Stop Rendering Our Pets Into Pet Foods

Millions of euthanized pets from humane shelters and veterinary hospitals all across the United States and Eastern Canada are being recycled back into pet foods.
In a September, 1995 article titled "What's Cooking", Baltimore City Paper takes their readers through Valley Proteins, Baltimore's only rendering plant. Graphic pictures of dead animals stuffed into barrels are depicted, one picture shows a dead dog and another is of fried animal parts! Neil Gagnon, General Manager of Valley Proteins says that 150 million pounds' of rotting flesh are fed into the plants grinders and cookers each year to produce 80 million pounds of the plants three products; meat and bone meal, tallow and yellow grease. The majority of this goes into chicken feed, the rest into dry pet food.
The use of dead pets, work animals, zoo animals and wildlife as raw material for meat meals is an aspect of the rendering process that Gagnon doesn't like to discuss. He further states that the meat and bone meal made at the plant includes materials from pets and wildlife and about 5\% of this goes into dry pet foods.
Just outside Seattle is a rendering facility cleverly disguised as Baker Commodities. Their raw material is collected from veterinary hospitals and humane societies across Washington State. Seattle humane shelters have their clients sign a waiver indicating that pet's bodies not collected by their owners will be sent to the rendering facility. Baker Commodities, a facility which is guarded like Fort Knox, sells meat meal by the ton. The majority of their product goes to American Nutrition of Ogden Utah which in turn manufacturers over 175 different private label brands of pet food.
In the veterinary text book, Euthanasia of the Companion Animal (1988), in the chapter headed, Animal Disposal: Fact and Fiction by David Cook, Cook states that "millions of America's deceased pets are being cooked and processed into petfood, most pet owners don't realize this fact. Does this raise questions of ethics that should be answered by the veterinary profession and the petfood industry? " Cook goes on to say, " Consider the introduction of dogs and cats into the human food chain by way of livestock food made from rendered by-products. What happens to all those toxic products that we use so liberally on our pets? "