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WASHINGTON (AP) - Roughly 56,000 pigs that were fed contaminated pet food scraps are safe to be eaten, the Agriculture Department said Tuesday.
The all-clear allows the pigs to be slaughtered for human consumption. They had been on hold or under quarantine in seven states: California, Illinois, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah.
The feed included scraps from pet food made using an imported Chinese ingredient later found to have been tainted by the industrial chemical melamine and related compounds. While those chemicals proved lethal to an unknown number of dogs and cats fed tainted pet food, the contaminants were sufficiently diluted when mixed into farm animal feed to not pose a risk to pigs — or the people who eat them.
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