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By reading this article you will realize that the dairy cows are no longer vegetarian animals. The dairy industry feeds them recycled meat mixed with regular grain feed. The recycled meat is derived by recycling slaughterhouses waste, dead animals (such as millions of euthanized cats and dogs from veterinarians and animal shelters), and supermarket and restaurant waste. Rendering
Plants: One estimate states that some 40 billion pounds a year of slaughterhouse wastes like blood, bone, and viscera, as well as the remains of millions of euthanized cats and dogs passed along by veterinarians and animal shelters, are rendered annually into livestock feed. This way they turn dairy cows, other cattle and hogs, which are natural herbivores (vegetarians), into unwitting carnivores (non-vegetarians). However without rendering plants, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population. "If you burned all the carcasses, you'd get a terrible air pollution problem," or "If you put it all into landfills, you'd have a colossal public health problem, not to mention stench. Dead animals are an ideal medium for bacterial growth," said Dr. William Heuston, associate dean of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at College Park, MD USA. This is a multibillion-dollar industry, and these facilities operate 24 hours a day just about everywhere in America, Europe and other parts of the world. They have been in operation for years. Yet so few of us have ever heard of them. Raw
Material: Slaughterhouses waste such as heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, blood, stomachs, intestines, spinal cords, tails, feathers, an bones.
Renderers in the United States pick up 100 million pounds of waste material every day. Half of every butchered cow and a third of every pig is not consumed by humans. An estimated six to seven million dogs and cats are killed in animal shelters each year, said Jeff Frace, a spokesman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York City. Along with the above material, the Rendering plants are unavoidably process toxic wastes as indicated below. Toxic
Waste Accompanied with Raw Material:
Skyrocketing labor costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh-peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed. Recycled
Process: During this cooking process, the soup produces fat of yellow grease or tallow (animal fat) that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens remove excess hair and large bone chips. Now the following three products are produced:
Since these foods are exclusively use to feed animals, most state agency spot check and test for truth in labeling such as; does the percentage of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete or not done. Recycled
Products and Usage: A 1991 USDA report states that rendering plants produced approximately 7.9 billion pounds of meat, bone meal, blood meal, and feather meal in 1983. Of that amount:
Scientific American cites a dramatic rise in the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987. At least 250 rendering plants operate in the United States and modern rendering plants are large and centralized, and the industry's revenues amount to $2.4 billion a year, said Bruce Blanton, executive director of the National Renderers Association in Alexandria, Va. Scientists believe the so-called mad cow disease results when cattle eat feed made from the brains or spinal cords of sheep suffering from scrapie. They believe the people who died were infected when they ate beef, or dairy or other products from these cows, a theory that remains controversial, though evidence is accumulating. The
Story of North Carolina - USA A local farmer hauls the animal and bird mortality to the rendering plant each day and maintains the collection site. The rendering plant pays the Livestock Association each week based on the current prices of meat, bone, feather meal, and fat. During the first 16 weeks of operation in 1989, over 1 million pounds or a weekly average of 65,000 pounds of dead animals and birds (mortality) were collected and sent to the rendering plant. The end result of this very successful project is that Greene County livestock and poultry producers have a convenient, safe, and economical alternative to dispose of animal and bird mortality. -------------------------------
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