PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (KDKA) -- The owner of a champion show dog claims her dog died after eating a new shipment of dog food.

The Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott described the Scottish Deerhound as "the most perfect creature of Heaven," and when they retired from Alcoa years ago, Karen Winter and her husband Eric began breeding the gentle giant.

"We've made this wonderful network of people who got us involved in showing the dogs and racing the dogs," Karen Winter, of Derry, said. "And in our retirement, we've traveled all over the United States from coast to coast and Canada."

She's bred many regal show dogs, but perhaps her favorite of all has been Zeus, a grand champion who became sickened on Aug. 8 after eating a new shipment of dog food.

"By early Saturday morning, he was violently ill, and I called my veterinarian and rushed him in," Karen Winter said.

Over the next day and a half, she says Zeus vomited and convulsed, contorting and inflaming his spleen, which needed to be removed. When he died on Aug. 10, Karen Winter recalled that while Zeus had eaten the food, the other dogs had smelled it and walked away. She checked the bag and saw that it had passed its expiration date by two months.

"I wish I had checked that bag before I ever fed it, and I didn't," Karen Winter said. "I missed that it was expired. I wish he hadn't had to endure what he endured for 36 hours before he died. It's a horrible, really horrible death."

"He had his annual physical probably two weeks ago," the dog's veterinarian, Melissa Voll-Stouffer, said. "Blood work at that time was perfect. He was a perfectly happy, healthy dog."

Voll-Stouffer said they have both heard from other owners whose dogs were sickened by the food, and they have sent a sample to the University of Missouri for testing. Voll-Stouffer believes it had developed mold and toxins that led to Zeus' death.

"It was a perfect storm in the fact that the dog food made him sick, his vomiting was so violent it caused the spleen to wrap around the stomach, and everything just went downhill from there," Voll-Stouffer said.

The food came from an Ohio company called Kinetic, which says it produced and shipped it in June 2024 with a use-by date of June 2025. The shipment first went to its distributor, Millersburg Feeds, which in turn delivered it to Karen Winter's local supplier: Chux Mobile Milling in Connellsville.

In a statement to KDKA, Kinetic expressed its condolences to the Winter family but blamed both the distributor and the supplier for not monitoring their stock and for not destroying expired food so it would not be sold to customers.

"As a result, we have terminated, effectively immediately, the relationship with both the distributor and the retailer," Kinetic's statement said. "We hold our partners to high standards and when those standards are not met, we act."

Kinetics says Millersburg Feeds acknowledges it did not act according to standards. Millersburg Feeds did not return KDKA's phone calls for comment, and Chux Mobile Milling said it would have no comment until the test results come back.

Kinetic says it's telling both the distributor and supplier to destroy the food and send it photographic proof, but Karen Winter says Kinetic is a national company and needs to issue a recall.

"I want them to find every out-of-date bag and get it off the market," Karen Winter said. "And I want people to know if they bought a Kinetic product and their dog is not eating it, immediately check that bag and the date on it. And do not feed it."

She says she won't stop until she finds out exactly what killed Zeus.

"We have to find out what went wrong," she said. "We have to look out for each other, and we have to do better."

Now, there are a lot of unanswered questions that should be answered once the test results come back. Veterinarians say pet owners shouldn't feed their dog expired food, but just because food is beyond its freshness date doesn't necessarily mean it's contaminated.