How Does a Euthanasia Drug Keep Ending Up in Dog Food?

...Owners of very good boys and girls might be perturbed by the latest recall to make the news: 27 brands of dog food pulled from warehouses for possibly containing pentobarbital, a sedative used to euthanize both pets and people alike. As Gizmodo has already reported, the recall concerns wet and canned dog foods manufactured by the J.M. Smucker Company as far back as 2016, and includes popular brands such as Kibbles ‘N Bits and Gravy Train.

But while the recalled products probably don’t contain high enough levels of the drug to pose a danger to anyone’s precious pups, it’s the fourth pet food recall to involve pentobarbital in the last two years. And that can’t help but bring up questions of how exactly it keeps ending up in dog food, and how often it’s really happening.

In February 2017, Evanger’s Pet Food and Against the Grain each announced their own recalls, after at least five dogs became sick and one died from eating Evanger’s branded food that was found to contain pentobarbital. No reports of injury came from eating Against the Grain products, but the companies are owned by members of the same family, and their products are sometimes manufactured by Evanger....

https://gizmodo.com/how-does-a-eutha...ood-1823186412

__________________
Hope is the dream of the waking man.
Aristotle

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.
Job 14:6-8

ALSO there's this

What is in pet food? Zoo animals, sick livestock, dogs and cats from shelters.

A Dog-Eat-Dog World
Does your pet’s food contain dead pets?

(short answer, Yes quite possibly)

Under Food and Drug Administration regulations, only about 50 percent of a cow can be sold for human consumption. The hide, bones, digestive system and it contents, brain, feces, udders, and various other undesirable parts are all left over after a cow is slaughtered and butchered. The stuff that can’t even go into hotdogs gets consolidated and shipped to rendering plants. Slaughterhouses that handle pigs and chickens also send their leftovers to rendering plants. So do many other facilities that find themselves with large volumes of otherwise unusable dead animal parts, including animal shelters and veterinary clinics that euthanize a lot of animals.

A rendering plant has a huge grinder that is filled up with whatever comes in. Some rendering plants are pickier than others, and some process ingredients in different batches to comply with state or local laws. But on the whole, most tend to dump in whatever they receive and start the grinder when it is full: parts from slaughterhouses, whole carcasses of diseased animals, cats and dogs from shelters, zoo animals, road kill and expired meat from grocery store shelves (tossed in fully packaged, complete with plastic wrap and Styrofoam).

This material is slowly pulverized into one big blend of dead stuff and meat packaging. It is then transferred into a vat where it is heated for hours to between 220–270 degrees F. At such high temperatures, the fat and grease float to the top along with any fat-soluble compounds or solids that get mixed up with them. Most viruses and bacteria are killed. The fat can then be skimmed off, packaged, and renamed. Most of this material is called “meat and bone meal.” It can be used in livestock feed, pet food, or fertilizer. It joins a long list of ingredients that you might prefer not to see in your pet’s food.

... The city of Los Angeles alone sends about 200 tons of dead pets to a rendering plant each month. ...

Many pet food manufacturers, including this site run by a pet food industry group, say that they are not using rendered pets to make a cannibal of your dog. But how would they really know? There is no simple way to look at a shipment of meat and bone meal and tell exactly what species are in the mix. The protein percentage of a load of cats and dogs looks basically the same as a shipment of carcasses from a poultry farm. The rendering industry gets very vague about what is in meat and bone meal, even in otherwise highly technical documents.
...
Perhaps the real problem is with the other things that hitch a ride with the dead cats, dogs, zoo animals, and some of the livestock that were rejected for human consumption. Many of these animals died after being medicated for health problems that contributed to their deaths, and not all drugs are neutralized during the rendering process. Meat and bone meal can contain antibiotics, steroids, and even the sodium pentobarbital used to kill pets at shelters. By definition, a lot of the animals that ended up in the rendering vat had something wrong with them.

...

The more that I learned about the pet-food business while writing this article, the less significant the cannibalism aspect seemed to me. My initial outrage at feeding dogs to dogs gave way to outrage at dogs being overproduced and dumped in shelters to be killed in the first place. One million deer are killed by vehicles each year. Even the plastic and Styrofoam from wasted grocery store meat that nobody even bothers to unpackage before rendering has come to seem a minor harm compared to the sins of a food system that devotes so much arable land to producing meat—in a world where people still starve to death—that we can’t even get around to eating it all before the expiration date hits.

...

__________________
Hope is the dream of the waking man.
Aristotle

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.
Job 14:6-8

That second post is horrifying. While I have heard about the recalls, and have stopped buying or feeding certain brands to my cats, I had figured (hoped) the introduction of the pentobarbital may have come from animals that were (as humanely as possible) slaughtered for meat.

The idea that animals from shelters are added, if that article is true, is revolting. Beyond revolting. I will do some serious research to find out if this is true, and let you know what I find.

Hopefully, between now and lunch, I'll regain my appetite.

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