I hear a lot of stories about dead cats and dogs in pet food and I just wonder why is it such a bad thing? Normally, they just place the dead euthanized animals in landfills anyway, so processing them instead into useful food sources seems ideal. At least we have some use for the millions of dead animals that shelter put down each day/month/year. Rather they all go to waste, I don’t see the issue here, unless you think that dogs eating dead dogs are gross. But it’s a good source of meat nevertheless.
Why is it bad to have rendered pets in pet food?
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Why don’t you eat them? I have never heard of that. That is disgusting.
eck how would you feel if they did that to humans after all we just get stuck in the ground anyway. there is no telling what diseases that would cause
Outside of the ethics and emotional attachment people have with their dead animals is the fact that the drug they use to euthanize/anesthetize builds up in the dogs that eat the food and they become tolerant of it. That was how they figured out dead pets were being used in the first place. As you can imagine, having to use higher doses of a lethal drug to produce the same anesthesia is a problem.
Euthanized animals are NOT a “good source of meat” because the chemicals used to kill those animals are still present in their tissue after death (since the body is no longer alive to process those chemicals). Therefor, you would be slowly poisoning your pet by feeding him the processed remains of euthanized animals. Just like a cat would die of poisoning if it ate a mouse that was killed with D-con. For this very reason it is illegal in some places to bury the remains of euthanized animals…because there is too great a risk for wildlife to dig up the remains and poison the local food chain. Also, many diseases can be transmitted by eating the remains of infected animals. Mad cow disease anyone? While cats and dogs don’t get mad cow disease specifically there are several other diseases that they can get that are passed along in a similar manner.
It’s not a matter of dogs eating dead dogs being gross. It’s a matter of health and good husbandry practices.
Iam’s has one of the biggest rendering plants next to where they make their dog food.
Copied and pasted … I’ve read that some of the dogs still have needles in them that were used to euthanize them.
To render, as defined in Webster’s Dictionary, is “to process as for industrial use: to render livestock carcasses and to extract oil from fat, blubber, etc., by melting.”When chickens, lambs, cattle, swine, and other animals are slaughtered for food, usually only the lean muscle is cut off for human consumption.This leaves about 50 percent of a carcass left over. These leftovers are what become what we so commonly find on pet food labels, such as “meat-and-bone-meal” or “by-products.
“So basically, what pets eat are lungs, ligaments, bones, blood and intestines.Some other things that go into rendering to make your Cat and Dog Food are:
* Euthanized companion animals Cats and Dogs
* Spoiled meat from the supermarket, Styrofoam wrapping and all
* Road kill that can’t be buried on the roadside
* The “4 D’s” of cattle: dead, dying, disease and disabled
* Rancid restaurant grease
When dead animals from cow pastures are picked up, they may not be rendered until up to a week after they are dead. Because of this, it is estimated that E. coli bacteria contaminate more than 50 percent of meat meals.
The rendering process destroys the bacteria, but it does not eliminate the endotoxins bacteria release when they die.
These endotoxin, which can cause sickness and disease, are not tested for by pet food manufacturers.When all this comes to the rendering plant, it’s put in a huge vat and shredded.Then it’s cooked at 220 to 270 degrees for 20 to 60 minutes. After it cools, the grease is skimmed off the top.
This is “animal fat.” The rest is pressed and dried. This is “meat and bone meal.”Dogs wouldn’t eat this stuff in the wild, so why will they eat it out of their bowls? Their noses are tricked by the smell of it. The smell of animal fats for dogs and fish oil for cats is sprayed on the dry, bland kibble bits to make them appetizing.
These flavors usually come from rendered restaurant grease, animal fat, or other oils unfit for human consumption. Huge conglomerates use pet food companies as a cheap, and even profitable, way of disposing of the waste from their human food companies. Three of the five major pet food companies are owned by these huge corporations.
Who owns what? Corporation & Pet Foods:
Nestle: Alpo, Fancy Feast, Friskies, Mighty Dog, Purina One
Heinz: 9 Lives, Amore, Gravy Train, Kibbles-n-Bits, Nature’s Recipe
Colgate-Palmolive: Hill’s Science Diet
Proctor & Gamble: Eukanuba and Iams
Mars: Kal Kan, Mealtime, Pedigree, Sheba, Waltham’s
Its not a mater of being gross its a matter of the fact that constant exposure to certain drugs makes dogs AND cats resistant to that drug. Not that long a god vets were noticing that dogs and cats were becoming resistant to phenobarbital. Why? Because they had been consuming enough of it in their food at low enough doses that they were resistant to the full drug.
So let me ask you this – would you want dead, diseased, drugged and dying animals in YOUR food source? The FDA has only disallowed the use of 4D animals in HUMAN meat food sources in the last 30-50 years.
Are you freaking hearing yourself? Do you really want your pets eating food laced with Pentobarbitol, maggots, diseased animals, steroids, every disgusting toxic waste you can think of???????????
Maybe you need to do some homework.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHadGUXCf7I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkyBv2wA8tU&feature=related
This is just the tip of the iceberg so don’t be ridiculous with such an insane question.
Well for one thing it is disgusting. Its cannibalism. Do you eat dead humans simply because they are dead and have protein? And besides that many animals die because they are diseased and sick and then they are feed to other animals that can become sick from eating them. Also if you have a pet that becomes old or sick whatever the case may be and needs to be euthanized do you want to know that its body was then ground to bits and fed to other animals? I would not want that for any of my pets. The problem really is that you often are not aware of what is being put in your pets food and I don’t think that’s okay.