Pet Food Supply Safe, Experts Say

Jul. 7–The human food supply may appear safe following the discovery of the nation’s first homegrown mad cow, but what about the food that Fido and Fluffy eat?

It’s a question that pet owners are bound to ask since the announcement last week that a

Texas-raised cow was infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The cow, from a Waco rendering plant, was to become pet food.

“The beef for the steakhouse and the beef for pet food, those are at opposite ends of the spectrum,” said Rick Bauer, vice president of Champion Pet Foods in Waco.

“For the steakhouse, those are grain fed animals, younger than 30 months,” he said. “For pet food, those are typically the downer animals — non-ambulatory — or dead.”

Feeding companion animals is a huge business. Americans spent $13.4 billion on cat and dog food in 2004, according to the Pet Food Institute in Washington.

More than 36 percent of U.S. households have one or more dogs, and nearly 34 percent of Americans have at least one cat in their home, the group said. Today, the pet dog population is over 60 million, and the pet cat population is more than 75 million.

Government agencies and pet food groups maintain safeguards to protect pet food, said Steven Payne, a spokesman for the Pet Food Institute.

“Pet food is more highly regulated than baby food,” he said.

And, no matter which cow turns into chow, “dogs don’t get (BSE) at all,” Mr. Payne said.

The process by which some cattle travel from the farm to the food dish is slightly different than that for meat destined for the steakhouse.

Most notably, so-called “downer” cows — cattle with a variety of afflictions, from broken limbs or fatal infections — can become part of dog and cat food, though they are prohibited from human consumption.

All meat products, whether for human or animal consumption, start, unsurprisingly, on the farm.

Some of the 96 million head of cattle nationally are chosen for the pet-food track simply because they are “thin, in poor condition,” said Beau Reagan, vice president for research and knowledge management at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in Denver.

“They don’t have a lot of muscle on them,” he said. “Basically, you have as much bone as you do meat coming off the animals.”

The cattle are slaughtered and rendered — ground and cooked under pressure to separate fat from protein and minerals.

The rendered material — meat and bone meal and tallow — is then bought by pet food manufacturers. Those ingredients — along with corn, chicken or fish meal and other supplements — are used to make many dry pet foods.

Such products are prohibited from cattle feed, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Cattle experts say all animals, whether headed for the human or pet food chain, undergo a strict process to ensure safety. Downer cattle are given a “rapid test,” which have results in three days or less.

“They’re sensitive to the point that if they’re going to err, they’ll err on the side of being a false positive,” Mr. Reagan said.

If the rapid test is positive, he said the animal is subjected to further testing.

The symptoms of downer cattle — inability to stand or walk, nervousness and excitability — make them difficult to distinguish from cows suffering from the rare brain-wasting disease.

If mad cow disease is determined, or even if the tests are inconclusive, the animal carcasses are incinerated.

So far, the government has only found two downer cattle with BSE — the original case found in December 2003 and the most recent discovery of a Texas beef cow.

The new regulations sharply reduced the market for downer cows, which can now be bought by only pet-food renderers.

Payment for such cows — which can fetch between $100 and $150 per animal — is far below the market for healthy cows, said David Anderson, a livestock market analyst and a professor at Texas A&M’s University Cooperative Extension Service.

Healthy cattle, those destined for steakhouses, sell for as much as $1,050 per head, said Steve Kay with Cattle Buyers Weekly.

At the Champion plant in Waco, a 12-year-old cow tested positive for BSE. Mr. Bauer, the company’s vice president, declined to reveal the name of the hauler who brought in the cow.

But generally, the animals arrive in varying conditions, via an army of independent haulers, mostly “little guys” who own their own trucks, he said.

Mr. Bauer said his five-person company makes up to 10,000 pounds a day of dog food, mostly for the greyhound industry.

Champion processes up to 25 head of cattle a day, most of them from Texas. About half of the cattle are already dead. But if those cattle have been dead for more than a few hours, they’d be rejected, he added.

Staff writer Karen Robinson-Jacobs contributed to this report.

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