The Animal Cruelty Hiding in Your Pet’s Food

Pigs, calves, and hens raised in cruel confinement don’t just disappear after slaughter — parts of them end up in your pet’s food too.

Most pet owners never think about where the animal-derived ingredients in their dog or cat food actually come from, or how the animals behind them were raised. But animal agriculture routinely confines breeding pigs, dairy calves, and egg-laying hens in ways most consumers have never seen and would be horrified by — and the byproducts of that same system are what get rendered into meat and bone meal, animal fat, and byproduct meal in conventional pet food. A recent fight in Congress over a bill called the Save Our Bacon Act put a spotlight on just how far the industry will fight to protect these practices. Here’s what’s actually going on, and why it matters every time you fill your pet’s bowl.

Gestation Crates: “A Coffin for Years on End”

Breeding sows in conventional pork operations are often confined to gestation crates — metal enclosures roughly two feet by seven feet, barely bigger than the animal’s own body. The sow cannot turn around, and in many operations she spends most of her adult, pregnant life this way, cycle after cycle. Roughly 60 percent of all breeding sows raised in the U.S. today are still confined to individual gestation crates like these. Josh Balk, who led the California ballot campaign that eventually banned the sale of crate-raised pork in that state, described it bluntly: pigs held in these crates are “forced to live inside what, in essence, is a coffin for years on end.” Confined pigs also suffer disproportionately from urinary tract infections, a leading cause of death in gestation-crate operations, driven by inactivity and infrequent urination.

Veal Crates: Taken From Their Mothers Within Days

Veal exists because of how the dairy industry works: a cow only produces milk after giving birth, so dairy cows are kept continuously pregnant to keep the milk flowing. Roughly half of those calves are born male — and a male calf is useless to a dairy operation, since he’ll never produce milk. Those male dairy calves are what become veal. They’re typically taken from their mothers within a day or two of birth and confined to individual crates or stalls roughly two and a half feet wide, too narrow to turn around in. They’re fed an all-liquid milk substitute deliberately low in iron and fiber to induce mild anemia, which keeps their flesh pale — the trait the veal market pays for. That diet and confinement together cause abnormal gut development, stomach ulcers, joint problems, and chronic stress behaviors, and independently raise their risk of severe diarrhea, already the leading cause of death in calves under one month old. Most veal calves are slaughtered at 16 to 18 weeks old; about 15 percent are killed at under three weeks and sold as “bob veal” for low-grade products like hot dogs.

Battery Cages — And Why “Cage-Free” Isn’t What You Think

A battery cage is a small wire enclosure, typically shared with 5 to 10 other hens, that gives each bird a floor footprint of just 67 to 86 square inches — in plain terms, about the size of a full-size iPad, at most a standard sheet of printer paper. That’s the entire living space for a hen’s whole laying life: where she stands, eats, sleeps, and lays every egg she ever produces, sharing that same tiny footprint with several other birds, unable to ever fully spread her wings, nest, or perch. The wire floor causes foot lesions and bumblefoot infections from never touching solid ground, and ammonia from accumulated waste beneath the cages is a genuine respiratory hazard. As of 2025, 53 percent of the entire U.S. egg-laying flock — roughly 164 million hens — is still confined to battery cages like these.

“Cage-free” is a real improvement in one narrow sense — the individual wire cage is gone — but it typically means tens of thousands of hens packed into a single barn on the floor instead, with the same ammonia problem now coming from an open floor rather than a pit. It says nothing about outdoor access, space, or enrichment.

An Industry Fighting to Keep It This Way: The Save Our Bacon Act

These practices aren’t just persisting by inertia — the industry is actively lobbying to protect them. The Save Our Bacon Act would bar states from enforcing their own animal welfare standards on products sold within their borders whenever those standards differ from the rules of the state where the animal was raised. Concretely: California’s Proposition 12 requires that pork sold there come from crate-free operations, regardless of where the pig was raised. Under Save Our Bacon, California would lose the legal authority to enforce that against out-of-state pork. Roughly fourteen other states have similar confinement laws, and all would lose that same enforcement power — a race to the bottom that strips any market incentive to go crate-free.

A coalition of 28 Democratic senators called the bill “particularly draconian in that it aims to negate state and local laws when there are no federal standards to take their place, creating an overnight regulatory vacuum.” Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods — two of the largest meat processors in the country — are backing the bill directly or through their trade groups. Smithfield, notably, is a China-owned company controlling roughly a quarter of all U.S. pork production, and stands to gain the most if the bill passes. Tyson’s stake is different: pork is a comparatively small part of its business, only around 11 percent of total revenue, dwarfed by its chicken and beef segments — but Tyson dominates the rendering side of the industry regardless of which animal it comes from, estimated to account for over half of all U.S. revenue in meabyproductct processing.

How This Cruelty Ends Up in the Bag

Here’s where this loops back to your pet’s food bowl. At USDA-inspected slaughter facilities, anything that fails inspection — diseased tissue, tumors, abscesses, pus-contaminated organs, tapeworm- and liver-fluke-infested parts — gets routed into bins legally marked “U.S. Inspected and Condemned.” That condemned material gets rendered into meat and bone meal, animal fat, and byproduct meal, and both Smithfield and Tyson operate large in-house rendering operations feeding directly into pet food and animal feed. Tyson alone processes an estimated 45 percent of all U.S. poultry byproducts this way.

Put it together: the same companies spending millions to keep breeding sows in crates too small to turn around are also running the rendering operations that turn condemned, diseased material into ingredients in your pet’s food. It’s one supply chain, not two separate stories. Consumers don’t buy directly from Smithfield or Tyson — pet food manufacturers do — which is exactly why the link is invisible on the label. “Meat and bone meal” and “animal byproducts” tell you nothing about which company rendered it or how the source animal was confined.

One more thread worth a brief mention: farmed salmon and other aquaculture, a common pet food ingredient in its own right, are frequently fed rendered animal byproducts too — a separate supply chain I plan to cover in a future article.

What the Pet Food Industry Has Said

Nothing, so far. A search of public statements from the Pet Food Institute, the American Feed Industry Association, and the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) turns up no position on the Save Our Bacon Act. That’s likely because it reads as a livestock-housing fight rather than an ingredient-definition issue — but it also means pet food’s own trade groups have stayed silent on a bill with real implications for the ingredients they help define.

What the Labels Actually Mean — And What You Can Buy Instead

If you want to buy meat, eggs, or pet food raised in a genuinely better way, the label alone won’t tell you:

• Cage-free means only that: no individual cage—nothing about outdoor access, space, or enrichment.
• Free-range legally requires “access to the outdoors” — no minimum size, duration, or quality. A tiny pop-hole to a narrow concrete pad most birds never reach satisfies the law.
• Pasture-raised on chicken meat now means something real: as of November 2024, USDA requires the animal to spend the majority of its life on land with actual rooted vegetation.
• Pasture-raised on eggs currently means nothing legally. Eggs fall under FDA jurisdiction, not USDA, and the FDA has no definition for the term — a petition to close this gap is still pending.

Since the government hasn’t closed that gap, the only reliable check is a third-party certification, not the word itself:

• Animal Welfare Approved by AGW — the strongest. Requires pasture or range access for every animal, at every level.
• Certified Humane — real standards, but its baseline allows some indoor confinement. Look for its specific “Pasture Raised” tier: 108 square feet of outdoor space per bird, year-round.
• Global Animal Partnership (GAP) — rates farms 1 through 5+; Step 1 or 2 is barely different from factory farming, only Step 3 and up requires real outdoor access. It’s the same system whether the meat lands in a grocery store or in pet food — check for the step number, since it’s not always on the main logo.
• ASPCA’s Better Chicken Commitment — a welfare policy for meat chickens covering breed, stocking density, and slaughter method, areas the certifications above don’t fully cover.

You don’t have to memorize any of this: the ASPCA’s own Certification and Label Guide ranks these the same way, and their ShopKind tool filters automatically — GAP products only make the cut at Step 2 and above. It’s a free, searchable map of higher-welfare meat, egg, dairy, and pet food sources by location. A small number of pet food companies have put this into practice: GAP maintains its own page for pet parents listing certified brands, a better place to look than any single name I could give you here, since the list changes. Certification isn’t the only path to trust, either — if a company won’t tell you where its meat and poultry come from, that silence is information on its own.

A Bright Spot: Insect Protein

Insect protein is moving through the actual regulatory pipeline right now, and it’s already on shelves, not just on the horizon. AAFCO has granted official status to dried black soldier fly larvae for use in pet food and animal feed, and it’s already an approved ingredient in adult dog food today. Dried crickets received official AAFCO approval for dog food as well, and cricket-based treats are already available to buy right now, not a someday product. Most recently, dried mealworm meal cleared AAFCO approval in early 2026, the first mealworm ingredient ever approved for U.S. pet food. A growing but still limited number of pet food companies are now using these ingredients, mostly in dry food and treats — wet food formulations are still in development, not yet on the market. None of it requires a slaughterhouse, a rendering vat, or a condemned bin. It’s not mainstream yet, but it’s real, it’s regulated, and it’s exactly the kind of structural alternative this supply chain needs more of.

Why I Recommend Human-Grade Pet Food

Not all meat byproducts are disgusting. The problem is that consumers have no way to tell which is which — a label can’t distinguish clean trim from condemned material. There’s no realistic way for that sorting to happen reliably at a conglomerate the size of Smithfield or Tyson. This is exactly why I’ve long recommended human-grade pet food — not as one option among several, but as the only real alternative that guarantees you’re avoiding this supply chain entirely. Human-grade formulations are made in facilities certified to produce human food, under human food inspection standards.

I should be transparent about where I’m writing from: I’m vegan, and I feel the tension of that choice every day I feed my own cats — obligate carnivores who cannot thrive on a plant-based diet the way I do. I have a privilege most people don’t: I live somewhere I can buy meat from a farmer’s market vendor I know personally, who raises her pigs with real love, even knowing where their lives end. Most pet owners won’t have that option, and I don’t expect them to.

The suffering of livestock raised for pet food ingredients isn’t a footnote to this story. It’s the story. If a pet food company won’t tell you where its meat and poultry come from, you have no way of knowing whether the animals behind that ingredient were raised in conditions like these. That’s reason enough to look elsewhere.

Sources: The American Prospect · U.S. House Clerk official roll call · H.R. 4673 on Congress.gov · California Dept. of Food and Agriculture, Proposition 12 · National Pork Producers Council · Stateline · Civil Eats · Smithfield BioScience · Tyson Ingredient Solutions · eCFR Title 9 Part 311 · eCFR Title 21 § 589.2000 · eCFR Title 9 Part 166 · FDA docket, pasture-raised egg labeling petition · ASPCA · ASPCA ShopKind · Global Animal Partnership · GAP for Pet Parents · Certified Humane · Animal Welfare Approved by AGW · ASPCA Supermarket Scorecard · Better Chicken Commitment · and prior Pet Food Safety News reporting on rendering and denaturing practices: There’s No Such Thing as “Pet Food Grade” Meat — Legally, It’s Either Human Food or It’s Condemned