The picture says it all. This is a box of cat food in which there are pouches (sachets) of wet cat food. Sally Higgins purchased the it from a local supermarket in Bingham which is 9 miles east of Nottingham in the middle of England.
As soon as she opened the cardboard box she immediately noticed the horrifying contents. The flies swarmed out and she threw the box of catfood into her waste bin where they continue to swarm around.
She first noticed the problem when she arrived back home with her shopping bags. She saw a lot of flies on her shopping and a small hole in the box of catfood. When she opened the box she saw thousands of flies and maggots. The flies continued to swarm out and around her home. She spent £20 on fly spray (six cans of it!).
The whole thing’s been a nightmare she said and her children are staying with friends while she tries to get rid of them. She also noticed a “large blue foreign body” inside a pouch of the wet cat food. We are not told what this object is (was it a large dead blue bottle fly?). She contacted the manufacturer who offered her a £20 shopping voucher which she refused. They upped their offer to £30 which she also felt was unacceptable. We don’t know what happened next.
Comment: I think we have to look at the life cycle of the fly to figure out what happened. It appears that during manufacture a single fly landed on the cat food before it was put into pouches. This fly laid eggs on the catfood which was packaged and shipped to the supermarket. Inside the pouch the eggs turned into larvae, which in turn became pupae and then flies. I suspect one of the pouches was open.
I can sympathise with what went on. Today I noticed that my outside dustbin was covered in thousands of fly larvae when I popped out to buy the newspaper, both on the inside and outside. It took me a good 20 minutes to wash the whole bin to get rid of them. What happened was that a fly had laid eggs on the uneaten wet cat food which I had provided for my cat. I threw the unused catfood away carefully into what I considered to be a sealed container but which clearly wasn’t. The eggs became larvae and the larvae crawled out of the waste bag into the waste bin. It was a disgusting sight. It doesn’t take long for this to happen, perhaps a few days.
