The costs on human health of factory farming
Fri Nov 26 2004

THE former U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian for one of the largest beef slaughterhouses in America says hamburger contains a lot more than just ground beef.

"Hormones, antibiotics, hair, feces, cancers, tumours," says Dr. Lester Friedlander. "My plant in Pennsylvania processed 1,800 cows a day, 220 per hour. It also processed the highest number of downed cows, 25 to 30 a day... There is no question. Some cancers end up in the human food source."

Dr. Friedlander, who trained vets for the USDA and was a decorated employee during his 10 years with the agency, has given interviews to all major American TV networks. His repeated warnings about the threats to human health from factory farming have never been denied by his former employer. "They just keep saying 'no comment,'" he jokes.

He brought his crusade for public health and the humane treatment of animals -- the best way, he says, of ensuring a safer food supply for humans -- to Winnipeg earlier this week. Accompanying him was B.C. physician Dr. Ray Kellosalmi, a founder of The Responsible Animal Care Society (TRACS).

Corporate agribusiness and the almighty dollar are the culprits, Dr. Friedlander continues. The speed of a slaughterhouse assembly line is all that counts. Any delay costs about $5,000 a minute and the pressure on veterinarians to look the other way is intense -- and tacitly demanded by their employer, the federal government.

The current U.S. administration has altered regulations to allow slaughtering plants to erect walls to prevent USDA veterinarians from watching the killing line, Dr. Friedlander says. Dr. Kellosalmi ratchets up the danger to human health a huge notch. Factory farming -- keeping thousands of animals in close confinement, necessitating high levels of antibiotics -- will be the breeding ground for the next global human pandemic, he warns. Already, the feeding of cattle offal to cattle has spiked an enormous increase in brain-wasting BSE in beef herds and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

Even more worrying is that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Stanley Prussiner, who discovered prions, the aberrant protein that triggers BSE and CJD, now believes prions may also cause Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Kellosalmi says the number of Alzheimer's deaths in the U.S. has spiked from 800 in 1979-80 to 50,000 in 2002.

Dr. Friedlander says the latest agribusiness profit maximizer is to feed chicken feces and dried urine to cattle. "At first, the cattle wouldn't eat it. So they added molasses. Cattle have a sweet tooth like us, so they licked it up -- and ended up eating the feces stuck to it."

The public must insist that the food safety regulatory function be separated from the governmental agency promoting corporate agribusiness, he continues. "We need a genuine, separate department of consumer protection."

The cost of today's factory farming in animal suffering is incalculable. If the cattle-stunner misses his target, that animal can still be alive when the butchering starts. Pigs can face another agony: They can still be conscious when they are immersed in scalding water.

Horses are harder to kill because they are intelligent athletic animals who "won't take pain sitting down," Dr. Friedlander continues. Horses on the way to slaughter are forced to keep their heads down the whole time they are in transit because they are transported in the same alumimum double-deckers. The new U.S. Homeland Security Act, fearing terrorist attacks on the food supply, has repealed former humane transport regulations requiring livestock to be periodically unloaded and fed and watered. Animals now must endure days without food and water at temperatures ranging from 40 below to 40 above. For horses, those days add another agony: the inability even to raise their heads.

Ferdinand, the Kentucky Derby winner in 1986, "ended up on someone's dinner plate in Japan," Dr. Friedlander says. "We will do this to an animal who brought our fathers across this continent, an animal who is an integral part of our history."

FrancesRussell@mts.net
Winnipeg Free Press

This is definitely my favorite part:



Why? Because I can see people laughing at this and how stupid the cows are. And yet, humans are doing the same exact thing to themselves.

Yum.

Reminds me of this.

so um, can you get cancer by eating it?

Another reminder why I dont eat meat.Thanx for that article Stonecrest.

Mmmmm.... tasty.

And these are only the things we know about.

Scientists have been speculating that a newly-discovered strain of Mad Cow disease may be responsible for up to 10 percent of Alzheimers cases (i.e. 10% of alzheimers cases are misdiagnosed). Alzeheimers is usually a default diagnosis, since it can only be determined conclusively by an autopsy of the brain, and most cases aren't autopsied.

Dump some high-fructose corn syrup on it and we'll eat it. Or if you don't want that you can use Splenda, Sucralose, Nutrasweet, or whatever science has created in a lab to substitute for sugar.

One thing that seperates us from the cows is that we can ask "where did this food come from? What is in it?" but most of us don't. Unless the problem is in our faces, unless Uncle Jim collapses in front of us, we won't do a damn thing. Especially proactively.

I'm glad I eat free-range meat and I'm even happier that my new girlfriend is a vegetarian

http://www.factoryfarming.com

Since the 1980s a series of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in concentrating over 80% of the 35 million beef cattle slaughtered annually in the U.S. into the hands of four huge corporations.

Many beef cattle are born and live on the range, foraging and fending for themselves for months or even years. They are not adequately protected against inclement weather, and they may die of dehydration or freeze to death. Injured, ill, or otherwise ailing animals do not receive necessary veterinary attention. One common malady afflicting beef cattle is called "cancer eye." Left untreated, the cancer eats away at the animal's eye and face, eventually producing a crater in the side of the animal's head.

Accustomed to roaming unimpeded and unconstrained, range cattle are frightened and confused when humans come to round them up. Terrified animals are often injured, some so severely that they become "downed" (unable to walk or even stand). These downed animals commonly suffer for days without receiving food, water or veterinary care, and many die of neglect. Others are dragged, beaten, and pushed with tractors on their way to slaughter.

Many cattle will experience additional transportation and handling stress at stockyards and auctions, where they are goaded through a series of walkways and holding pens and sold to the highest bidder. From the auction, older cattle may be taken directly to slaughter, or they may be taken to a feedlot. Younger animals and breeding-age cows may go back to the range.

Ranchers still identify cattle the same way they have since pioneer days — with hot iron brands. Needless to say, this practice is extremely traumatic and painful, and the animals bellow loudly as ranchers' brands are burned into their skin. Beef cattle are also subjected to 'waddling,' another type of identification marking. This painful procedure entails cutting chunks out of the hide that hangs under the animals' necks. Waddling marks are supposed to be large enough so that ranchers can identify their cattle from a distance.

Most beef cattle spend the last few months of their lives at feedlots, crowded by the thousands into dusty, manure-laden holding pens. The air is thick with harmful bacteria and particulate matter, and the animals are at a constant risk for respiratory disease. Feedlot cattle are routinely implanted with growth-promoting hormones, and they are fed unnaturally rich diets designed to fatten them quickly and profitably. Because cattle are biologically suited to eat a grass-based, high fiber diet, their concentrated feedlot rations contribute to metabolic disorders.

Cattle may be transported several times during their lifetimes, and they may travel hundreds or even thousands of miles during a single trip. Long journeys are very stressful and contribute to disease and even death. The Drover's Journal reports, "Shipping fever costs livestock producers as much as $1 billion a year."

Young cattle are commonly taken to areas with cheap grazing land, to take advantage of this inexpensive feed source. Upon reaching maturity, they are trucked to a feedlot to be fattened and readied for slaughter. Eventually, all of them will end up at the slaughterhouse.

A standard beef slaughterhouse kills 250 cattle every hour. The high speed of the assembly line makes it increasingly difficult to treat animals with any semblance of humaneness. A Meat & Poultry article states, "Good handling is extremely difficult if equipment is 'maxed out' all the time. It is impossible to have a good attitude toward cattle if employees have to constantly overexert themselves, and thus transfer all that stress right down to the animals, just to keep up with the line."

Prior to being hung up by their back legs and bled to death, cattle are supposed to be rendered unconscious, as stipulated by the federal Humane Slaughter Act. This 'stunning' is usually done by a mechanical blow to the head. However, the procedure is terribly imprecise, and inadequate stunning is inevitable. As a result, conscious animals are often hung upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker makes another attempt to render them unconscious. Eventually, the animals will be "stuck" in the throat with a knife, and blood will gush from their bodies whether or not they are unconscious.

This is detailed in an April 2001 Washington Post article, which describes typical slaughterplant conditions:

The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren't.

They blink. They make noises, he said softly. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around. Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. They die, said Moreno, piece by piece...

"In plants all over the United States, this happens on a daily basis," said Lester Friedlander, a veterinarian and formerly chief government inspector at a Pennsylvania hamburger plant. "I've seen it happen. And I've talked to other veterinarians. They feel it's out of control."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees the treatment of animals in meat plants, but enforcement of the law varies dramatically. While a few plants have been forced to halt production for a few hours because of alleged animal cruelty, such sanctions are rare.

Reaction to the Washington Post investigative piece and others like it precipitated a Congressional resolution reiterating the importance of the Humane Slaughter Act, but to date, there is little if any indication that the situation for animals in slaughterhouses has appreciably improved.

yummy! throw another burger on the grill for me

Thanks for all the information. It really is good to have a reminder and wake up call every so often.

No question. There's plenty of health risks missed in a large slaughter plant. Usually there's only a couple USDA vets overseeing a huge work force often consisting of non-English speaking workers whose primary objective is to move as fast as possible. It's quite the sight to see. Unfortunately, I don't see the national government increasing funding for veterinary services anytime soon. Especially when legislation they've passed to increase the number of veterinarians in underserviced areas is still still seeking funding 1+ yrs after the bill was signed by the president.

http://aavmc.org/HeadlinesOctoberNewsletterNVMSA.htm
http://www.avma.org/onlnews/javma/nov04/041115r.asp




I think "enormous increase" is a bit of an overstatement. BSE isn't popping up all over the place, and variant-CJD isn't springing up in response to BSE nearly as fast as researchers first thought. The UK's system of tracking cattle when they had their BSE outbreak was horribly inaccurate. There's no telling how many animals got into the food chain. However, the number of vCJD that the UK has had since has not been some vast epidemic, or correlating to the number of BSE cases at a similar rate. I'm not saying it's not something to be concerned about, but I don't view BSE and vCJD as primay things to freak out about when there are diseases that deserve far more attention.



Now this is interesting research. I don't think prions as a whole should be dismissed, because there's so much we don't know about them. However, I think the number of Alzheimer related deaths increasing could be misleading. Isn't there also a larger population in 2002 that's in the usual age range for Alzeheimer's than there was in 1980? Once again, I'm not dismissing the fact that prions may be causing this disease, just these numbers might not tell all the truth. There's 3 types of lies in this world: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

Okay, here's the food chain.

Here's the top - IE: me ----------------------


























And here's domesticated animals -----------


















And here are the animals that are tasty and that I love to eat and exploit in order to make myself full and warm in the winter.


























Here are chickens -----------------------------------------------------




















Here's how much I care about them --------------------------------------

Hurrah for organic/free range meats!

Agreed.

And family farms in Wisconsin run by caring farmers.

I agree!

And Michigan.

I rarely eat meat, but when I do, it's always free-range... unless I'm at someone's house for dinner and they happen to be eating meat.