Hi Keremms,
Thank you for taking the time to comment. IMO the primary reason the testing was inconclusive was because the regulatory agencies involved did not run tests capable of giving a conclusive result. Digestion study and bite force studies can not tell you what a substance is. Microscopy revealed that No Hide look “indistinguishable” from rawhide, but it needed to be followed up with amino acid analysis. And apparently, not being familiar with how rawhide is typically made, regulators were seemingly unaware that a pathologist can not identify rawhide as skin since identifying elements like hair follicles etc. reside in the layer removed at the tannery.
Unfortunately, IMO many missteps were made along the way. Penn. regulators, apparently stated they missed that their pathologist referred to No Hide as “animal tissue” and needed to be shown that the label of the product they tested did not contain any animal gelatin after saying a finding of collagen could be from gelatin. Also, while they did protein and starch analysis and found No Hide similar to rawhide, they failed to test moisture content which muddied the waters of interpretation and after watching a production run, apparently never had sent a roll they witnessed being made to pathology to compare it to an “off the shelf” product. My understanding is that they seemed willing to do follow up amino acid testing but later apparently said they had run out of money.
It is hard to know why an AA analysis was not done. IMO it was simply lack of knowledge and experience in testing unknowns.
I fully agree with you when you said ” It is essential for regulatory agencies to follow through and conduct further investigations or request additional testing when faced with inconclusive results to reach a definitive conclusion”
