LOS ANGELES - Retired real estate developer Don Earl wasn't interested in playing detective when his cat, Chuckles, died in December of sudden and mysterious kidney failure.

Earl, a resident of Port Townsend, Wash., said he suspected he knew what happened to his 6-year-old orange-and-white longhair when he heard reports of thousands of similar dog and cat illnesses last winter and the recall of tens of millions of containers of pet food.

But his cat's food never made the list. Earl called the Food and Drug Administration, offering to send officials unopened samples of the food for testing, but they declined, he said. So Earl, like scores of pet owners determined to safeguard their animals or explain their pets' demise, took matters into his own hands and found a private lab to conduct tests at his own expense.

"If anything comes out of this, it's going to be through the efforts of people like me doing the research and testing on their own," said Earl, who has spent several hundred dollars on lab tests and three weeks ago launched a Web site devoted to the issue. "We're over three months into this thing and private citizens are finding evidence that no one else is even bothering to look for. And that's beyond unacceptable."

FDA officials and other experts, however, don't recommend the path taken by Earl, saying consumers don't have the means to determine whether a lab is reliable.

Dr. Robert Poppenga, a professor of veterinary diagnostic toxicology at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, suggested pet owners first contact their veterinarian if they suspect poisoned food. A pet's doctor can then determine whether to have food tested and how best to interpret a lab's findings, he said.

FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said consumers also could contact the agency to report a problem. In some circumstances, the FDA will pick up a sample of the food for further testing.

Zawisza said the FDA has collected samples from consumers throughout the pet food crisis, which began with the March recall of 60 million containers of dog and cat food made by Menu Foods Income Fund of Canada.

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