reported an illness, the company said.

“We feel that we have been let down by our supplier, and in reference to the possible presence of pentobarbital, we have let down our customers,” the family-owned company, which has been in business for 82 years, said.

Despite having worked with the supplier of this specific beef for about 40 years, Evanger’s immediately decided to cut its ties with the supplier, which also serves a number of other companies.