Abstract Background The benefits of using the oxidized oils from rendering and recycling as an economic source of lipids and energy in animal feed always coexist with the concerns that diverse degradation products in these oxidized oils can negatively affect animal health and performance. Therefore, the quality markers that predict growth performance could be useful when feeding oxidized oils to non-ruminants. However, the correlations between growth performance and chemical profiles of oxidized oils have not been well examined. In this study, six thermally oxidized soybean oils (OSOs) with a wide range of quality measures were prepared under different processing temperatures and processing durations, including 45 °C-336 h; 67.5 °C-168 h; 90 °C-84 h; 135 °C-42 h; 180 °C-21 h; and 225 °C-10.5 h. Broilers and nursery pigs were randomly assigned to diets containing either unheated control soybean oil or one of six OSOs. Animal performance was determined by measuring body weight gain, feed intake, and gain to feed ratio. The chemical profiles of OSOs were first evaluated by common indicative tests, including peroxide value, thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, p-anisidine value, free fatty acids, oxidized fatty acids, unsaponifiable matter, insoluble impurities, and moisture, and then analyzed by the liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based chemometric analysis. Results Among common quality indicators, p-anisidine value (AnV), which reflects the level of carbonyl compounds, had the greatest inverse correlation with the growth performance of both broilers and pigs, followed by free fatty acids and oxidized fatty acids. Among the 17 aldehydes identified in OSOs, C9-C11 alkenals, especially 2-decenal and 2-undecenal, had stronger inverse correlations (r < − 0.8) with animal performance compared to C5-C8 saturated alkanals, suggesting that chain length and unsaturation level affect the toxicity of aldehydes. Conclusions As the major lipid oxidation products contributing to the AnV, individual C9-C11 unsaturated aldehydes in heavily-oxidized oils could function as effective prediction markers of growth and feed intake in feeding non-ruminants.