By now, most of us know that our meat comes from unsavory places. Globally, 90% of meat comes from large-scale factory farms that confine animals under cruel and environmentally destructive conditions. In the U.S., it’s a whopping 99%. Despite this harsh reality, Americans are eating more meat than ever before. In 2021, they consumed 224.9 pounds per person, and that number is projected to rise in 2022. It’s no wonder the U.S. meat industry is worth $172 billion, and is expected to climb to a $215 billion value by 2028.
And while human consumption of animal products is naturally the core business of animal agriculture, there’s another set of individuals who pad the wallets of the meat industry: our pets.
It may come as a shock, but dogs and cats consume, one study found, between 25% and 30% of the calories derived from animals in the U.S. By those numbers, if America’s companion animals comprised their own country, its meat consumption would rank fifth in the world (behind only Russia, Brazil, the United States, and China.) The reason for this is simple: We have a lot of pets—some 163 million dogs and cats—and their diets tend to include a higher portion of meat than the average human’s.
Most of the meat we feed our dogs and cats is not suitable for human consumption. As Shawn Buckley and veterinarian Dr. Oscar Chavez explore in their book Big Kibble, only about 40% of the meat from factory-farmed animals makes it into the human food chain. The rest of the carcass—hooves, beaks, tendons, ligaments, blood, bones, and intestines—is “waste.” Some of it is buried or burned, but a significant portion finds its way into pet food. Perhaps most disturbingly, meat for pet food is also gathered from animals that died before they reached the slaughterhouse—animals that were injured or diseased.
Regardless of the source, undesirable meat is transported to a rendering plant, which is basically a large cooking facility that separates the waste products into raw materials for everything from soap to fertilizer to, yes, pet food. As the slaughterhouse guide famously said in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, “They don’t waste anything here. . . . They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”
In general, making use of waste is a good thing, but not in this case. For starters, factory-farming waste (aka “industry sludge”) does not meet the standards most of us want for our pets. The Association of American Feed Control Officials, a nonprofit organization made up of state officials who are responsible for enforcing state laws concerning the safety of animal feed, indicates in its regulations that “feces from commercial poultry, which has been thermally dehydrated to a moisture content not in excess of 15%,” can be used as “crude proteins” for pets. Yum.
But more subtly, the pet food industry funnels additional money to the factory-farming industry. It compensates meat producers for byproducts that would otherwise go to waste. As a result, meat producers have less incentive to reduce waste by keeping their animals healthier and happier. The extra profit may also allow the meat industry to keep the price of human-grade meat lower than it otherwise would be, encouraging consumption.
It’s not just that the interests of the pet food and factory farming industries align. In some cases, the pet food industry is the factory farming industry. Cargill, for example—a major meat supplier and the largest privately held corporation in the United States—owns Pro-Pet, an Ohio-based manufacturer of private label and co-manufactured pet foods. And Tyson—the world’s second-largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork—recently purchased American Proteins and AMPRO Products, companies that render animal byproducts into pet food. As the former president and chief executive officer Tom Hayes put it, “rendering plays a key role in growing our business . . . no part of the animal goes to waste, and we can recycle valuable ingredients into feed for pets. . . .”
Pet owners—especially those who are sensitive to animal welfare and environmentally conscious—face a dilemma. Cats are obligate carnivores; they need to eat meat. And although dogs are omnivores and can be vegetarian, it’s more difficult to ensure they are getting the nutrients they need on a vegetarian diet. Higher welfare, more sustainable meat exists, but it’s extremely rare and expensive compared to the factory-farmed kind.
One solution on the horizon is cell-cultured meat, grown from biopsied animal cells. Humans are already eating cell-cultured meat in Singapore, and the pet food industry is jumping on board. Wild Earth, for example, announced recently that it had developed a cell-cultured meat broth topper for dogs that will be available to consumers in 2023. And Because, Animals has developed cell-cultured mouse treats for cats, which they hope to have on the market by 2024. Though there are reasons to be skeptical that cell-cultured meat for pets will ever reach price parity with conventional meat, it’s still one of the most promising avenues toward ending factory farming.
The meat industry’s narrative that rendering byproducts into pet food benefits the planet by reducing waste. In fact, it’s just another way for them to profit. The only way to solve the problems associated with factory farming is to put an end to the industry altogether. That means changing not only what humans eat, but what our furry friends eat, too.
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