Seafood on display in Goss's Seafood on Vermont and W 60th St.
© Alaena Hostetter

From Cosmetics to Animal Feed: What Happens to Stray or Deceased Animals Found on the Streets of Los Angeles.

In the back of a Westside grocery store, rows of raw, gleaming seafood are piled high in large glass display cases. Long, grayish bodies marked with black stripes carry the exotic moniker "Tiger Shrimp - From Vietnam," while smaller, blue shrimp are tagged, "White Shrimp - From Indonesia."

As customers point to selections through the glass, employees grab fistfuls of slippery crustaceans and throw them on a scale. The fish is bagged up, brought home and made into tonight's shrimp scampi or grilled kabobs.

Little do shellfish-lovers know what they are possibly consuming: dead animal renderings. For people who pop down shrimp cocktail or slurp a spoonful of hearty gumbo, what the shrimp feeds on probably never crosses their minds.

But these aren't just any dead animals. They may be your beloved Fido or Mittens, who ended up impounded at a Los Angeles City animal shelter and euthanized. These animals, along with those found on the street (stray or deceased), are fated for a local rendering plant, where their bodies may be used in products ranging from cosmetics to animal feed.

The city of Los Angeles is responsible for the disposal of these animals. The Bureau of Sanitation, which picks them up from the shelters on a daily basis, trucks the bodies to the West Coast Rendering facility in Vernon, an industrial area south of downtown.

The contract between the city and West Coast Rendering states that the plant will provide pick-up and rendering services for three years, from 2006 to 2009. This contract is worth $648,000 plus an additional service fee of $200 per ton of animals brought in monthly.

"We've held this contract with West Coast for the past 30 years," said Nat Isaac, project manager for the Bureau of Sanitation's dead animal disposal program. "This is our method of choice and it's always how we've dealt with the animals that have been euthanized or found on the streets."

Every month for the past three years, the city has delivered 30 tons, or 60,000 pounds, of animal bodies to West Coast Rendering's facility, according to Isaac. The plant is required to keep monthly records and provide them to the city.

The sheer number of animal bodies may be a result of overcrowding in the city animal shelters. There are currently 50,000 animals housed in six animal shelters across the city, according to L.A. Animal Services. Most of the animals are cats and dogs.

The city is making efforts to cut down on the number of animals euthanized by following a no-kill policy in its shelters. At the beginning of 2008, the city enacted a law requiring most dogs and cats to be spayed or neutered by the time they are 4 months old. Still, the city euthanized about 15,000 animals last year, according to L.A. Animal Services.

"Unfortunately, as much as we try to follow a no-kill policy, it's impossible not to euthanize some animals," said Jim Bickhart, Policy Deputy at the Mayor's Office. "We have animals that are so sick or injured or so unadoptable that we have to euthanize them, and these bodies have to be disposed of in some way."

Animals that have been euthanized are picked up every day from the shelters by a specialized sanitation truck that is refrigerated and sealed. Other animal bodies, such as roadkill and even expired horses from the Los Angeles Police Department, are also brought to the plant, Isaac said.

Upon arrival at the facility, the animals are boiled to separate the dry and wet materials. The wet fraction consists of oil used for biofuels and in cosmetics, such as lipstick, according to Isaac. The dry fraction is made up of bone and hair, which is ground into a powder and sold offshore as meal feed for shrimp and fish farms, mostly located in Southeast Asia.

About 75 percent of farmed shrimp is produced in Asia, mostly in China or Thailand, and the remaining comes from South America, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Vince Gorman, owner of the West Coast Rendering Company, had no comment about the operation after speaking with Neon Tommy on the phone.

"Our company no longer speaks to the media since our operations have been given a bad rap," said Gorman. Attempts to reach employees at other rendering plants in the area were unsuccessful, as well. As a result, specific vendors in Southeast Asia that import these seafood goods to the United States could not be located.

"The plant provides a necessary service," Isaac said. "It recycles 95 to 100 percent of these animal bodies, leaving virtually no waste."

The use of animal renderings is not illegal and is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. According to the FDA, rendering of poultry and other animal tissues has been practiced for over a hundred years as a means of salvaging valuable protein and fat content from what would otherwise be waste material. For many years, end products from rendering have been used to feed animals.

This includes commercial animal farms here in the U.S. Both wet and dry rendering processes are designed to ensure that the resultant animal feed ingredients pose no threat of disease transmission to animals that are fed the material nor to the health of humans consuming their edible products (meat, milk, and eggs).

"Even with regulations, the fact that humans are consuming products that contain these animal parts is repulsive," said Kathleen Riordan, President of the Board of Commissioners for L.A. Animal Services.

Riordan points to the drugs that are used to euthanize animals at the shelters that may make their way into food products. Also, antibiotics or other drugs administered to animals may not be completely eliminated in the rendering process.

"There should be some tighter regulations for the animal feed industries, because most people probably have no idea what's in the meats they're eventually eating," Riordan said.

In order to prove trace amounts of these animal renderings exist in the seafood, samples would need to be submitted for testing. According to several consumer food testing labs, this process would cost at least $10,000 and take several months to complete.

Farm-raised tilapia could have ingested traces of euthanized animals
© Alaena Hostetter

Those in the fish-farming industry, known as aquaculture, use animal proteins instead of plant-based meals to feed shrimp, fish, and other organisms in order to increase their sizes. A 2007 study by the University of Stirling in Scotland found a significant difference in the growth performance of these organisms when fed proteins derived from animal renderings.

In Europe, farmers are banned from feeding animal renderings to their livestock after an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, in England 15 years ago.

While the land animal farm industry is controlled by local and federal regulations, there has been little oversight to the aquaculture industry's use of animal renderings. The FDA inspects only between 1 and 2 percent of imported shrimp, according to Food and Water Watch, a non-profit consumer watchdog organization that monitors water cleanliness and food safety.

The government requires manufacturers to label shrimp products with their country of origin and to list whether they are wild or farm-raised. However, these rules don't apply to seafood that's processed, including breaded, cooked, canned, fried, or any other alteration to the original state.

Health hazards can also exist during the handling of the deceased animal bodies. Members of DELTA Rescue, a local animal rights organization and shelter, say they have witnessed the unsanitary conditions at the West Coast Rendering plant.

The group conducted an undercover operation during the summer of 2008 in which people with hidden cameras captured gruesome images of employees throwing animal bodies into piles on the ground, which was littered with pails of blood and guts along beer cans and other debris.

"It was a complete health hazard," said Shannon Keith, an animal rights attorney who posed as a pet owner looking for her deceased dog. She said plant employees did not challenge her efforts to search through the piles of bodies.

Keith witnessed only one of the employees wearing a facemask, while the other three at the time were smoking and walking on the bodies. She also discovered that the employees failed to remove the collars and tags from the animals before they were rendered. Keith could not disclose how this information would be used specifically because it is part of a case DELTA is currently building.

"To think that these animals end up in consumer products is outrageous," Keith said. "The worst part is that very few people know about pets being mistreated and abused. You would never do this to a human corpse, why would you ever want an animal to be disrespected in this way?"

These practices continue today even in the face of disturbing information, according to Keith. Not only is there a lack of public awareness, but there are also few viable alternatives to dispose of these animal bodies.

"We can't change this situation if this issue is never brought to light on a larger scale," said Pamelyn Ferdin, a member of the Animal Defense League of Los Angeles, a grassroots animal-rights group.

Ferdin also blames L.A. Animal Services General Manager Ed Boks for fostering an atmosphere of apathy that filters all the way down to the shelter employees, who don't push hard enough to adopt out the animals that are being euthanized and rendered.

"That kind of lazy and inept attitude starts at the top," Ferdin says. "Boks doesn't successfully encourage and rally his employees, so the shelters become overcrowded, which puts the animals in danger and then they have to euthanize to make room."

In October, the City Personnel Committee called a special meeting to discuss the firing of Boks after more than half of the city's shelter workers signed a petition declaring no confidence in his leadership.

"Mayor Villaraigosa stands behind Boks and doesn't think he should be removed," said Bickhart. "He has a tough job in one of the largest cities in America. It's an unfortunate coincidence with the economy down and families being forced out of their homes due to foreclosure. There's only going to be more animals on the streets and fewer places to put them."

Other city officials also blame Boks for not addressing this issue, despite the efforts made by animal-rights groups.

"We all knew about this problem, but we never had the chance to scrutinize it because it was never placed on the agenda," said Marie Atake, a former Commissioner who left the Animal Services Board this past August. She cited Boks' lack of accountability and ineffectiveness, which made any efforts on her part "futile."

"There are much, much larger problems in the department," Atake said. "We tried to submit pages of problems to the Mayor's office, but nothing is done. Boks dictates the agenda, and only one person is behind Boks, and that's the Mayor."

Atake is not the only one who has run into bureaucratic roadblocks. Riordan, who has been on the Board since 1999, has also struggled to get issues addressed by Animal Services.

"I don't think the rendering plant has even been given a thought," Riordan said. "It's like walking through a minefield with a straightjacket on trying to get anything passed."

Finding other options to dispose of the animal bodies is the biggest challenge, according to Riordan. While the idea of cremation has been suggested, city officials are concerned about the ash and pollution that could be generated.

"With the vast numbers of bodies that are taken away, cremating them on such a massive scale would contribute to the already huge smog and pollution problem we have in Los Angeles," Isaac said.

"We shy away from incineration because the more we burn, the worse the air quality becomes," Bickhart said. "What are our other alternatives then?"

Until other methods are considered, rendering may be the only way the city can handle the thousands of pounds of animal bodies that are collected each year.

"We're willing to find another solution, something that we could work on in concert with the Bureau of Sanitation," Riordan said. "It's got to be a collective effort by the public and the city, but if we're not doing more to explore and research this matter, we're stuck."