i think it’s more that it’s not allowed to be sold for human consumption, but selling things for domesticated animal consumption as “feed stock” is about the most permissive standard in the US, basically unregulated. animals in captivity will eat all kinds of crap, especially omnivores. (CW: animal agriculture / gross)
spoiler
they used to feed ground up chicken parts to chickens, ground up hog parts to hogs, etc… and not even that long ago. generally speaking, a tactic is to feed botched production and byproducts to animals. like food scraps or waste products, etc. for example: if there’s a bout of sickess on a dairy that requires medication which passes into the milk, they’ll still milk the animals to express the milk, but the milk will be isolated and sold to some feed processor OR just taken directly by a person with an animal operation because it’ll be cheap feed.
that’s definitely why they call it a loophole, because no animal farmer would be paying $12/gal for uninspected milk to feed to their hogs when they could go to the store to get pasturized, homogenized milk for like $4/gal. those one-off instances i’m referring to above, like the dairy farmer selling to the hog farmer might be paid the price of transporting the milk + maybe 25 cents a gallon or something, seeing as how an actual dairy processor would only being paying the dairy farmer something like $1.80/gal for chilled liquid milk still fit for human consumption.
that’s kinda why they insist on calling it “pet food” too, because gullible rich people will pay premium bucks to feed their pets absolute garbage-grade feedstock materials if it’s marketed cleverly and convenient.
Why the fuck is it allowed to sell as pet food?
i think it’s more that it’s not allowed to be sold for human consumption, but selling things for domesticated animal consumption as “feed stock” is about the most permissive standard in the US, basically unregulated. animals in captivity will eat all kinds of crap, especially omnivores. (CW: animal agriculture / gross)
spoiler
they used to feed ground up chicken parts to chickens, ground up hog parts to hogs, etc… and not even that long ago. generally speaking, a tactic is to feed botched production and byproducts to animals. like food scraps or waste products, etc. for example: if there’s a bout of sickess on a dairy that requires medication which passes into the milk, they’ll still milk the animals to express the milk, but the milk will be isolated and sold to some feed processor OR just taken directly by a person with an animal operation because it’ll be cheap feed.
that’s definitely why they call it a loophole, because no animal farmer would be paying $12/gal for uninspected milk to feed to their hogs when they could go to the store to get pasturized, homogenized milk for like $4/gal. those one-off instances i’m referring to above, like the dairy farmer selling to the hog farmer might be paid the price of transporting the milk + maybe 25 cents a gallon or something, seeing as how an actual dairy processor would only being paying the dairy farmer something like $1.80/gal for chilled liquid milk still fit for human consumption.
that’s kinda why they insist on calling it “pet food” too, because gullible rich people will pay premium bucks to feed their pets absolute garbage-grade feedstock materials if it’s marketed cleverly and convenient.