Is meat and bone meal safe? It is a reasonable question — and one that carries a lot of history.
In the 1990s, meat and bone meal became synonymous with one of the most alarming food safety crises in modern history. BSE — bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow disease” — killed 178 people, triggered the mass culling of millions of cattle, and caused governments worldwide to ban MBM from animal feed almost overnight.
That history is real. But it was thirty years ago.
The science has advanced significantly since then, the transmission mechanism is now fully understood, and major regulatory bodies — including the European Union — have revised their rules accordingly. So is meat and bone meal safe to use today? The answer depends entirely on how it is used, and where it comes from.
The short answer: Meat and bone meal sourced from healthy, inspected animals and used in non-ruminant feed (pigs, poultry) under current regulatory controls is considered safe under the scientific and regulatory consensus that exists today. The one rule that remains absolute — and always will — is that mammalian MBM cannot be fed to cattle, sheep, or goats. That specific prohibition is the reason classical BSE has effectively been eradicated.
What Actually Caused the BSE Crisis
Understanding whether meat and bone meal is safe today requires understanding precisely what went wrong in the first place — because the cause was specific, not general.
BSE is caused by a prion: an abnormally folded protein that can trigger the same misfolding in healthy brain tissue. Prions are extraordinarily resistant to heat. Standard cooking temperatures that destroy bacteria and viruses have no effect on them.
The crisis was not caused by MBM existing. It was caused by a single catastrophic practice: cattle infected with BSE entered the rendering supply chain, their tissues were processed into MBM, and that MBM was fed back to other cattle. The disease recycled through the herd. Once that feedback loop was established, it compounded — and by the time regulators fully understood what was happening, the contamination was widespread in UK cattle populations.
The critical insight from this history is that prion transmission required two conditions to be met simultaneously: infected source animals in the rendering supply chain, and ruminant-to-ruminant recycling in feed. Remove either condition, and transmission stops.
What the Bans Actually Prohibited — and Why It Matters
The regulatory response of the 1990s and early 2000s was sweeping, but it is important to understand what it was actually targeting.
The core prohibition — which remains in force globally and is not under review anywhere — is the feeding of mammalian-derived MBM to ruminants (cattle, sheep, and goats). This directly eliminates the ruminant-to-ruminant recycling loop that caused the crisis.
- The EU banned mammalian MBM in ruminant feed in 1994.
- Following the scale of the UK outbreak, the EU extended this to a near-total ban on all animal proteins in farmed animal feed from 2001.
- The US banned ruminant-derived protein in ruminant feed in 1997, with additional controls in 2008.
- Canada, Australia, Japan, and most major livestock-producing countries introduced equivalent ruminant feed bans.
These bans were not a judgment that meat and bone meal is inherently unsafe as an ingredient. They were a targeted response to a specific transmission mechanism. Pigs and poultry — monogastric species — were never implicated in BSE transmission, because the disease does not affect them.
What the Science Now Shows About MBM Safety
BSE research since the 1990s has produced a clear and well-validated picture of how the disease works — and does not work.
Classical BSE (the feed-transmitted form) has been effectively eliminated where feed controls are enforced. The last confirmed case of classical BSE in the EU was reported in 2016. By 2021, 24 of the 27 EU member states had achieved “negligible BSE risk” status under international standards. The US has recorded only a handful of BSE cases since surveillance began, all managed without impact on the food supply.
Atypical BSE is a spontaneously occurring form found in older cattle. It is not linked to feed and cannot spread between animals through feeding. It is unrelated to MBM.
The science is also clear on what meat and bone meal from healthy, inspected animals does not do: it does not spontaneously generate prions. Prion disease in the source animal must already exist for rendering to produce infectious material. Under modern slaughter controls — which mandate the removal of specified risk materials (brain, spinal cord, dorsal root ganglia) from all animals before rendering — the probability of infectious material entering the rendering supply chain is extremely low and actively monitored.
The 2021 EU Reversal: A Regulatory Signal Worth Understanding
The clearest evidence of where the scientific and regulatory consensus now stands came in September 2021, when the European Commission enacted Regulation (EU) 2021/1372 — partially lifting the blanket processed animal protein ban that had been in place since 2001.
Under the revised rules:
- Porcine-derived MBM was re-authorized for use in poultry feed
- Bovine-derived MBM was re-authorized for use in pig and poultry feed
- The ruminant feed ban remains permanent and unchanged
This was the result of years of assessment by the European Food Safety Authority, public consultation under the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy, and a vote in which 25 of 27 EU member states voted in favor. The Commission noted that international standards — including those of the World Organisation for Animal Health — had never required a blanket non-ruminant feed ban. The EU’s previous position was more restrictive than the global scientific consensus on meat and bone meal safety required.
How Modern Controls Prevent a Recurrence
Current safety frameworks address BSE risk across multiple layers — not by trusting that the problem has gone away, but by structurally preventing the conditions that caused it.
Specified risk material (SRM) removal. The tissues where BSE prions concentrate — brain, spinal cord, eyes, tonsils, intestines — are removed from all slaughtered cattle before any material enters the rendering supply chain. This is mandatory in the EU, US, and all major markets, and is enforced at the slaughter plant level.
Ruminant feed ban enforcement. Feed containing mammalian animal proteins must be labeled and tracked to prevent it reaching ruminant animals. In the US, labels must state “Do not feed to cattle, sheep, deer, or other ruminants.” EU regulations require equivalent documentation throughout the supply chain.
Active surveillance. Both the EU and US maintain ongoing BSE testing programs targeting high-risk animals — older cattle and those displaying neurological symptoms — to detect any cases before they can enter commercial channels. This surveillance is what allows regulators to state with confidence that classical BSE is no longer circulating at detectable levels.
Category 3 raw material controls. In the EU, MBM for feed use must be produced only from Category 3 animal by-products — material from animals confirmed fit for human consumption at slaughter and rejected from the food chain only for commercial reasons, not safety reasons.
What Remains Permanently Prohibited
The one absolute prohibition — feeding mammalian MBM to ruminants — has no pathway to revision and no jurisdiction where it is under active reconsideration. It is the foundational control that eliminated classical BSE, and regulators in every major market treat it as a permanent structural safeguard rather than a precautionary measure pending further review.
Intra-species recycling (pig MBM back to pigs, poultry MBM back to poultry) also remains banned in the EU as an additional precaution, even though no equivalent TSE disease has been demonstrated in these species at a population level.
So Is Meat and Bone Meal Safe Today?
For MBM used in pig and poultry feed, sourced from approved rendering facilities operating under current Category 3 controls, with SRM removal verified at the slaughter stage: yes. The BSE transmission pathway has been structurally closed, not merely monitored, and the regulatory consensus in the EU, US, and comparable markets reflects this.
For MBM fed to ruminants: the prohibition is absolute, applies everywhere, and is non-negotiable. This is not a matter of ongoing risk assessment — it is a permanent regulatory line that reflects the lesson learned at considerable cost in the 1990s.
For buyers sourcing MBM, the practical due diligence is supplier-focused: confirm that rendering facilities hold the appropriate Category 3 approvals, that species-of-origin is declared per batch, and that the product’s intended feed application is within the permissions that apply in your target market. These are standard supply chain checks, not exceptional risk-management steps.
Conclusion
Mad cow disease and meat and bone meal are linked by a specific historical event, not by an inherent biological relationship. The crisis was caused by a practice — ruminant-to-ruminant protein recycling — that has been prohibited for thirty years and whose elimination has effectively ended classical BSE as a circulating disease.
The science is no longer uncertain about how BSE works, how it spread, or what controls prevent it. The regulatory frameworks in the EU, US, and comparable markets have been updated to reflect that science. Is meat and bone meal safe? For compliant non-ruminant applications, the answer the evidence supports is yes.
Looking to source compliant, specification-grade meat and bone meal with full Category 3 documentation? Contact our team for supply chain information and certifications.