
A mysterious "bump" came up on my little dog Nunzi's foot and I thought that it was a fox tail burr imbedded in his foot as he is a short little fellow and he picks up things wherever we take walks. However when I took him to the vet, she told me that it looked suspiciously like a mast cell tumor, which I had never heard of. She took a biopsy and sent it to the lab and it came back as a malignant mast cell tumor which had not spread to any other organ yet but was in his lymph node. He is an older dog but normally pretty healthy so I started researching what the cause of the tumor could be. I found a site discussing the use of the chemical glyphosate (market name Roundup®) in the environment and its correlation to cancer in dogs. I knew that Bayer who bought Monsanto the chemical's creator was recently hit with a $2 billion verdict losing their third straight Roundup® trial in relation to cancer in humans, but I did not know about dogs. A lab at The University of California San Francisco reports that, in their testing, a whopping 93% of humans today have glyphosate in their systems, with children having the highest levels particularly in agricultural areas.
Studies have found that dogs can have up to 5,000% more glyphosate than humans and it makes sense. They are lower to the ground, they sometimes eat the grass that has been sprayed and they roll in it. A national laboratory was offering to test a pet's urine for glyphosate so I sent in a sample of Nunzi's urine.