This post is not for the squeamish.
If, however you are interested in what goes into some/most commercial pet
foods then you might find this of interest.
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POLLUTED PET FOOD
Commercial pet food and stock feed contain a cocktail of dead domestic
animals and deadly environmental toxins.
NOTICE
-All Animals Are To Be Destroyed In A Humane Manner and No Processing Is To
Begin Until The Animal Has Expired. - The Management
[Sign on the wall of a rendering plant]
Warning: these four short articles will make you rethink what you feed to
your pets, and even what you and your family eat.
1. THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS AND DOGS
by Ann Martin
The pet food industry, a billion-dollar, unregulated operation, feeds on
the garbage that otherwise would wind up in landfills or be transformed
into fertiliser. The hidden ingredients in a can of commercial pet food may
include roadkill and the rendered remains of cats and dogs. The pet food
industry claims that its products constitute a "complete and balanced diet"
but, in reality, commercial pet food is unfit for human or animal consumption.
"Vegetable protein", the mainstay of dry dog foods, includes ground yellow
corn, wheat shorts and middlings, soybean meal, rice husks, peanut meal and
peanut shells (identified as "cellulose" on pet food labels). These often
are little more than the sweepings from milling room floors. Stripped of
their oil, germ and bran, these "proteins" are deficient in essential fatty
acids, fat-soluble vitamins and antioxidants. "Animal protein" in
commercial pet foods can include diseased meat, roadkill, contaminated
material from slaughterhouses, faecal matter, rendered cats and dogs and
poultry feathers. The major source of animal protein comes from dead-stock
removal operations that supply so-called "4-D" animals&emdash;dead,
diseased, dying or disabled&emdash;to "receiving plants" for hide, fat and
meat removal. The meat (after being doused with charcoal and marked "unfit
for human consumption") may then be sold for pet food.
Rendering plants process decomposing animal carcasses, large roadkill and
euthanised dogs and
cats into a dry protein product that is sold to the pet food industry. One
small plant in Quebec, Ontario, renders 10 tons (22,000 pounds) of dogs and
cats per week. The Quebec Ministry of Agriculture states that "the fur is
not removed from dogs and cats" and that "dead animals are cooked together
with viscera, bones and fat at 115� C (235� F) for 20 minutes".
The US Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM)
is aware of the use of rendered dogs and cats in pet foods, but has stated:
"CVM has not acted to specifically prohibit the rendering of pets. However,
that is not to say that the practise of using this material in pet food is
condoned by the CVM."
In both the US and Canada, the pet food industry is virtually
self-regulated. In the US, the
Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) sets guidelines and
definitions for
animal feed, including pet foods. In Canada, the most prominent control is
the "Labeling Act", simply requiring product labels to state the name and
address of the manufacturer, the weight of the product and whether it is
dog or cat food. The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA) and the
Pet Food Association of Canada (PFAC) are voluntary organisations that, for
the most part, rely on the integrity of the companies they certify to
assure that product ingredients do not fall below minimum standards.
The majority&emdash;85 to 90 per cent&emdash;of the pet food sold in Canada
is manufactured by US-based multinationals. Under the terms of the
US-Canada Free Trade Agreement, neither the CVMA nor PFAC exercises any
control over the ingredients in cans of US pet food.
Pet food industry advertising promotes the idea that, to keep pets healthy,
one must feed them commercially formulated pet foods. But such a diet
contributes to cancer, skin problems, allergies, hypertension, kidney and
liver failure, heart disease and dental problems. One more item should be
added to pet food labels: a skull-and-crossbones insignia!
(Ann Martin is an animal rights activist and leading critic of the
commercial pet food industry. She lives in London, Ontario, Canada.)
2. FOOD NOT FIT FOR A PET
by Dr Wendell O. Belfield, D.V.M.
The most frequently asked question in my practice is, "Which commercial pet
food do you
recommend?" My standard answer is "None." I am certain that pet-owners
notice changes in their animals after using different batches of the same
brand of pet food. Their pets may have diarrhoea, increased flatulence, a
dull hair coat, intermittent vomiting or prolonged scratching. These are
common symptoms associated with commercial pet foods.
In 1981, as Martin Zucker and I wrote How to Have a Healthier Dog, we
discovered the full extent of negative effects that commercial pet food has
on animals. In February 1990, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John
Eckhouse went even further with an expos� entitled "How Dogs and Cats Get
Recycled into Pet Food".
Eckhouse wrote: "Each year, millions of dead American dogs and cats are
processed along with
billions of pounds of other animal materials by companies known as
renderers. The finished
product...tallow and meat meal...serve as raw materials for thousands of
items that include
cosmetics and pet food."
Pet food company executives made the usual denials. But federal and state
agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, and medical groups,
such as the American Veterinary Medical
Association and the California Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA),
confirm that pets, on a
routine basis, are rendered after they die in animal shelters or are
disposed of by health
authorities&emdash;and the end product frequently finds its way into pet food.
Government health officials, scientists and pet food executives argue that
such open criticism of commercial pet food is unfounded. James Morris, a
professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Davis, California, has
said, "Any products not fit for human consumption are very well sterilised,
so nothing can be transmitted to the animal." Individuals who make such
statements know nothing of the meat and rendering business.
For seven years I was a veterinary meat inspector for the US Department of
Agriculture and the State of California. I waded through blood, water, pus
and faecal material, inhaled the fetid stench from the killing floor and
listened to the death cries of slaughtered animals.
Prior to World War II, most slaughterhouses were all-inclusive; that is,
livestock was slaughtered and processed in one location. There was a
section for smoking meats, a section for processing meats into sausages,
and a section for rendering. After World War II, the meat industry became
more specialised. A slaughterhouse dressed the carcasses, while a separate
facility made the sausages. The rendering of slaughter waste also became a
separate speciality&emdash;no longer within the jurisdiction of federal
meat inspectors and out of the public eye.
To prevent condemned meat from being rerouted and used for human
consumption, government
regulations require that meat be "denatured" before removal from the
slaughterhouse and shipment to rendering facilities. In my time as a
veterinary meat inspector, we denatured with carbolic acid (a potentially
corrosive disinfectant) and/or creosote (used for wood-preservation or as a
disinfectant).
Both substances are highly toxic. According to federal meat inspection
regulations, fuel oil,
kerosene, crude carbolic acid and citronella (an insect repellent made from
lemon grass) are all approved denaturing materials.
Condemned livestock carcasses treated with these chemicals can become meat
and bone meal for
the pet food industry. Because rendering facilities are not
government-controlled, any animal
carcasses can be rendered&emdash;even dogs and cats. As Eileen Layne of the
CVMA told the
Chronicle, "When you read pet food labels, and it says "meat and bone
meal", that's what it is: cooked and converted animals, including some dogs
and cats."
Some of these dead pets&emdash;those euthanised by
veterinarians&emdash;already contain
pentobarbital before treatment with the denaturing process. According to
University of Minnesota researchers, the sodium pentobarbital used to
euthanise pets "survives rendering without undergoing degradation". Fat
stabilisers are introduced into the finished rendered product to prevent
rancidity.
Common chemical stabilisers include BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT
(butylated
hydroxytoluene)&emdash;both known to cause liver and kidney
dysfunction&emdash;and
ethoxyquin, a suspected carcinogen. Many semi-moist dog foods contain
propylene
glycol&emdash;first cousin to the anti-freeze agent, ethylene glycol, that
destroys red blood-cells.
Lead frequently shows up in pet foods, even those made from livestock meat
and bone meal. A
Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, titled "Lead in Animal Foods",
found that a nine-pound cat fed on commercial pet food ingests more lead
than the amount considered potentially toxic for children.
I have been practising small-animal medicine for more than 25 years. Every
day I see the casualties of pet industry propaganda. But the professors in
the teaching institutions of veterinary medicine generally support an
industry that has little regard for the quality of health in our companion
animals.
One last word of caution: meat and bone meal from sources not fit for human
consumption have
found their way into poultry feed. This means that animal products rendered
under questionable conditions are fed to birds that may wind up on your
table. Remember this when you are eating your next piece of chicken or turkey.
(Dr Belfield is a graduate of Tuskegee Institute of Veterinary Medicine and
is now in private
practice in San Jose, California. Dr Belfield established the first
orthomolecular veterinary hospital in the US. He is co-author of The Very
Healthy Cat Book and How to Have a Healthier Dog. This article first
appeared in Let's Live Magazine, May 1992.)
3. A LOOK INSIDE A RENDERING PLANT
by Gar Smith
Rendering has been called "the silent industry". Each year in the US, 286
rendering plants quietly dispose of more than 12.5 million tons of dead
animals, fat and meat wastes. As the public relations watchdog newsletter
PR Watch observes, renderers "are thankful that most people remain
blissfully unaware of their existence".
When City Paper reporter Van Smith visited Baltimore's Valley Proteins
rendering plant last
summer, he found that the "hoggers" (the large vats used to grind and
filter animal tissues prior to deep-fat-frying) held an eclectic mix of
body parts ranging from "dead dogs, cats, raccoons, possums, deer, foxes
[and] snakes" to a "baby circus elephant" and the remains of Bozeman, a
Police Department quarterhorse that "died in the line of duty".
In an average month, Baltimore's pound hands over 1,824 dead animals to
Valley Proteins. Last
year, the plant transformed 150 millions pounds of decaying flesh and
kitchen grease into 80
million pounds of commercial meat and bone meal, tallow and yellow grease.
Thirty years ago,
most of the renderer's wastes came from small markets and slaughterhouses.
Today, thanks to the proliferation of fast-food restaurants, nearly half
the raw material is kitchen grease and frying oil.
Recycling dead pets and wildlife into animal food is "a very small part of
the business that we don't like to advertise," Valley Proteins' President,
J. J. Smith, told City Paper. The plant processes these animals as a
"public service, not for profit," Smith said, since "there is not a lot of
protein and fat [on pets]..., just a lot of hair you have to deal with
somehow."
According to City Paper, Valley Proteins "sells inedible animal parts and
rendered material to Alpo, Heinz and Ralston-Purina". Valley Proteins
insists that it does not sell "dead pet by-products" to pet food firms
since "they are all very sensitive to the recycled pet potential". Valley
Proteins maintains two production lines&emdash;one for clean meat and bones
and a second line for dead pets and wildlife. However, Van Smith reported,
"the protein material is a mix from both production lines.
Thus the meat and bone meal made at the plant includes materials from pets
and wildlife, and about five per cent of that product goes to dry-pet-food
manufacturers..."
A 1991 USDA report states that "approximately 7.9 billion pounds of meat
and bone meal, blood
meal and feather meal [were] produced in 1983". Of that amount, 34 per cent
was used in pet food, 34 per cent in poultry feed, 20 per cent in pig food
and 10 per cent in beef and dairy cattle feed.Transmissible spongiform
encephalopathy (TSE) carried in pig- and chicken-laden foods may eventually
eclipse the threat of "mad cow disease". The risk of household pet exposure
to TSE from contaminated pet food is more than three times greater than the
risk for hamburger-eating humans.
(Gar Smith is Editor of Earth Island Journal.)
4. THE DARK SIDE OF RECYCLING
[Author's name withheld]
[In February 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a macabre two-part
story detailing how
stray dogs, cats and pound animals are routinely rounded up by meat
renderers and ground up
into&emdash;of all things&emdash;pet food. According to the researcher who
brought the
information to the Chronicle, the paper buried the story and deleted many
of the charges he had documented. A report he worked on for ABC
television's 20-20 was similarly watered down.
In exasperation, he sent the story to Earth Island Journal. NEXUS has been
asked to withhold the name of the author/researcher, who has been forced to
flee San Francisco with his wife and go into hiding as a result of the
threats made against his well-being. Ed.]
The rendering plant floor is piled high with "raw product": thousands of
dead dogs and cats; heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses;
whole skunks; rats and raccoons&emdash; all waiting to be processed. In the
90-degree heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own
as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.
Two bandana-masked men begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the
"raw" into a 10-foot-
deep stainless-steel pit. They are undocumented workers from Mexico, doing
a dirty job. A giant auger-grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn.
Popping bones and squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will
never forget.
Rendering is the process of cooking raw animal material to remove the
moisture and fat. The
rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or "chef", blends
the raw product in order to maintain a certain ratio between the carcasses
of pets, livestock, poultry waste and supermarket rejects.
Once the mass is cut into small pieces, it is transported to another auger
for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The
continuous batch cooking process goes on non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven
days a week as meat is melted away from bones in the hot 'soup'. During
this cooking process, the 'soup' produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow
that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent
to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and
pulverises the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens sift out excess
hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is finished, all that is left is
yellow grease, meat and bone meal.
A Meaty Menu
As the American Journal of Veterinary Research explains, this recycled meat
and bone meal is used as "a source of protein and other nutrients in the
diets of poultry and swine and in pet foods, with lesser amounts used in
the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat is also used in animal feeds as an
energy source." Every day, hundreds of rendering plants across the United
States truck millions of tons of this "food enhancer" to poultry ranches,
cattle feed-lots, dairy and hog farms, fish-feed plants and pet-food
manufacturers where it is mixed with other ingredients to feed the billions
of animals that meat-eating humans, in turn, will eat.
Rendering plants have different specialities. The labelling designation of
a particular "run" of product is defined by the predominance of a specific
animal. Some product-label names are: meat meal, meat by-products, poultry
meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef
fat and chicken fat.
Rendering plants perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they
recycle used animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of
becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and
bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population.
The Dark Side
Death is the number one commodity in a business where the demand for feed
ingredients far
exceeds the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food
production through waste
management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering plants are
unavoidably processing toxic waste.
The dead animals (the "raw") are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted
ingredients.
Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, and fish oil
laced with bootleg DDT and other organophosphates that have accumulated in
the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.
Because animals are frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still
attached, organophosphate-containing insecticides get into the mix as well.
The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches.
Pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock, and euthanasia drugs
given to pets are also included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of
sources: pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles.
Even plastic winds up going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken
and fish arrive in styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for the
tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat-packs. More plastic
is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID tags, plastic
insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from
veterinarians.
Rendering Judgements
Skyrocketing labour costs are one of the economic factors forcing the
corporate flesh-peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel
to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks.
Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the
rendering process and
become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.
The most environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where
spot checks and testing of animal-feed ingredients happen at the wobbly
rate of once every two-and-a-half months. The supervising state agency is
the Department of Agriculture's Feed and Fertilizer Division of Compliance.
Its main objective is to test for truth in labelling: does the percentage
of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do
the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides
and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.
In California, eight field inspectors regulate a rendering industry that
feeds the animals that the state's 30 million people eat. When it comes to
rendering plants, however, state and federal agencies have maintained a
hands-off policy, allowing the industry to become largely self-regulating.
An article in the February 1990 issue of Render, the industry's national
magazine, suggests that the self-regulation of certain contamination
problems is not working.
One policing program that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella
Education/Reduction Program, formed under the auspices of the National
Renderers Association. The magazine states that "...unless US and Canadian
renderers get their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are
serious about reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their
animal protein meals, they are going to be faced with...new and overly
stringent government regulations."
So far, the voluntary self-testing program is not working. According to the
magazine, "...only about 20 per cent of the total number of companies
producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the
program..." Far fewer have done the actual testing.
The American Journal of Veterinary Research conducted an investigation into
the persistence of sodium phenobarbital in the carcasses of euthanised
animals at a typical rendering plant in 1985 and found "...virtually no
degradation of the drug occurred during this conventional rendering
process�" and that "...the potential of other chemical contaminants (e.g.,
heavy metals, pesticides and environmental toxicants, which may cause
massive herd mortalities) to degrade during conventional rendering needs
further evaluation."
Renderers are the silent partners in our food chain. But worried insiders
are beginning to talk, and one word that continues to come up in
conversation is "pesticides". The possibility of petrochemically poisoning
our food has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself
are allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and
supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of
increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the
environment. No longer hunters, we are becoming the victims of our
technologically altered food chain.
The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality.
(First published in Earth Island Journal, Fall 1990.)
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Extracted from NEXUS Magazine, Volume 4, #1 (Dec '96 - Jan 1997).
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com
Reprinted with permission from
Earth Island Journal
(vol. 11, no. 3, Summer 1996)
(vol. 5, no. 4, Fall 1990)
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