Human remains are supposed to be cremated if not interred with the body. After an autopsy, any organs removed are replaced, though not exactly correctly. Only samples taken are kept. There are some cases of human remains being just dumped out with the trash to wind up in the land fill.
Prior to a body being shipped via airlines, the funeral home removes the intestines and disposes of them. If no autopsy has been done, and the body is not cut open, they use a hook shoved up the anus to fish them out. This is done to prevent swelling and possible explosion of the body in the low pressure cargo hold.
Some meat plants salvage blood, bone and odd bits to be used in fertilizer and other products, like sausage. Most have salvage ponds out back where the refuse left on the floors goes when sluiced off. These ponds can get really stinky in the summer and in the case of a pork processing plant, get the EPA involved.
It seems that we have buyers for every part of an animal run through a processing plant. Feathers for pillow makers, feces, blood, gristle, bone, unusable organ meat goes to fertilizer plants, though some can go to pet food or commercial feed plants. (Some of the disease problem we’ve developed in chicken is from selling chicken poop to feed companies, who process it into chicken and cow feed and sell it back to the providers. These same geniuses decided that herbivores can eat a percentage of meat protein processed from their slaughtered cousins into their feed for a quicker muscle gain.)
Hides have a market, even chicken feet are sold for soup. (Yuck!) Animals like cows with horns still attached have the horns cut off and shipped to glue factories or craft makers, even the skull is sold intact for specialty art or ground into bone meal for food or fertilizer. I think even the tuft of hair at the end of the tail has a market. Someone told me that scrapple contains such items as pork anuses, lips and whatever else no one wants to actually know about.
A one ton cow goes in one end and the total waste comes out weighing about a pound.
The whole process is somewhat disgusting and shocking but efficient. I just wonder about the people who dream up marketable uses for these odd bits.
I can just imagine some guy staring at a big vat of pork pricks and figuring out how he could make money off of them. I mean, consider the guy who first decided cow and pork ears could make doggie chews and be used in ‘meat food products’.
