We hope you enjoyed reading our last post, “Mixed Messages”. We will be re-visiting that topic in today’s post thanks to the latest crap to come rolling down from the “mountain”.
Meet the Hartz Facebook Flea & Tick Care Station:
So, Hartz is going to relieve consumer fears about buying the wrong products by offering their suggestions on what’s safe to use?
You probably know where this is going.
The system works like this. You tell Hartz if you have a cat or a dog, how old the animal is, how much it weighs and where you live in the United States. This “sophisticated” app takes all that data, analyzes it, gives you a coupon for good ole Hartz and makes a postcard for you to tell all your friends about the wonderful deal you just got on some reckless poison.
To be fair, the Care Station doesn’t always recommend Hartz. If you tell the app your animal is under the age or weight limit, it cautions you against using the products, employing cutesy animal graphics. Aww.
Of course, Hartz, has also accounted for the combination of underage and underweight at the same time! What attention to detail:
Okay, so, aside from the expected bias towards Hartz products, what’s the problem?
We’re glad you asked.
In our last post we revealed that Hartz has been sending out messages in direct opposition to their EPA approved labeling, specifically on the subject of age.
As a reminder, here is some of the advice Hartz offers on its Facebook Flea & Tick Education Tab, on the topic of appropriate age:
In this instance, the advice above matches with Hartz’ labeling, though Hartz does not go into nearly as much detail on what they consider elderly on their labels (but that’s a whole other post):
Keeping all this in mind, please watch the following video (for the record, you do not have to be logged in to Facebook to use this app and the music is our addition):
Yep. Although Hartz considers cats to be elderly at 7 years of age and they state on their labeling not to use the products on aged cats, they carelessly tell you to run out and choose from an assortment of Hartz flea & tick “treatments” and apply them to your cat of 10 or more years of age, well over the Company’s definition of “aged”.
If you’re wondering, the same results can be obtained if you select the “7-9 Years” option and, yes, the error occurs on the dog side of the fence too:
As soon as we saw news of this release, we made sure to let Hartz know what was coming:
With today’s post, we believe we delivered on that promise.
P.S. – More on Fitch later.
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