[lacrew]

Dog food plants are inspected, I’m sure by the government, but more importantly by Wal Mart and other big boxes that carry their product. People are nuts about their pets, and dog food plants are probably cleaner than this meat plant.

[MarMema]

And that also explains why your pet’s food can contain such things as bits of ID tags, flea collars, antibiotic tags from livestock, and even plastic. The “Buyer’s Guide to Rendered Fats” also notes that almost all tallow (a fat byproduct of the rendering process) “contains polyethylene (PE), which is a foreign material in tallow, to some degree. It finds its way into the rendering plant as meat wrappers mixed in with the raw material. Most of the polyethylene wrappers used by the meat industry are of low density type that will melt at lower temperatures and stay soluble in the tallow.” Well, that’s certainly good to know; at least it’ll be melted before your pet eats it or you brush your teeth with it. But how do meat wrappers get into your pet’s food? When the truck heading to the rendering plant dumps its load of meat rejects from your local supermarket, including trimmings, refuse, offal (as bad as it sounds), and outdated packages of meat, they don’t bother to remove the packaging. Think about that for a moment: The Styrofoam trays and the plastic wrap go right into the cooker with everything else.

Some pet food companies buy raw goods from rendering facilities that process animals euthanized at animal shelters. That means that some pet food is made from a variety of meats that humans wouldn’t eat, including diseased livestock and cats and dogs containing lethal doses of sodium pentobarbital. In other words, the body of a stray dog killed in a shelter may be ground up into dog food.

FDA Admits Diseased Animal Carcasses Are Used In Pet Food