a friend told me that dead zoo animals are rendered into dog food and make-up
apparently animal lard is rendered to make cosmetics. can this be true? anybody got a cite? i have noticed that you never see a grave for jumbo the elephant 
Well, I imagine that some cosmetics are made from animal fats, most of them are not.
Typically cosmetics use plant collagens and whatnot, but I’m sure some manufacturers still use animal bits. Avon, for instance, will not difinitively say if there are animal byproducts in their cosmetic line (at least they wouldn’t say to my Muslim friend who was inquiring).
Given that our local nature center often supplements the carnivore’s diets with fresh roadkill (usually deer), I’d be surprised if zoos don’t feed their dead animals to their other animals, unless they died of something problematic like a communicable disease. It’s expensive to feed big carnivores.
It would also depend on what industries are available locally. No one is going to ship an animal carcass a long distance. They’d probably end up wherever dead horses go.
Well, we’re not a zoo, exactly (we’re a large aquarium), but here almost all of our animal carcasses are disposed of as “medical waste”, usually after a necropsy is performed. We have a contract with a medical waste company who comes once a week (or sooner if something large dies) to retrieve carcasses; they are stored in a freezer until that time.
Some tissues (including bones…actually, most commonly this means “bones”) may be used for in-house education or research purposes or donated to facilities who have requested tissues for such purposes. At our institution we have a review process for any tissue requests to determine if regulations permit us to comply and if the research/program is worthwhile. For example, we get a lot of requests for marine mammal tissues since we have a marine animal rescue program, and all of these must be approved by NOAA Fisheries (it’s a federal crime to possess marine mammal artifacts in the US without a letter of authorization from NOAA Fisheries).
Anyway, I suspect most zoos, at least the reputable ones, follow similar protocols to the ones we use. It’s a really unsafe practice to feed out animals that die to other collection animals since it’s rare to actually know the cause of death of an animal for several hours or even days (depending on whether the cause is obvious during a gross necropsy or whether you have to submit samples to be examined by a veterinary pathologist). It’s also probably against USDA regulations for most exotic mammals. It’s certainly against federal regulations for marine mammals. Carcass disposition is one of the pieces of information that we, as an accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, are requested to submit to the International Species Information System when updating our inventories…so I’m sure the AZA generally frowns upon dead zoo exhibit animals being used as food for other zoo animals or the publics’ pets.
Michele
I read an article in a magazine about this a couple years back. For the big animals, like elephants or giraffes, they bury the bodies in a secret location (so no one steals them), until all the flesh is gone (eaten by bugs, whatever), and then they donate the skeleton to a museum.
There’s an article in the Washington Post newspaper on Friday that says 23 tigers died of bird flu after eating diseased chickens in a Thai zoo. The article goes on to say that another 40 tigers will be killed because they tested positive for the disease. I’d imagine that feeding practices among the world’s zoos will be drastically changed from now on.
Cindy, a long time elephant at the Tacoma, Washington Point Defiance Zoo died a few years ago. Her body was scheduled to be delivered to an animal processing plant for cremation. But someone from the transfer company decided differently and the body was delivered and buried at a landfill instead. By the time the error had been discovered, the body was too far decomposed to be removed. News story here.
That makes sense. I meant to add that I’ve seen requests come through from museums for skeletons of certain species and we have a request from one of our curators to perform a “cosmetic necropsy” when possible if any of our freshwater Australian turtles die because some of them aren’t represented anywhere in museum collections. I was thinking further about this on the way home and I suspect that even in cases like the above a necropsy would have to have been performed since the USDA usually wants to know if a cause of death has been determined when a large mammal dies. The USDA shows up to inspect us every 2-3 years and always asks to see medical records (FYI, USDA currently only regulates mammals, excluding mice and rats). And if the animal had been under medical care for any significant period of time, it is likely to have antibiotics or other therapeutics in its system that make it unsuitable as a food source.
Hmm…in what way? Most zoologic institutions either get their food animals and fruits/vegetables from many of the same sources restaurants and grocery stores use, raise their own animals in-house for that purpose (i.e. feeder mice and rats, crickets, grubs, fruit flies, etc), or they get them from specialty suppliers of feeder insects or exotic animal commercial pelleted diets. The whole point of these practices is to eliminate the kind of problems you cited. The example you mentioned seems to be an issue of quality control from the farm that was the source of the chickens…does it say whether the chickens were known or suspected to be ill prior to being fed out? I know avian flu is a big problem right now in that part of the world.