I just ordered the book "Buyer Beware: The crimes, lies and truth about pet food"
I just finished reading this book, most of it was nothing new to me, but still some pretty disgusting information that I wished I did have to hear. What I found interesting is that its illegal to use diseased animals in pet food according to the FDA, yet its a common practice. In the book theres an excerpt taken from a personal account by pest control operator documenting what he saw at a rendering facility. Hopefully I can share it here:
" the plant was out in the middle of an open field and except fir a 15 foot parameter around the building, the weeds were waist to neck high. I entered the plant on a dirt drive that went up to a concrete parking slab in the front of the building;in front of the office door and a large overhead foor. The dirt drive went around one side of the building to the back where there was a concrete dump area with an overhead door going into the building. The concrete slab was sloped away from the building with a curb on both sides so that they could wash down the area. This is where the dead animals, parts and pieces of animals and other things to be rendered or processed were dumped. Between the dirt drive area and the building was junk parts and equipment piled up that obviously house a large colony of rats as you would see their trails in and out of the junk piles. The other dumping ground or machine parts, etc, out back was also full of rats. The concrete pad in the back where trucks dumped their loads had rat holes lining the curb that ran along the sides.
As you might imagine this area was loaded with flies; the piles of products were alive with maggots. It made it look like the whole pile of product was alive and moving. After the loads were dumped they were picked up by a bobcat (miniature loader with a scoop on the front) and hauled inside the plant to the rendering pit. The plant had 3 undocumented workers doing the labor, including running the bobcat. The pit was a concrete hole with sloped sides that was about 8 to 10 feet deep and it had four sides that were about 7 feet long. There was a small seam 1 inch wide about 4 feet down that ran all the way around the pit. This seam, as the ones in the corners, had several rat holes in them, so rats were living in the rendering pit.
At the bottom of the pit was an auger grinder that ground the product and augured in out to a bin to be cooked. The cooker was in the back corner of the plant that took up about 1/3 of the building. After it was cooked, it was pressed to eliminate the remaining moisture. Then it was seperated into different products and shipped off to one of their other plants to be further processed and packaged. I asked where the finished product was sent to: they said it was shipped to several different pet food plants. It seems the corporation had several rendering plants and contracts with numerous pet food plants. Not only were dead animals that died who know how were rendered, but also live rats, a lot of rat droppings plus all the dirt and concrete fragments that were removed from the rat holes in the pit and piles of maggots. But "that was ok" because it was just going for the pet food. What they were concerned about was the constant maintenance that the rats were causing by digging holes in the concrete and chewing through hoses and electric lines.
Maintenance expenses were getting too high and something had to be done. That is why they called me. it took a couple months, and several buckets of dead rats, but I did take care of their rat problem. In the meantime I found out that were a lot of the dead animals and other scaps and pieces came from. There were dead cows, pigs, horses, chickens various road kill, packaged meat from local supermarkets and waste from restaurants and fast food places. The most sickening thing that I saw was trucks that come from chicken farms. I call them chicken prisons that were supposedly full of dead chickens. When they were dumped, 90% of the chickens were dead, however there was always a few that were still alive, if you could call that alive. They were mostly featherless and staggering around obviously sick and dying. The picked them up and threw them into the pit alive to be ground up with the rest of the dump. Most of the cattle from the feed lots and farmers had plastic ear tags impregnated with Dursban or other insecticides that were places there to ward off flies. These tags were not removed, they were ground up with the cattles and the plastic and styrofoam containers that spoiled and rotten meat from the supermarkets came in. When I asked about the ear tags and the plastic and styrofoam they said that they could not afford to pay someone to remove them or unpackage the spoiled meats from the supermarkets. "Besides, they would be eliminated from the end products through rendering process.".
The point of this is that when you see meat byproducts listed on the label of your pet food, this could be what you could be feeding your pet. So when you see this on the label, I would encourage you to think twice about purchasing the product."