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Byline and Credit: John Eckhouse, Chronicle Staff Writer
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How Dogs and Cats Get Recycled Into Pet Food
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. Although you won't find it on any pet-food label, many brands contain dog and cat remains.
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 products - tallow and meat meals - serve as raw material for thousands of items that include cosmetics and pet food.
The rendering industry denies that this occurs.
"I don't know of any small animals going into soap or dog food, " said Ray Kelly, a spokesman for the National Renderers Association and executive vice president of Baker Commodities, a
Pet-food executives also say no pets end up in their products. Many manufacturers in the $8 billion industry require suppliers to sign affidavits to that effect.
Yet federal and state officials, including the Food and Drug Administration, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the California Veterinary Medical Association, confirm that pets routinely are rendered after they die and the end product frequently finds its way into pet food.
"The pets serve a viable purpose by providing foodstuff for the animal feed chain, " said Lea McGovern, chief of the animal feed safety branch of the FDA.
The practice is neither illegal nor unhealthy. Pets probably constitute a very small percentage of a day's production at a renderer and an even lower percentage of the ingredients in a package of pet food.
The National Animal Control Association estimates that
Several hundred thousand deceased
"When you read pet-food labels and it says meat or bone meal, that's what it is - cooked and converted animals, including some dogs and cats, " said Eileen Layne, of the California Veterinary Medical Association.
Critics like Libby Schenkman of the Berkeley-based Animal Rights Connection are upset by such "cannibalism, " but government, academic and industry officials say rendering pets recycles a valuable commodity while simultaneously solving a difficult waste-disposal problem.
"The alternative is burying, or some other form of environmental contamination, " said Bert Mitchell, associate director of the surveillance-and-compliance branch of the FDA.
Most scientists say the high temperatures and pressures used in rendering kill any viruses and bacteria.
Veterinarians at the
Bay Area animal shelters and veterinarians rely heavily on rendering for animal disposal. Faced with a mammoth pet-overpopulation problem, shelters in the nine-county area reluctantly put to sleep almost 100,000 sick or abandoned animals per year. Virtually all pay to have the euthanized pets hauled to renderers in
For instance, it would cost the Humane Society of Santa Clara Valley $3,500 per month to cremate the shelter's dead pets compared to the $1,100 per month it pays to have them picked up by Koefran Industries and delivered to Sacramento Rendering Co., according to Executive Director William Burke.
Koefran supplies the Humane Society with a freezer and picks up a full truckload of frozen animals there three times a week. It has similar arrangements at shelters and veterinary hospitals in six other counties. "Look Elsewhere'
Mike Koewler, president of Koefran and Sacramento Rendering, acknowledged that his company renders dead pets but insisted that the end product does not end up in pet food.
"We don't do that, " he said. "If you want to pursue that issue, look elsewhere, because it does go on all over the country."
Koewler said that pets rendered at his facility on the outskirts of Mather Air Force Base go into products that are either sold out of state, exported, used as fertilizer or fed to chickens and cattle.
Independent Rendering, a
"Thousands and thousands of pounds of dogs and cats are picked up and brought here every day, " said one employee of Sacramento Rendering. "The small animals are a big part of the company, " confirmed an ex-employee.
The two estimated that the company rendered somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 pounds of dogs and cats a day out of a total of 250,000 to 500,000 pounds of cattle, poultry, butcher scrap and other materials. Sacramento Rendering recently began transferring most of its dead pets to North State Rendering in
In addition, the same product that is called tankage in
Three different state agencies have responsibility for inspection and enforcement of rendering factories, which leaves many gaps.
To make sure no small animals go into pet food components, "we'd have to put a person at the rendering plant at all times it's in operation, " said Steve Wong, acting branch chief of the Feed, Fertilizer and Livestock Drugs branch of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. His eight inspectors visit each rendering plant an average of once every 2 1/2 months.
In spot checks during the past two years, the state cited Sacramento Rendering on five occasions for product-labeling violations. In another case 15 months ago, a shipment of 52,280 pounds labeled as meat and bone meal headed to Sacramento Rendering from West Coast Rendering Co. in
Executives at four of the leading pet food companies say no household pets are in the raw materials they buy from renderers.
"There are no dogs or cats in our products, " said Patrick Farrell, a Ralston Purina Co. spokesman. "We have strict quality assurance programs in place from all of our suppliers."
Yet rendering industry employees say it would be impossible for any purchaser to know the exact contents of what they buy. One 20-year industry veteran said it would be easy to pass off dogs and cats in a poultry by-product, because of the similar protein content. COMMON PRACTICE
An East Coast executive, with almost 40 years in the rendering business, said that it was common practice for his company to process dead pets into products sold to pet food manufacturers.
"For years we sold Ralston meat meal and they had dogs and cats in their product for years and didn't know it until somebody squawked, " said the executive. But Ralston was the only company that stopped buying his product.
"I don't recall any other pet (food) manufacturer saying they wouldn't buy it, " he said.
Most pet owners probably know as little as the feed companies about rendering of animals. When a pet dies, owners generally are told they can choose from a $30 mass cremation, a $70 individual cremation or a $400 burial.
Or, for about $15, they can have the county pick up the remains. That means rendering, though the word rarely is mentioned.
Even industry insiders are often unaware of where pets end up. A random survey of nine local pet hospitals disclosed that five tell clients that pets disposed of by the county are cremated, while a sixth said the county buries the pets in mass graves.
"I've got to put my main focus and concern on saving lives, " said Carl Friedman, director of
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THE PET DISPOSAL PROBLEM
Local animal shelters, overwhelmed by the large number of stray and unwanted dogs and cats they handle, dispose of the euthanized animals by sending their remains to rendering plants in
Contra Costa 20,400 3,050 3,564 14,187
Solano 10,974 1,229 1,240 8,586
Marin(b-c) 6,215 1,993 1,376 2,846
LOCAL TOTAL 148,745 21,945 33,317 96,620
(a) includes pets dead on arrival and those which died in custody of the shelters (b) 1989 calendar year (c) All the euthanized animals in Marin and some in Sonoma are cremated. (d) includes 12 of 22 animal shelters in the city and
Rendering Can Turn Waste Into Usable Products
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. Rendering may be the world's oldest industry, as well as the first recycling business.
It dates back to the times of the ancient Egyptians. In
Today, rendering companies in the
"We're dealing with something a lot of people don't even want to think about, but that's fine, we'll handle it and keep everything clean, " said Don Brownstein, a partner at West Coast Rendering in Los Angeles.
Though unknown and unseen by most people - because of their pungent odors, most facilities are located on the far outskirts of urban areas - the rendering industry produces raw materials used in thousands of products purchased by consumers and businesses.
There are two main types of renderers, those which are adjuncts to meat-packing plants and process edible products - and are closely inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture - and those which process products inedible for humans.
Edible by-products are used in shortenings, canned and frozen foods, chili, pizza and egg rolls. Inedible by-products find their way into soap, lipstick and other cosmetics, paint and even shaving cream, as well as animal feeds.
"Everything is recycled, nothing goes to waste, " said Gary Essex, general manager of Florin Tallow, a recycling company in
In
"If the rendering industry closed tomorrow and we had to take that to landfill, we'd fill it up so fast it would make your head spin, " said Michael Koewler, president of Sacramento Rendering and a board member of the national association. Rendering prevents inedible animal by-products or the grease from a restaurant's deep fat fryers from being tossed down sewers or in dumps, he said.
Koewler said there is a rendering plant about every 400 miles across the country in order to take care of the recyclable waste discarded daily by meat packers and restaurants.
When a beef steer is slaughtered, for example, only about 58 percent is used for food. The remainder - excess fat, bones, viscera and hide - goes to renderers. They also collect diseased meat rejected by USDA inspectors for human consumption, such as cancerous tissues from steers or chickens, but federal health authorities say any toxins disappear when processed at high temperatures in the renderers' cooking equipment.
Renderers have two basic products: fat, called tallow or grease, and dried meat and bone meal. Some of the tallow goes directly into soaps and animal feed. Chemical manufacturers purchase the rest, processing the tallow into fatty acids used in lubricants, cosmetics, cement, polishes and printing inks. Feed mills purchase the meat and bone meals, which serve as a basic ingredient for chicken, cattle, hog and pet food.
Historically, most rendering companies have been local, family-owned firms. The one exception is Darling-Delaware Co. Inc., which became the only nationwide rendering company after being acquired by a group of Texas investors in 1986 (see related story, Page C3).
Because its products compete with alternative commodities from around the world, such as Malaysian palm oil, the rendering industry tends to see its fortunes ebb and flow. Prices for tallow and meat meals are on a downswing.
"In recent years we've been selling our end products at prices less than what they were 15 years ago, " said Ray Kelly, executive vice president of Baker Commodities and a spokesman for the National Renderers Association. Tallow today commands only 13 cents a pound, compared with 25 cents a pound in 1979.
To help keep sales up, renderers have increased their exports of tallow to Japan,
The
"But it's still a pretty lucrative business, " said Craig Breunig, president of Wahoo By-Products, a renderer located outside
Why Pet-Food Labels Baffle Most Consumers
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. Pet owners trying to control what they feed their animals face a formidable obstacle: the label on the bag or can.
Although standardized by government regulation and industry agreement, the labels contain terms hazy enough to baffle most post-graduate scientists. What, for example, is a digest of poultry by-products or wheat middlings or meat and bone meal?
"It took me three hours to give a lecture on how to read a pet-food label to my veterinary students, " said Dave Dzanis, a veterinary nutritionist with the federal Food and Drug Administration who holds a doctorate in clinical nutrition.
The labels also fail to indicate that a small percentage of the ingredients used in pet food consists of dogs and cats that have been rendered after they die, as reported yesterday. Nor is it easy to discover that animal stomachs, poultry feathers, chicken feet or fish heads are common ingredients.
Expensive advertisements lend the impression that only the choicest grades of steaks and chops are ground up and served to finicky cats and dogs. In reality, the meat content in pet food consists mostly of by-products rejected for human consumption for health or esthetic reasons.
Wendell Belfield, a San Jose veterinarian, spent seven years inspecting meat at a slaughterhousebefore opening a private practice.Part of his job was to reject forhuman consumption so-called 4Dtissue - meat that came from animalsthat were dead, dying, diseased or disabled before they reached the packing plant.
"This would go in a tank and then was taken to a rendering plant and made into meat and bone meal, that is the main ingredient of dry dog food, " Belfield said. "Fed this cotton-picking diet every day, this will in time have a deleterious effect on the dog, " Belfield claimed.
Government health officials, scientists and pet-food industry executives say such criticism is unfounded.
"Any products not fit for human consumption are very well sterilized, so nothing can be transferred to the animal, " said James Morris, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California at Davis and one of the country's leading experts on cat nutrition. "And to say products are unwholesome because we Americans don't like to eat them is not correct. There's nothing wrong with eating spleen, which we don't do but some Arabs eat."
Charles Weil, vice president of the Friskies PetCare Division of Carnation Co., believes it makes little sense to put the high-priced human-grade meat products into pet food.
"But what we use is very nutritious and a good source of protein, " he said.
Yet a growing group of veterinarians and specialty pet-food manufacturers challenge such prevailing opinions. They base their conclusions on years of working with pets. CAUSING DISEASES
"In many instances you are causing diseases in animals if you feed off-the-shelf food, " said Alfred Plechner, a West Los Angeles veterinarian who helped design an all-natural diet for a
Bob Goldstein, co-owner of a Connecticut pet-food company named Lick Your Chops, said his veterinary practice found that chemical additives and preservatives in mass-produced pet foods caused skin and kidney disorders, arthritis, hyperactivity, hair loss and other problems - many of which improved by eliminating foods with the additives.
"The bottom line is a lot of the animals get better just on the diet alone, " said Richard Pitcairn, a Eugene, Ore., veterinarian who wrote the seminal book on natural pet foods in 1982.
Some vets express concerns about the concentration of lead in the bones of grass-fed cattle that routinely are processed into pet food. Others warn against the use of preservatives such as propylene glycol - a first cousin to antifreeze - BHA, BHT and ethoxyquin.
"All that is anecdotal, there is no tested and tried information about additives. You need to do a double-blind study to confirm anything, " countered Quintin Rogers, a professor in the
He said additives cause far fewer problems than pet owners who give their animals too many supplements such as calcium or vitamin D. NUTRITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
An expert in animal nutrition,
"But give me a tire, an old leather shoe and a quart of oil and I can meet all the national specifications for the NRC diet, " said Jeff Bennett, president of Nature's Recipe.
That's because the standards only measure the content of such items as protein, but fail to reveal how much of that protein is digestible and available to the animal. Shoe leather and chicken feathers meet the protein standards, even though little would be absorbed by a dog or cat.
That bothered the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Animal Hospital Association enough to propose that they supervise independent testing of pet food.
"Our concern was their labels were not indicative of the bio-availability of the nutrients, " said John Albers, executive director of the AAHA. "There is some doubt in our minds as to whether the labeling is sufficient, whether the claims that are on the label are backed up by adequate testing." "SUPERMARKET SYNDROME'
Walter Martin Jr., chairman of the pet-food advisory committee and immediate past president of the AVMA, recalls a disease his colleagues called supermarket syndrome. Dogs were literally starving to death on a certain generic brand of pet food because it had so little digestible material, even though it met the minimum standards.
Another problem came from a well-known canned dog food that contained large chunks of heart artery. Although counted as protein under the old rules, the aorta is almost totally indigestible, Martin said.
But the two groups dropped plans for independent testing when the Association of American Feed Control Officials agreed to revise the standards for determining which pet foods may use the "complete and balanced" claim on their labels. The proposed policy calls for procedures to substantiate that a pet food not only contains the required nutrients, but that they are digestible by the animal.
-------------------------------- HOW TO READ A PET-FOOD LABEL Definitions of frequently used ingredients in dog and cat food:
. -- Fish by-products must consist of nonrendered, clean, undecomposed portions of fish (such as, but not limited to, heads, fins, tails, ends, skin, bone and viscera) which result from the fish-processing industry.
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-- Meat and bone meal is the rendered product from mammal tissues, including bone, exclusive of blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents, except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.
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-- Meat by-products is the nonren- dered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered animals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low-temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. .
-- Poultry by-products must consist of nonrendered, clean parts of carcasses of slaughtered poultry such as heads, feet, viscera, free from fecal content and foreign matter except in trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice. Source: Association of American Feed Control Officials
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