Our thanks to Maneka Gandhi for permission to republish this post, whichappeared on the Web site of People for Animals,
India’s largest animal-welfare organization, on September 15, 2011.
Gandhi is the founder of People for Animals and a leading animal-rights
and environmental activist in India.
When
you bite into a hamburger or chicken sandwich, what do you think that
this grass eating animal was eating before it died? Most likely it was a
mixture of ground up eyeballs, anuses, bones, feathers, and euthanized
dogs.
Most
animals that we eat spend the entirety of their short lives in
factories eating recycled meat and animal fat. These herbivores have
been turned into carnivores thanks to our process of “waste removal”
better known as rendering.
Every
day thousands of pounds of slaughterhouse waste such as brains,
eyeballs, spinal cords, intestines, bones, feathers or hooves as well as
restaurant grease, road kill, cats and dogs are produced. From this
need for large waste disposal came the development of rendering plants.
Rendering plants recycle the dead animals and their wastes into products
known as bone meal, and animal fat. These products are sold to the
companies that grow animals for meat or milk cattle, poultry, swine,
[and] sheep and put into their feed. Each slaughterhouse has a privately
owned rendering plant nearby.
These
facilities operate 24 hours a day all over the world. Till the BJP
[Bharatiya Janata Party] came to government in 1998 rendering was banned
in India by the department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Ministry
of Agriculture, which prohibited the use of animal byproducts in
ruminant feeds (Order No.2-4/99-AHT/FF). However, the BJP, influenced by
a coterie of slaughterhouse owners and interested bureaucrats, repealed
this ban and India’s first rendering plants came up in 2001. No one in
India knows about them—and few people in America where there are
thousands of plants. They are not advertised—and for good reason. The
process itself is very disturbing and those who have witnessed it have
often sworn off meat for good. The rendering plant floor is piled high
with “raw product”—tonnes of feet, tails, feathers, bones, spinal cords,
hooves, milk sacs, grease, intestines, stomachs and eyeballs of
slaughtered animals. In the heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have
a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.
First
the raw material is cut into small pieces and then transported to
another machine for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for
one hour, melting the meat away from bones in the hot “soup.” This
continuous batch cooking process goes on for 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
During
this cooking process, the soup produces yellow grease or tallow that
rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are then
sent to a hammer mill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture
and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens remove
excess hair and large bone chips that are unsuitable for consumption.
Now recycled meat, yellow grease, and bone meal are produced and used
exclusively to feed vegetarian animals.
In
India no testing is done of these plants. In America and Europe state
agencies spot check, yet testing for pesticides and other toxins in
animal feeds is not done or is done incompletely with toxic wastes
accompanying the dead animals—all of which the rendering plants do not
remove. Poisoned cattle stomachs, animals that have been lying dead for
weeks before being picked up, animals that have been run over by trucks,
all their noxious parts are part of this. The package includes
euthanasia drugs given to pets, animals with flea collars containing
organophosphate insecticides, fish oil laced with DDT, heavy metals from
pet ID tags, and plastics from thrown away meats. Labor costs are
rising and therefore many rendering plants refuse to hire extra hands to
cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled shop meat. Every week, millions
of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and
become one of the many unwanted ingredients in animal feed.
Even
if some people do realize how animal feed is made and feel that it is
still too far removed to be a concern to them, most of them do not know
of the risks [that] consumption of this meat entails. Perhaps the
best-known health concern associated with rendering plants is Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease. In America regulations
mandate that brain and other nerve tissue be removed from cattle after
they are slaughtered for human food. Yet these most infectious parts,
the brain and spinal cord, are allowed to go to a rendering facility
where they can be processed into pet and animal feed. This means it is
possible that a cow with Mad Cow Disease can be ground up and fed to a
pig or chicken that is, in turn, fed back to other cows that are
eventually eaten by people. India has no regulations of any kind. Behind
the scenes and out of public view, these practices are unfolding around
the world putting millions of people at risk for Mad Cow Disease.
Other
diseases that can be contracted from rendering plant product feed
include tuberculosis, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), and
Alzheimer’s. All of these diseases, except Alzheimer’s, are
transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases (TSEs), which means
that they [...] are infectious diseases that leave the brain resembling a
sponge. The process by rendering plants makes chickens, goats, sheep,
pigs, cows and buffaloes into cannibals[---a] factor that has been cited
as a cause of Alzheimer’s disease which did not exist in the world
until this practice started. Millions of people are affected by
Alzheimer’s making it one of the leading causes of death among the
elderly across the globe. Scientific evidence shows that people eating
meat more than four times a week for a prolonged period have a three
times higher chance of suffering from dementia than vegetarians. A
preliminary 1989 study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that
over 5% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s were actually dying from
human spongiform encephalopathy. That means that as many as 200,000
people in the United States may already be dying from mad cow disease
each year. God knows how many in India but certainly thousands more
after 2001.
In
India, in 2001 the BJP led Government prepared a secret position paper
on the “Utilisation of Slaughter House Waste for the Preparation of
Animal Feed.” This is what the report said:
The
report further goes on to explain that “Presently in India, live stock
feed production is cereal based. This results in livestock, especially
poultry, pig and fish competing with humans for grains and cereals which
can easily be replaced with slaughterhouse waste.”
The
Office International des Epizooties (OIE World Organisation for Animal
Health) had surveyed the risk of CJD/BSE in Asia. The report revealed
that no attention had been paid to any risk analysis on bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in China, India, Pakistan and seven
other countries. According to OIE, significant quantities of animal feed
of meat origin have been imported into Asia, which may mean that the
BSE agent could have reached domestic cattle in these countries. The
Report noted that “the spread of BSE through rendering plants cannot be
excluded in some countries such as China, India, Japan, Pakistan and
Taiwan. Therefore, much more stringent management at slaughterhouses and
rendering plants, as well as extensive surveillance programmes, are
required in those countries.”
The
Indian companies on the Internet advertise their rendered meal as
having been made from “spray-dry” machines that turn blood into a fine,
brown powder (gardeners know it as blood meal); gigantic kettles that
boil fat to make tallow; grinders that crush bones into minuscule
fragments. Millions of tons are supplied to dairy industry, poultry
farms, cattle feed-lots, pig farms, fish-feed plants, and pet-food
manufacturers. Leading manufacturers of “Meal,” as they call it, are
Standard Agro Vet (P) Ltd., Allanasons Ltd., Hind Agro Ltd., Al Kabeer,
and Hyderabad—also the four largest private slaughterhouses in the
country.
All
animal feed manufacturers use meat and bone meal in their feeds. Recent
reports state most domestic animals are fed such rendered animal
tissues. A 1991 United States Department of agriculture report states
that approximately 7.9 billion pounds of meat, bone meal, blood meal,
and feather meal was produced by rendering plants in 1983. Of that
amount: 12% percent was used in dairy and beef cattle feed, 34% in pet
food, 34% in poultry feed and 20% in pig food. This has doubled by 2006.
So has the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987
all over the globe. Grass or cereal fed cattle and other animals are
nonexistent abroad and lessening in India. BSE expert Richard Lacey
states “The time bomb of the twentieth century equivalent of the bubonic
plague ticks away.” Do you think Nature will forgive you for a baby
chick [...] eating on what’s left of her mother after she’s been
stripped down, a calf being fed on her mother’s slaughtered remains, a
pig being reared on a diet of dead pigs, a goat being fed on a goat’s
leftovers?
nice blog !! i was looking for blogs related of animal feed manufacturers . then i found this blog, this is really nice and interested to read. Thanks to author for sharing this type of information.
BalasHapus