Canadians who are confident in their food inspection system may dismiss a vegetarian activist’s claims of roadkill used in animal feed as merely fodder in a propaganda war.
But while Howard Lyman’s rhetoric is missing some important contextual information, said a program manager with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, it does contain grains of truth.
“While you’re sitting firmly in your chair, it is true,” said Stan Kirkland.
Renderers pick up dead pigs, cattle, chickens and horses from farms, which they turn into fat, bone meal and meat meal, said Kirkland. They can also pick up roadkill.
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“Pardon the emotion, but if you have a recently killed deer on the side of the road, versus a pig that has died five days ago on a producer’s premises and is sitting outside the barn, which one is the more wholesome product to be rendered?” Kirkland said.
“We have to sometimes get beyond the fact that it was roadkill.”
North American renderers use temperatures, moisture conditions and pressures that are “way above and beyond” the standards for killing organisms in the dead animals, said Kirkland.
The resulting meat meal is “essentially sterile” and can be used as a source of protein in livestock rations, he said.
For the past two years, North American renderers have made sure meat meal from all mammals (other than horses and pigs) does not end up in rations for beef and dairy cattle.
They strictly abide by the regulations, which were prompted by the mad cow disease scare in Great Britain.
“I can say with lots of confidence that ruminant to ruminant (feeding) doesn’t exist,” said Kirkland, adding it was an extra precaution in a system that already ensured dead animals were adequately rendered.
Since most rendering plants have only one processing line, all their meat meal is placed on a prohibited list and does not go into cattle feed.
“There’s enough of a market in chicken and swine feeds to consume the production, and it’s not worth their effort to separate the two different product lines,” said Kirkland.
