Is Pet Food Safe After a Flood or a Power Outage? The Salvage-or-Discard Call, With the Publisher of Every Rule Named

The bag is still standing. There is a tide line halfway up it, a smear of silt on the folded top, and the kibble you can see through the tear looks exactly like kibble. The cans on the bottom shelf were underwater for six hours and came out looking like cans. The freezer is warm, the raw patties are soft, and there is a second bag in the garage that never got wet at all but sat in a hot, shut-up room for three days with no air conditioning.

Four different questions, four different answers, and not one of them is settled by looking at the food.

This page is the post-event triage. What you stored, and how much of it, is the two-week shelter-in-place standard and the food and water storage math; those are the pages for the quiet afternoon before anything happens. This one starts after the water has gone down or the power has come back, when the decision in front of you is feed it or bin it, and when the cost of getting it wrong is a liver.

One promise about how it is written. The rules people repeat about floods and outages are real, published, and quotable, but most of them are published by agencies whose job is human food. Pet food sits with FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, which publishes a genuinely useful set of pet food storage and handling instructions and a recall system, and which does not publish a consumer-facing salvage procedure for a flooded bag of kibble. Where this page applies a human-food rule to a pet shelf, it says so in the sentence. Quietly relabelling an FSIS rule as a pet rule is the exact move that makes a page look authoritative and be wrong.

The Only Question That Matters First: Did Floodwater Touch It?

Floodwater is not dirty water. FDA describes what is in it, in the context of crops meant for animal food: “Flood waters from storms often contain sewage, pathogenic organisms, pesticides, chemical wastes, or other toxic substances.” Its Center for Veterinary Medicine repeats that in its own Q&A on flood-affected crops and adds the second problem: “Mold growth is another serious concern for flood impacted crops intended for use in animal food. Some molds produce mycotoxins, which are toxic to certain animals and people.”

That is the FDA describing a truckload of grain, not the sack in your utility room. But it is the agency that regulates pet food describing what floodwater does to the raw material pet food is made from, and it tells you why the answer to the salvage question is packaging rather than appearance.

CDC states the consumer version in three sentences on its disaster message page, dated February 6, 2024:

“Do not consume anything that flood water may have touched. Throw out containers with screw-caps, snap lids, twist caps, flip tops, home-canned food or traditional soda bottle-style crimped caps if flood water may have touched them. Do not eat food packaged or wrapped in plastic, cardboard, cloth or similar materials or containers that have touched flood waters.”

FDA’s flood page, content current as of 03/05/2024, says the same thing as a rule and then defines its terms:

“Discard any food and beverage that is not in a waterproof container if there is any chance that it has come into contact with flood water.”

“Food containers that are waterproof include undamaged, commercially prepared foods in all-metal cans and ‘retort pouches’ (like flexible, shelf-stable juice or seafood pouches).”

“Food containers that are not waterproof include those with screw-caps, snap lids, pull tops, and crimped caps.”

“Also discard cardboard juice/milk/baby formula boxes and home canned foods if they have come in contact with flood water, because they cannot be effectively cleaned and sanitized.”

Read those definitions against a pet food shelf and the sorting does itself. A paper or woven-plastic kibble bag is not on the waterproof list. A cardboard carton of treats is named on the discard list by material. A resealable tub with a snap lid is named on the not-waterproof list by closure. A pouch of wet food is on the waterproof list only if it is an undamaged commercially prepared retort pouch, and a can is on the waterproof list only if it is undamaged and all metal.

Here is the honest part. Every sentence quoted above is published for human food. FDA’s page is from its food program, its printable version names the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in the footer, and its worked examples are juice, milk and infant formula. It never uses the words pet food. CDC’s PSA is a general disaster message with no animal in it. We are extending a human-food packaging rule to the pet shelf, and we are telling you that is what we are doing. We do it because the rule is about the container rather than the contents, because the reason given for discarding cardboard is that it cannot be cleaned, and because no agency we could open publishes a different rule for a bag of dog food. If your veterinarian or your state’s agriculture department tells you otherwise for your situation, follow them, not us.

One more line, from a state agriculture department rather than a federal one, because state agriculture departments are where feed and pet food programs actually live. Michigan’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development published guidance on April 19, 2026 during flooding in that state. In its section on protecting food and food supplies it states: “Food that comes into contact with stormwater must be discarded.” In its farm section, on providing for livestock, it states: “Make sure the food and water are untouched by floodwater, and the food is not soggy or moldy as this could lead to illness.” Its section headed Protecting Pets tells owners to evacuate with their animals, to bring pet food, and not to let pets “walk through, swim in, or drink floodwater.” It does not give a pet food salvage procedure. That pattern, real and useful pet guidance that stops short of the salvage question, held everywhere we looked.

The Can and Pouch Procedure, Copied Rather Than Summarized

If you have undamaged all-metal cans or undamaged commercial retort pouches, there is a published reconditioning procedure. It is worth having in front of you in full, in the publisher’s own words, because each step in it is doing a job and because a half-remembered version of it is worse than no version at all.

One thing before the steps. Every can in that procedure was sitting in the water FDA itself describes above, the water that “often contain[s] sewage, pathogenic organisms, pesticides, chemical wastes, or other toxic substances.” FDA’s published steps do not carry a hygiene instruction for the person doing the brushing and washing, so this next sentence is our own addition, not something FDA publishes for this procedure: wear waterproof gloves if you have them, keep your hands away from your face while you brush off silt and wash the cans, and wash your hands with soap and safe water when you finish a batch and before you handle any animal or any other food.

First, the disqualifier. FDA states: “Discard any food in damaged cans. Damaged cans are those with swelling, leakage, punctures, holes, fractures, extensive deep rusting, or crushing/denting that is severe enough to prevent normal stacking or opening with a manual, wheel-type can opener.”

Then the procedure, as FDA publishes it under the heading “How To Save Undamaged Food Packages Exposed to Flood Water”:

1. “Remove the labels, if they are the removable kind, since they can harbor dirt and bacteria.”
2. “Brush or wipe away any dirt or silt.”
3. “Thoroughly wash the cans or retort pouches with soap and water, using hot water if it is available.”
4. “Rinse the cans or retort pouches with water that is safe for drinking, if available, since dirt or residual soap will reduce the effectiveness of chlorine sanitation.”
5. “Sanitize cans and retort pouches by immersion in one of the two following ways”, either “Place in water and allow the water to come to a boil and continue boiling for 2 minutes” or “Place in a solution of 1 cup (8 oz/250 mL) of unscented household (5.25% concentration) bleach mixed with 5 gallons of water and soak for 15 minutes.”
6. “Air dry cans or retort pouches for a minimum of 1 hour before opening or storing.”
7. “If the labels were removable, then re-label your cans or retort pouches, including the expiration date, with a permanent marking pen.”

And the closing instruction: “Food in reconditioned cans or retort pouches should be used as soon as possible thereafter.”

Step 4 carries its own reason inside the sentence: residual soap reduces the effectiveness of the chlorine, so the rinse is not cosmetic. Step 6 sets a minimum drying time before the container is opened or put away. Step 7 is the one with the most consequence for an animal, because a can whose label came off in the water is a can you can no longer match against a recall, and matching against a recall is the last check on this page’s checklist.

The Two Bleach Ratios, and Why You Should Not Convert Between Them

This is the part to be careful with, and it is the reason this page copies rather than paraphrases.

FDA publishes this guidance in two formats, and the sanitizing solution is not the same in both.

The web page, content current as of 03/05/2024, says: “Place in a solution of 1 cup (8 oz/250 mL) of unscented household (5.25% concentration) bleach mixed with 5 gallons of water and soak for 15 minutes.”

The printable version, which that same web page links from its own body, carries the same title and is dated January 2023 on each of its pages. It says instead: “Place in a freshly made solution consisting of 1 tablespoon of unscented liquid chlorine bleach per gallon of drinking water (or the cleanest, clearest water available) for 15 minutes.”

USDA FSIS, on its fact sheet “Keeping Food Safe During an Emergency”, last updated Jul 30, 2013, publishes the same salvage sequence and gives the tablespoon version: “Place in a freshly made solution consisting of 1 tablespoon of unscented, liquid chlorine bleach per gallon of drinking water (or the cleanest, clearest water available) for 15 minutes.”

CDC, in its February 6, 2024 disaster message, gives the cup version: “Remove the labels, thoroughly wash, rinse, and disinfect the containers with a sanitizing solution of one cup of bleach and five gallons of water.”

Those are two different strengths, published concurrently, across three federal agencies, in four documents we opened on the same day. We are not going to do the arithmetic for you, we are not going to tell you which is right, and we are not going to invent a third figure. What we will tell you is the operating rule: open the page you intend to follow, read the ratio off that page, note the bleach concentration it assumes, and mix it as written. The FDA web page names the strength it assumes, household bleach at 5.25% concentration; the FSIS version and the FDA printable version both specify unscented liquid chlorine bleach without naming a concentration. Since one of the three documents treats the concentration as part of the instruction, read the concentration printed on your own bottle against the page you are following rather than assuming they match.

There is also a small ordering difference between the two publishers worth noticing if you are following along in two tabs. FDA’s version brushes away dirt and silt before washing; the FSIS version washes first and brushes second. Neither is presented as critical, and both end at the same place.

What This Procedure Does Not Cover

It covers commercially prepared food in undamaged all-metal cans and undamaged commercial retort pouches. That is all it covers, in both agencies’ wording.

It does not cover a bag. It does not cover a cardboard carton or a treat box. It does not cover the plastic bin you decant kibble into, because the bin is a container you filled, not a commercially sealed package, and because the rule already names snap lids as not waterproof. It does not cover a home-portioned bag in the freezer. It does not cover an opened can that had a plastic cover on it in the refrigerator. And there is no version of it that ends with rinsing the food itself: every step in the published procedure is performed on the outside of a sealed container that the water never got into.

If you decant kibble into a bin, that habit interacts with this page in a way worth planning around. FDA CVM’s own storage instruction is: “If you want to store dry pet food in another storage container, put the entire bag into the container rather than pour the kibble directly into it.” FDA gives its reason as keeping the lot number and best-by date with the food, which matters for a recall. It happens to also be the version of the habit that keeps a second layer of packaging between water and food, and the version that lets you answer a recall question about the food you kept.

Mold, Mycotoxins, and Why “It Looks Fine” Is Not a Finding

This is the section that makes the pet version of this problem different from the human version, and it is the one to read even if your food never touched water.

FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine states the general mechanism plainly: “Mycotoxins are toxic metabolites of certain fungi (molds) that can grow on agricultural commodities in the field and during storage.” And then the sentence that removes the shortcut most people reach for: “Mycotoxins are difficult to eliminate because they are not destroyed by most of the processes used in animal food production.”

Read that against what people actually do with a wet bag: spread it on a tarp, run a fan on it, put it in the sun, bake it, boil it. None of those is described as a mycotoxin removal step by any source we opened, and the agency that regulates animal food says the toxins survive most of the processes a factory would use, which is a higher bar than a driveway and a fan.

The second shortcut is the eye. FDA’s own alert on aflatoxin in pet food states that aflatoxin is “a toxin produced by the mold Aspergillus flavus, which can grow on corn and other grains used as ingredients in pet food” and that “At high levels, aflatoxin can cause illness and death in pets.” In the same alert’s account of the recall, FDA adds the sentence that removes the visual shortcut: “The toxin can be present even if there is no visible mold.”

There is a third thing in that alert that has no equivalent in human food safety and that is easy to miss: “Pets are highly susceptible to aflatoxin poisoning because, unlike people, who eat a varied diet, pets generally eat the same food continuously over extended periods of time. If a pet’s food contains aflatoxin, the toxin could accumulate in the pet’s system as they continue to eat the same food.”

That is the reason a marginal call on a person’s cereal box and a marginal call on a dog’s only food are not the same call. One is a single exposure. The other is the entire diet, twice a day, for as long as the bag lasts.

And the fourth thing, which is the reason “he ate it and he is fine” is not evidence: “In some cases, pets may suffer liver damage but not show any symptoms.”

The Number, and What It Is and Is Not

There is a published pet-specific aflatoxin figure. It is in FDA’s Compliance Policy Guide Sec. 683.100, “Action Levels for Aflatoxins in Animal Food”. The version we read is dated March 2019 on its cover, states on its final page “Issued: 11/21/79”, “Reissued: 10/01/80” and “Last Revised: 5/18/89, 8/28/94, 3/12/19”, and we checked FDA’s own CPG Revision/Update History index on August 11, 2026, where the most recent entry for 683.100 is the same 03/12/2019 revision.

Its table sets, for “pets (dogs, cats, rabbits, etc.) of all ages”, covering “corn, peanut products, cottonseed meal, and other food ingredients and complete pet food”, an action level of 20 ppb of total aflatoxins.

Four things about that number, all from the document itself.

It is a level for FDA staff deciding whether to act, not a home threshold. The document is subtitled “Guidance for FDA Staff” and states “In general, FDA’s guidance documents, including this CPG, do not establish legally enforceable responsibilities.”

It is not a bright line even for the agency: “Action levels are not binding on the courts, the regulated industry, or the agency … There may be situations where circumstances warrant enforcement action at levels below an action level or where enforcement action is not warranted even though an action level is exceeded.”

It is measured in a laboratory. The CPG’s own trigger is an original and a check analysis run “in accordance with applicable methods of the current Official Methods of Analysis of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists”, with the identity of the aflatoxin “confirmed by chemical derivative formation.” There is no home test in that sentence, and there is no smell test.

And the document itself records that this is not theoretical for pets: “Aflatoxins can be present in dog and cat food as well. In 1998, 2005, 2011, and 2013 aflatoxin contamination of dog and cat food resulted in illness, dog mortalities, and extensive recalls of affected dog and cat food.”

FDA has published what its own sampling found since. Its report on a FY 2021 nationwide assignment collected 200 retail samples of kibbled dog and cat food containing corn or corn by-products, 127 dog foods and 73 cat foods, across 36 states and Puerto Rico. In the dog foods, aflatoxins were detected in five samples, at 0.50, 0.54, 1.23, 1.50 and 6.52 ppb, all below the 20 ppb action level. In the cat foods, three samples were positive at 0.70, 1.56 and 2.02 ppb. The same report explains why the assignment was run at all: it was issued “in response to incidents in 2020 and 2021 that led to hundreds of illnesses and deaths in pets that ate food contaminated with unsafe levels of aflatoxin, some of the levels reaching more than 500 ppb.”

Read the two paragraphs together and the shape of the risk is clear. Routine retail kibble sampled in 2021 was mostly clean and, where positive, was far under the action level. The events that killed animals were not routine, and the levels involved were not close to the line. A flooded or heat-soaked bag in your garage is not routine retail kibble, and no laboratory has looked at yours.

What FDA Means By Salvaging Animal Food

There is one more reason not to improvise a rescue, and it is that FDA has written down what salvage means on the animal food side. Its Q&A for crops harvested from flooded fields, current as of 08/19/2024, states:

“In certain circumstances, crops harvested from fields that have been impacted by flood waters can be used for animal food, but usually these crops are unacceptable because of contamination.”

“Before being used in animal food, crops exposed to flooding should, at a minimum, be tested for mold, bacteria, chemicals, and heavy metals contamination.”

The testing list it then gives is not a home list. It names mycotoxins including aflatoxin, fumonisin, vomitoxin, zearalonone and ochratoxin; heavy metals, specifically cadmium, mercury and lead; pathogenic bacteria and their toxins including Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 and Clostridium perfringens and botulinum; and chemicals such as pesticides. Reconditioning requests, it says, go to an FDA field office and are considered “on a case-by-case basis”, and it adds that “your state’s Department of Agriculture may have state-specific requirements regarding any attempt to clean, process, test, and sell/use these crops in animal food.”

That page is written for producers and it is about crops, not about the bag in your garage. Quote it for what it actually establishes: when the regulator of animal food contemplates salvaging flood-exposed material, the route runs through a laboratory, a field office and a state agriculture department, and the default answer is that the material is unacceptable. None of that is available to you on a Tuesday in a wet garage, which is the practical reason the household version of this decision is a discard.

The Outage: Three Different Foods, Three Different Rules

An outage does not attack a shelf-stable product the way it attacks a chilled one, so split the shelf before you start.

Unopened dry kibble and unopened cans

What FDA CVM publishes here is a storage condition rather than a clock: “Store dry pet food and unopened canned food in a cool and dry place. The temperature should be less than 80 F. Excess heat or moisture may cause the nutrients to break down.”

Note what that sentence claims and what it does not. It is about nutrient breakdown, and it is a storage instruction, not a failure threshold. A day above that figure is not a published spoilage event, and FDA does not publish a temperature or a duration at which stored kibble becomes unsafe. What a long hot outage does do is produce conditions of the kind FDA CVM names when it describes how mycotoxins occur, which it says is “influenced by various environmental factors, such as temperature, humidity, and rainfall during growing, harvesting, and storage.” So a bag that spent days in a hot, humid, powerless house is a bag to be conservative with, and it is a question for your veterinarian and for the manufacturer named on the bag, both of whom can ask about the specific product.

If a bag or can already carried damage before any of this, FDA CVM’s buying rule is a reasonable read on it too: “Buy pet food products (cans, pouches, or bags) that are in good condition. Don’t buy the product if the packaging has visible signs of damage, such as dents, tears, and discolorations.” That is written about the shop, and we are applying it to your shelf.

Opened cans, pouches, and fresh refrigerated food

Here FDA CVM does write a pet-specific instruction, and it is short: “Promptly refrigerate or throw out unused or leftover canned and pouched pet food. Tightly cover refrigerated pet food.” Followed by: “Set your refrigerator to 40 F or below.”

CDC adds the category most people forget they own: “Because fewer or no preservatives are used, fresh pet foods need to be refrigerated. This also means they do not keep as long as kibbles or canned pet foods.”

What neither agency publishes is an hours-without-power figure for pet food. That is where people reach for the human-food rules, so here they are, correctly attributed.

USDA FSIS, on “Keeping Food Safe During an Emergency” (last updated Jul 30, 2013): “Refrigerated food should be safe as long as power is out no more than 4 hours. Keep the door closed as much as possible. Discard any perishable food (such as meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and leftovers) that have been above 40 °F for 2 hours.” The same page states the appliance figures: “The refrigerator will keep food safely cold for about 4 hours if it is unopened. A full freezer will hold the temperature for approximately 48 hours (24 hours if it is half full) if the door remains closed.”

FDA’s flood and outage page (03/05/2024) states the refrigerator rule with a different discard clock than FSIS uses: “Discard any refrigerated perishable food (such as meat, poultry, seafood, milk, eggs, or leftovers) that has been at refrigerator temperatures above 40°F for 4 hours or more.”

Both of those are human-food rules, and each document says so by what it contains. FDA’s printable version names the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in its footer, and neither its web nor its printable version uses the words pet or animal anywhere in the guidance. FSIS’s fact sheet does mention pet food, in its preparedness section, telling readers to “Make sure you have ready-to-use baby formula for infants and pet food” as part of a stocked emergency supply. That is a stocking line rather than a salvage line, and the two save-or-discard tables that follow it on the same page are lists of human foods: meats, cheeses, dairy, eggs, produce, sauces, breads and pastries, with no animal food category anywhere in either table.

So the honest instruction for a pet owner is this. Use the appliance thermometer FSIS and FDA both tell you to keep in the refrigerator and freezer, or a food thermometer on the food itself, and make the decision on a temperature you actually read. Do not make it on an elapsed-time number that no agency has published for the food in question. And when the reading is ambiguous, FSIS’s own line covers it: “Never taste food to determine its safety!”

Frozen raw, and the people in the house

Frozen raw is the case where the outage decision is not only about the animal.

The refreeze rule people quote is real and it is human-food. FSIS: “If the food still contains ice crystals or is 40 °F or below, it is safe to refreeze.” And, on the thermometer route: “If the appliance thermometer stored in the freezer reads 40 °F or below, the food is safe and may be refrozen.” FDA’s page says the same and adds the warning that matters most here: “You can’t rely on appearance or odor.”

We are not going to hand you those sentences as a pet food rule, because raw pet food carries a second exposure that a package of frozen human chicken in the same freezer does not, and because both CDC and FDA have published positions on raw pet food that a refreeze rule does not touch.

CDC: “CDC does not recommend feeding raw pet food or treats to dogs and cats.” And, on why: “Raw pet food can also make you and your family sick when these germs spread around your kitchen and home.” And, on the processing methods that are often assumed to solve it: “Freeze-drying, dehydrating, or freezing raw protein from animals only reduces the amount of germs. These processes do not kill all germs that might be on the food.”

FDA CVM: “FDA thinks that raw pet food poses significant health risks to both pets and pet owners. Because raw pet food is more likely than processed pet food to contain harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes, the single best thing you can do to prevent infection with these foodborne bacteria is to not feed your pet a raw diet.” FDA CVM’s separate raw pet food page, “Get the Facts! Raw Pet Food Diets can be Dangerous to You and Your Pet” (content current as of 02/22/2018), records what FDA’s own two-year study found: of 196 raw pet food samples analyzed, 15 were positive for Salmonella and 32 were positive for L. monocytogenes.

If you already feed raw and you are working out what to do with a freezer that went warm, CDC’s published handling instructions are the ones to apply to the handling half of the problem: “Wash your hands with soap and water before and after handling raw pet food. Clean items and surfaces that touched raw pet food.” And: “Properly chill and store raw pet food that needs to be kept cold. Freeze it until you are ready to thaw and use it. Thaw frozen raw pet food in the refrigerator. Keep it in a sealed container in the freezer and refrigerator, separate from other foods.” And: “Throw away leftovers that have been out at room temperature.”

The decision about whether a specific thawed raw product can be refrozen or should be discarded belongs to your veterinarian and to the manufacturer printed on the package, both of whom can be asked about that product. It does not belong to a rule written for supermarket steak, and it does not belong to us.

One current-events check, because raw pet food is a category where advisories move. On August 11, 2026 we read FDA’s veterinary Recalls & Withdrawals table and FDA CVM’s Outbreaks and Advisories index. Both were carrying 2026 entries. In the recall table’s own reason column, a dog food recall dated 05/22/2026 read “Due to possible Listeria contamination” and a dog food recall dated 05/07/2026 read “Potential to be contaminated with Salmonella”. The advisory index’s most recent pet food entry at that moment was titled “FDA Advisory: Do Not Feed Eight Lots of Raaw Energy Dog Food Due to Contamination with Harmful Bacteria”, dated May 22, 2026 and marked updated. Those specific entries will age; the two pages will not. Check them yourself before you feed anything you set aside.

What We Could Not Find, Stated Precisely

The temptation on a page like this is to write that nobody publishes pet-specific disaster food guidance. That would be wrong, and it is worth being exact about what does and does not exist.

What does exist, all opened on August 11, 2026: FDA CVM’s pet food storage page and its safe handling page, both current as of 05/23/2024, which publish storage temperatures, refrigeration instructions, original-packaging and lot-number instructions, and a report-a-problem route. FDA CVM’s raw pet food page and CDC’s pet food safety page, which publish handling instructions and positions on raw diets. FDA’s Compliance Policy Guide 683.100, which sets a pet-specific aflatoxin action level. FDA’s FY 2021 kibble sampling report. FDA’s pet food recall table and CVM advisory index, both live. FDA’s flood-affected animal food crops guidance and its CVM Q&A. CDC’s pet emergency preparedness page. AVMA’s pets and disasters page. A state agriculture department release, from Michigan, addressing pets and flooding in April 2026.

What we did not find, after searching those same sources: a consumer-facing procedure, published by any of them, for deciding whether a specific flood-exposed or heat-exposed pet food can be salvaged. Specifically, we searched FDA’s animal and veterinary pages including the pet food, animal health literacy, contaminants, recalls and advisories sections; FDA’s food safety during emergencies section; USDA FSIS’s emergency fact sheet and its consumer guidance; CDC’s Healthy Pets and natural disasters sections; AVMA’s pets and disasters page, whose “Recovering after a disaster” list covers surveying hazards, examining animals, releasing animals indoors and re-establishing routine but contains no discard-or-salvage instruction for food; and Ready.gov’s pets page, which addresses building the kit rather than triaging it afterwards. We also ran general searches for state agriculture department guidance on flood-damaged pet food and found the Michigan release quoted above plus federal producer-facing material, not a household salvage procedure.

That is a statement about what a day of searching returned, not a finding that no such document exists. Agencies publish under names that do not match the words we searched, state programs vary, and a document can exist without ranking. If you find one for your state, follow it over this page. Your state’s department of agriculture, which is usually where the commercial feed and pet food program sits, and your state or county health department are the two numbers worth calling, and either can tell you in one conversation whether they publish anything on this.

Two of those sources were unreachable by our normal retrieval on the day and had to be read another way, which we note so the record is straight rather than implying a gap in the sources themselves: the FSIS fact sheet and the CDC pages returned blocked responses to direct fetches and were read in a browser instead. Nothing in them was treated as absent because a server said no.

The Triage Checklist

Work it in this order. The packaging question comes first because it disqualifies the most food fastest, and because it is the question a published rule answers most cleanly.

• Separate anything floodwater may have touched from everything else, physically, before you sort anything. “May have touched” is the standard in FDA’s own sentence, which reads “if there is any chance that it has come into contact with flood water.”
• Discard every bag, cardboard box, treat carton, decanted bin, screw-top tub, snap-lid container and home-portioned pack from the floodwater pile. These are the containers FDA and CDC name as not waterproof or as impossible to clean. This rule is published for human food and we are applying it to pet food.
• Discard every damaged can from that pile, using FDA’s definition: swelling, leakage, punctures, holes, fractures, extensive deep rusting, or denting severe enough to prevent normal stacking or opening with a manual can opener.
• For undamaged all-metal cans and undamaged commercial retort pouches, follow the published procedure in full, ratio and contact time copied off the page you are reading, then air dry for the stated minimum before opening or storing, then re-label with the expiration date. Then use that food soon rather than putting it back into long-term storage.
• Do not rinse, dry, sun, bake, boil, sieve or repackage food itself. The procedure is performed on the outside of a sealed container. FDA CVM’s position on mycotoxins is that they are not destroyed by most of the processes used in animal food production.
• Do not use appearance, smell, or a small test feeding as your evidence. FDA’s alert states that aflatoxin can be present without visible mold and that a pet can suffer liver damage without symptoms. FSIS states, in its own punctuation, “Never taste food to determine its safety!” Do not feed a questionable food to one animal to see how it goes, and do not hand it to a supposedly hardier animal instead.
• For the outage pile, read a thermometer, not a clock. Use the appliance thermometer in the refrigerator and freezer, or a food thermometer on the food. Where you are relying on a published hours or degrees rule, know that the four-hour and ice-crystal rules are FSIS and FDA human-food rules, not pet food rules.
• Treat opened wet food, pouched food and fresh refrigerated food as the first casualties of a warm refrigerator, per FDA CVM’s own instruction to promptly refrigerate or throw out unused or leftover canned and pouched pet food, and CDC’s note that fresh pet foods need refrigeration and do not keep as long as kibble or cans.
• Handle any raw or thawed raw product as a household exposure as well as an animal one. Wash hands and every surface it touched, keep it sealed and separate, and put the refreeze-or-discard question to your veterinarian and the manufacturer rather than to a human-meat rule.
• Handle the flood-can salvage step as a household exposure too, for the same reason. Those cans sat in water FDA describes as often carrying sewage and pathogens. Wear waterproof gloves if you have them, keep hands away from your face while sorting and brushing, and wash your hands with soap and safe water when you finish a batch and before you touch any animal or any other food.
• Before you feed anything you set aside, check FDA’s veterinary recall table and CVM advisory index. You will need the product name, lot number and best-by date, which is the practical argument for keeping food in its original bag.
• Write down what you fed, and when, for every animal. If an animal gets sick later, a diet history is the first thing a veterinarian asks for, and FDA’s aflatoxin alert says so directly: “Provide a full diet history to your veterinarian. You may find it helpful to take a picture of the pet food label, including the lot number.”
• If an animal has already eaten food that was in floodwater, or that you now doubt, call your veterinarian rather than waiting for signs. FDA CVM’s own instruction on a suspect product is: “If your pet has a health problem related to a pet food or treat, stop feeding the product and call your veterinarian.”

If Your Animal Already Ate It

Two things, and neither of them is a diagnosis.

Call your veterinarian, and lead with the diet history rather than with the symptom. FDA’s aflatoxin alert asks veterinarians to take a diet history from clients and asks owners to bring one, including a photograph of the label with the lot number. That is the fastest way to turn “he seems off” into something a clinician can work with.

Report it. FDA CVM states: “FDA encourages you to report complaints about a pet food or treat to both FDA and the manufacturer of the product.” The lot number is the reason the paragraph above insists on the original bag. FDA’s storage page notes the gap plainly: “Less than half of the pet food complaints that FDA receives include the lot number. The lot number helps FDA identify when and where the pet food or treat was made, making it easier and faster for the agency to address problems with a specific product.”

What this page will not do is tell you what to watch for and then let you decide at home whether it is serious enough. FDA does publish a list of signs associated with aflatoxin poisoning in pets, and it also states in the same document that pets can suffer liver damage without showing any signs at all, which is precisely why a symptom list is not a screening tool. The decision belongs to your veterinarian. If the bill is the obstacle, the post-disaster veterinary bill options page works through what exists.

The Version of This You Do Before Anything Happens

Three habits decide how much of this page you ever have to use, and all three are free.

Store it high, and store it sealed, in that order. FDA’s own preparedness list puts height first: “Store food on shelves that will be safely out of the way of contaminated water in case of flooding.” Ready.gov’s pet kit list adds the container: “Keep several days’ supply of food in an airtight, waterproof container.” Be clear about what the container buys you, because it is easy to over-read. A sealed bin makes it less likely that water reaches the food at all, which is the whole game. It does not turn a bag into one of the containers FDA’s flood rule calls waterproof, since that definition names commercially prepared all-metal cans and retort pouches, and the same rule names snap lids on the not-waterproof side. Height is what keeps the question from arising; the container is a second line, not a licence to salvage.

Keep the original bag with the food. FDA CVM: “Store pet food and treats in the original container or bag. This allows you to have the UPC code, lot number, product name and manufacturer, and ‘best by’ date easily available in case of a product defect or recall.” Bag inside the bin, not kibble poured into the bin. It costs nothing, and it is the difference between checking a recall against an actual lot number and guessing.

Put a thermometer in the refrigerator and one in the freezer now. Both FSIS and FDA build their post-outage decision around a reading you can only get if the thermometer was in there before the power went out. FDA’s preparedness list: “Make sure you have appliance thermometers in your refrigerator and freezer.” Without one, every rule above collapses back into guessing from elapsed time, which is the thing the rules were written to replace.

The rotation habit that keeps all of this current is on the kit rotation checklist, and the two pages that size the supply in the first place are the shelter-in-place food and water standard and the storage math for how much to keep.

Where to Go Next

This page is the post-event food-triage spoke of our pet evacuation kits hub. Three neighbouring problems have their own pages.

The rest of coming home. Returning home with pets after a disaster covers the walkthrough, the hazards and the re-entry sequence that this page sits inside, and what a flood does to a pet household covers the event rather than the aftermath.

Water, which follows different rules from food. Water purification for pets handles the drinking-water half, which has its own published treatment procedures and its own contact times, and the timing question people ask when the supply is short has its own page for each species: how long a dog can go without water and how long a cat can go without food or water. CDC’s instruction for the animal is short enough to carry with you: “Don’t allow pets to play in or drink contaminated water.”

The outage itself. Pets and power outages is the hazard hub, pet medication and refrigeration during an outage is the cold-chain problem for drugs rather than food, and automatic feeders and fountains during an outage covers the equipment that stops working while you are deciding all of this.

Then do the one thing on this page you can do today. Go and look at where your animal’s food is stored right now. If it is a bag on the floor, get it up off the floor and into a sealed container with the original bag still inside it, and put an appliance thermometer in the refrigerator and the freezer while you are up. Neither of those makes a flooded food salvageable. Both of them make it far more likely that, months from now, the question never reaches you at all.