Stench From Valley Proteins’ Rendering Plant Causes Writer to Wonder, “What We’re Feeding Dogs.”
People who live in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near the Valley Proteins rendering plant describe the misery of living with the suffocating stench that emanates from the plant. “There is stink, and there is stink,” writes a local reporter. “There is stink you can live with, and there is stink that makes every breath a chore.” He said it made him wonder, “what we’re feeding dogs.”
Not uncommon in the rendering industry is the surrounding neighborhood complaints from those unfortunate to have to work or live within the vicinity of a rendering plant. It is for this objectionable industry by-product, the stink, that most rendering plants are far from highly populated areas and in some of the poorest neighborhoods.
But they have to go somewhere and Fayetteville, North Carolina, is as good a place as any.
What goes on in there?
For the reporter who wonders what we’re feeding dogs, can’t be blamed for his ignorance because rendering plants, while notoriously secretive, are shrouded in mystery where the only clue to what goes on inside a plant is the stench. Inside those plants, they cook down condemned, diseased and decaying animal flesh, the parts leftover and castoff waste of the human food side of the animal agriculture industry. Renderers like Valley Protein claim they are doing the country a service, and the products they are producing are safe and sterile. Transforming guts, by pulverizing and cooking them down into clean animal fat and dried meat by-products. Ingredients which have made the owners of Valley Proteins incredibly rich.
Stinking rich.
J.J. and his half a billion
J.J. Smith, the CEO of Valley Proteins and owner of the third-largest privately-owned rendering business in the U.S., makes some serious cash by turning meat guts into gold, grossed 500 million dollars last year.
As J.J.’s father used to say, “My dad always told me it was most profitable to be in a business most people do not want to be associated with.” He boasts, “I will give you $5 million and five years and see if you can get one built within eight miles of your house. I don’t think you can.” J.J. summed it up this way: “Do you know anyone who wants a rendering plant near their home?”
J.J., who drives a custom BMW and flies to work on the company’s private jet, sheepishly admits to the dark side of the rendering industry: recycling dead pets and road-kill. But, he hastens to add, it is “a very small part of the business that we don’t like to advertise.”
The story that blew the lid off
In an article published in a Baltimore City Paper in 1995 effectively blew the lid off the rendering industry titled, ‘Meltdown: What Happens to Dead Animals at Baltimore’s Only Rendering Plant.’ In the article, it said that Valley Proteins “sells inedible animal parts and rendered material to Alpo, Heinz, and Ralston-Purina,” but Valley Proteins insisted that it does not sell “dead pet by-products” to pet food firms since “they are all very sensitive to the recycled pet potential.”
The mythology of the dead pets in pet food has never died down since the article was written twenty-four years ago. And not since that time has the rendering industry granted an interviewer to anyone outside the feed industry. They stayed silent until Ted Kerasote, until the author of Pukka’s Promise: The Quest for Longer-lived Dogs, began by calling the National Renderers Association, where a high-placed official told him that to his knowledge no plant in the United States currently rendered dogs and cats into pet food.
But as he later found, “Rendered products are used ubiquitously, and someone needed to speak to this issue of dogs and cats being killed in shelters and then being rendered with a firsthand eye witness report. There’s been so much misinformation and hyperbole around the issue of rendering – I wanted to lay it to rest once and for all and tell it as truthfully as I could about how rendered products go into pet foods.”
Kerasote managed to get inside a few rendering plants, including one in British Columbia, to see what parts are made into the rendered products, which often appear in commercial pet foods as various meals and fats. He was so disgusted with what he found at the rendering plants that he removed all commercial pet food from his dog’s diet.
The worst ingredients
Next time you are shopping for pet food, just know that any ingredient in which the species is not named and only referred to as ‘animal’ means that it came from a rendering plant. They cannot name the species because all the animals, whether they include pets or roadkill, are turned into an indistinguishable mass known as ‘meat and bone meal,’ ‘animal fat,’ ‘animal digest,’ ‘animal by-products’ and ‘animal protein.’
Ask yourself — when you look at the colorful packaging labeled with words such as ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome,’ the ads that picture sumptuous grilled chicken, juicy cuts of meat, brightly colored fruit and vegetables — is it truth in advertising or is it deception?
Read more about it:
Value Added: Farm to table? He makes money on what’s left
Rendering Unto Oprah; How Dead Pets, Bad Brains, and Free Speech Landed Me in Amarillo
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7 Comments
Jahmal Branch
I was a truck driver for valley protein from 2019-2023
Mollie Morrissette
Can you tell me what you saw? What was working there like?
A Traveler
You are right to keep up with what you feed your animals. Pets or otherwise.
Also, what you eat as well.
I know from experience all dog food is not equal and you get what you pay for.
The material is ground up, cooked down and blended to the specifications required.
All food processing plants I have been in stink in one part or another.
The rendering plant is turning what is not normally eaten in America, or what is surplus, into a saleable product.
If the end product does not seem suitable for your pet, then just make your own pet food using what your buy from the grocery store.
Keep in mind that left on their own pets eat off the ground, drink out of the toilet, eat roadkill and some are sometimes prone to coprophagia.
How do you think the mommy cleans up her pups?
If you eat raw oysters, you are eating them guts and all.
I took a class of Government and business relations under a professor who left at the end of the semester to head the FTC.
One of the topics was food standards.
The questions:
How much rat hair will you tolerate in your Peanut butter?
Human hair?
How about insect parts in your bread?
Metal shavings in your hamburger?
Fecal residue in your milk, butter and cheese? Clean them all you want but some gets in the system and is caught in the filter prior to the milk tank. Enjoyed many a cup of still warm milk as I pulled the filter and rinsed it off.
All of these items, or ingredients, have a maximum allowable level.
If you enjoy eating out, do not go looking around in the kitchen.
I cleared a popular chicken restaurant after complaining about how the food was being handled in plain view of those of us waiting in line.
Dish water being slopped into the trays and the person doing the serving coughing in their hand and touching the food.
Contaminates are everywhere, including your own kitchen.
Hince the adage – if you like sausage do not watch it being made.
If you have a big following, why not contact a manufacturer and ask for a plant tour?
I’m sure if you present an outline for an article that is biased toward how they ensure quality, a positive spin from their perspective, and make it clear you want them to help you make edits so it is accurate you will get a lot of cooperation.
These people want to educate the public.
Go to the rendering plants as well.
Remember, all plants stink somewhere.
Why not start at a chicken processing plant, then go to the rendering plant, then to the pet food and farm animal food processors?
That will give you the entire cycle.
Mike Rowe’s show “Dirty Jobs” had sessions at a rendering plant if I recall.
There is a show somewhere about a man in Las Vagas who turns all the restaurant scraps into hog food.
Best Regards,
A Traveler
Charles Rogers
I own an electrical safety training snd have been in more than 8 Valley Protein plants. I know what goes on there. I have watched the large blue dump trucks dump stench piles of every kind of animal you can think of. I have also toured the process. Most people don’t know that they reclaim the oil or grease by-product while the are boiling the rotten soon-to-be dehydrated meat snd sell the oil to make-up and lip balm companies. The golden meal is sold yo name brand dog food manufacturers such as Purina for one.
Alexandra Medlin
Hello, I do not mean this in any type of malicious way, I think you are very brave for digging into all the horrors and unethical behavior of the pet food industry but what this forum lacks is a solution to the problem “now i have these pets and they need to eat, and the stuff I’ve been brainwashed into spending 50$ a week into buying is what’s causing all these health problems in my cats and i need to feed them something that won’t hurt them and destroy their life, I dont think you will ever win against these monsters, they go too far and anyone who gets loud enough gets “taken care of”, better to spend your energy on a solution so that those of us who believe and support you aren’t just “shit out of luck” now that we know the truth, just a suggestion.
Jeffho
There products has fly larva and truck fluids. It is all by products of animals. Bones, guts, feathers you name it.
Janie Knetzer
Thank you so much for sharing an up to date article on this topic. There’s a reason why many dogs and cats are suffering with continuous health problems including skin, heart, kidney and cancer. This make me sick and people have got to wake up. The unfortunate thing is that so many believe because they see a warm an fuzzy commercial on t.v. so therefore, it must be true. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be farther from the truth!
Thanks again for sharing.
Janie