What Are Rendering Plants and How Do They Affect Your Cats' Food?

There are several hundred Rendering Plants across the U.S. They quietly dispose of millions of tons of dead animals, meat waste and fat.

What do you think you would see in Rendering Plants?

It's not uncommon, in a rendering plant, to find such dead animals as; skunks, snakes, opossums, cat, dogs, circus animals, raccoons, horses and foxes. In addition, the Rendering Plants also transforms billions of pounds of decaying flesh and kitchen grease, from mainly fast food restaurants, into billions of pounds of commercial meat and bone meal, tallow and yellow grease and much of it ends up in commercial pet foods.

Rendering Plants claim that although they sell their products to various companies including pet food companies and cosmetic companies, they are doing it as a public service and not for profits.

A look inside a rendering plant

Various animals in all types of conditions lay in piles awaiting their turn to be added to the mixture as swarms of maggots can be seen all over the piles. This is what you would witness inside of a Rendering Plant.

As workers operating mini dozers load the animals into a 10-foot-deep stainless steel pit also known as a vat, a giant auger-grinder begins to turn. The sounds of popping bone, squeezing flesh and the final cries can be heard.

Yellow grease or tallow that's produced by this process are skimmed off and sent to a hammer mill press where the remainder of moisture is removed and the final product is pulverized into a gritty powder. A shaker then removes excess bone and hair so all you have left are bone meal, yellow grease and meat.

Every day, hundreds of Rendering Plants across the U.S. 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.

Do you think your pets are benefiting from these products?

When you see ingredients on your pet food products labeled as; meat meal, meat by-products, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef fat and chicken fat, now you know their origin. They all are produced at Rendering Plants.

Pets are shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached. The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches. Euthanized drugs given to pets and pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock are also included.

Heavy metals from pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles as well as plastic wrap from supermarket rejected meat, chicken and fish. According to Rendering Plant officials, it's not economically feasible to have someone at the Rendering Plants to remove the ID tags, Styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. So they all go into the mix that becomes part of your pet food.

It's fair to say that without Rendering Plants, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread through the population but it's not safe for pet food manufacturers to use products produced at Rendering Plants.

In the final analysis, we have to understand that Rendering Plants produce products that are toxic to our pets. The drug Sodium Phenobarbital is used to euthanize pets of all type. This drug is not destroyed in the rendering process; therefore the product produced by the Rendering Plants that go into our pet foods contains sodium Phenobarbital.

All we as pet owners want is food for our pets that is nutritional, wholesome, and free of harmful ingredients. Time and time again the pet food companies have proven that they simply just will not deliver.

We as pet owners continue to buy their products even though it has been proven that they produce pet foods that are killing our pets. Why as pet owners do we refuse to invest time to discover what really goes into a bag of pet food?

There is something that all of you pet owners should realize, you are sentencing your pet to a premature and painful death. Yes, I'm speaking to you if you are one of millions of pet owners buying and feeding your pet commercial pet food. Simply put, if you fail to take time to discover what goes into the food that your pet eats the commercial pet food industry will capitalize on that and our pets will continue to to die prematurely and the makers of this food will continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

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