YOUR LATEST FRIDAY RECALL

Here's the latest USDA meat recall that you won't hear anything about - and why should you, it's only 34 tons of beef potentially contaminated with deadly E.Coli.

I'm declaring it a Friday recall because even though Reuters says the USDA released the information "late on Thursday," their own story is time-stamped 9:24 a.m. this morning and it's the earliest one I've been able to find (I also checked the AP wires). So yeah, Friday. Excellent work, USDA.

FOOD ANIMAL ABUSE: 'THIS IS UBIQUITOUS'

The HSUS put out another video of downed / abused cattle - this time at livestock auction houses, and though it won't make anywhere near the splash of the first one, it confirms what the USDA and meat producers continue to deny: That what we saw in that first video is not an aberration but Standard Operating Procedure.

Even meat-eaters are slowly opening their eyes to the reality:

"Denise Clendening said she was surprised to see the new footage - shot this month at auction houses in Texas, Maryland, New Mexico and Pennsylvania - given recent heightened government scrutiny on the meat industry.

'It's appalling this is still occurring,' Clendening said. 'One of the auction house owners interviewed said he was aware of the heightened scrutiny, so even with his awareness it's still occurring, which makes you realize this is ubiquitous.'"

ANOTHER HORSE "CHAMPION" DIES TO SERVE GAMBLERS

Ed Berliner, a pretty well known sports journalist who has covered horse racing on many occasions, issues a scathing condemnation of the entire institution and all but calls for its elimination after Eight Belles follows in Barbaro's footsteps as a high-profile 'winner' of a horse that trips and must be killed.

UPDATE 5/4: Berliner's not alone... Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? is asked in the New York Times.

EXPERTS: FACTORY FARMING MUST GO

This is almost as big a bombshell as the Humane Society video, though it won't hit with the same force, because, why? No pictures. But it's still big.

Factory farming takes a big toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America's economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock, concludes an independent, 2 1/2-year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

The report, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and released Tuesday, finds that the "economies of scale" long used to justify factory-farming practices are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for associated costs.

Among those costs are human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots and the degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.

Read the whole story - while the 10-year "phaseout" is predictably wussy, there are still some pretty breathtaking recommendations, considering the (very staid, mainstream) source. They even call for an end to forced feeding of poultry to produce foie gras, which should have repercussions in cities across North America where activists are pressing that fight.

ADVANTAGE: EDDIE LAMA

If you've seen The Witness, you know what this is about. You also know that it's just one method, as part of an ongoing barbaric industry, that's being eliminated. But it is an important step. "New York has become the first state in the nation to ban the electrocution of animals in a particularly gruesome way to harvest their fur. The law bans the practice of anal and genital electrocution of fur-bearing animals, including mink, foxes, chinchillas and rabbits."

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

It's many months now since one has been named, but the name remains the same. Just worth citing for those who persist in believing a vegan diet renders the human body weak or unfit: "Tim VanOrden will do whatever it takes today to get his body to the top of a 62-story skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles before hundreds of others.
But unlike his competitors, he is only fueled by fruits and vegetables, some nuts and some seeds, and he eats them only in their natural state: uncooked, unprocessed and unrefined. He is a raw vegan athlete and has been for the past three years."

TAIWAN TODAY, HERE TOMORROW

Mark my words, this will come to our illustrious nation as well. But we'll doubtless drag our feet about it and be in the back of the pack as usual.

"Taiwan, for religious and health reasons, plans to require food manufacturers to provide detailed identification of vegetarian food, the Department of Health said on Thursday. Under the new rule, food manufacturers must identify the content of the veggie food according to five categories on the outside of the food package.

The five categories are pure veggie, milk veggie, egg veggie, egg/milk veggie and plant veggie."

Dunno if we'll go all the way to labeling "plant veggie," which deals specifically with Buddhist spice restrictions, but still, it's gonna happen.

BIG MEAT'S ABOUT-FACE ON DOWNERS

This is pretty big: "In a significant reversal, major meat and dairy industry groups on Tuesday backed a total ban on so-called downer cattle from entering the food supply. Calls for such a ban have come from watchdog groups and some lawmakers in the wake of the massive beef recall from a Southern California slaughterhouse in February, but industry had resisted." Looks like the ban will go forward now, as it was Congressional pressure that supposedly led to the shift in stance.

UPDATE 4/30: Ha! How naive of me - the USDA, it seems, is fine with standing up to Big Meat as long as the agency is completely on the wrong side of the issue: USDA isn't on board with beef industry's downer cow ban

BACK ON THE CASE

Well, that was another little blogging hiatus, wasn't it?

I did prepare some posts during that interim but didn't manage to get them into Blogger, so I'll put them in first as they occurred before proceding with May posts.

MORE SLAUGHTERHOUSE PROBLEMS FOUND IN PROBE

A federal audit of slaughterhouses licensed to provide beef to the nation's schoolchildren found animal-handling problems at four of the 18 plants, including one that was shut down briefly.

Still, the very fact that it wasn't 18 out of 18, in an audit that was publicly announced in advanced, leads the USDA hack Schafer to say "Based on the findings of the audit, we do not believe this was a widespread practice or issue. It seems to be confined -- the downer cow issue -- to the Chino facility."

What a sick joke. Why don't you check with your own agency's Inspector General to see if there are other cases of downers being wrongfully slaughtered?

ELEPHANT ABUSED GRAPHICALLY DESCRIBED BY FORMER RINGLING TRAINER

"With a bull hook in her hand and tears in her eyes, Archele Hundley told horrified Chicago aldermen that she once saw the head elephant trainer at the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus swing the device 'with all his might . . . like a baseball bat' against the ear and legs of a chained elephant that refused a command to lie down. It happened in 2006 during a two-week layover in Tulsa, Okla. 'It was the worst beating that I have ever, ever seen in my life. . . . She bled profusely. She screamed and she shrieked in pain as blood just dripped down her ear. This beating lasted for about 35 to 45 minutes, Hundley said."

Not surprisingly, "Feld Entertainment, producer of Ringling Brothers, flatly denied Hundley's cruelty claims. Circus officials called her a 'sponsored witness of an animal-rights group' whose allegations were investigated and dismissed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture."

Yeah, that USDA, they're always right on the ball in detecting animal abuse, aren't they?

The only problem, though, with this kind of focus is that it presumes there's a kinder, gentler way to exploit elephants. Putting elephants in a circus is abuse. Period. Everything else is gravy.

APRIL FOOLS ROUNDUP

Putting this post up as April 1, since that's when I rounded these stories up for posting, but didn't actually get them online then. Tough. Gotta clear these out before I can get to the more recent stuff. So a bunch of semi-random quick hits...

3/24: Beef recall case: Cattle abuse wasn't a rare occurrence "More than 10% of the humane-slaughter violations issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the 18 months ended March 2004 detailed improper treatment of animals that couldn't walk - mostly cattle... The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a 2004 report that humane violations are likely under-reported because USDA inspectors miss them."

3/28: Italy recalls contaminated mozzarella cheese Italy ordered a recall on Friday of mozzarella cheese potentially contaminated with cancer-causing dioxin, as a widening health scare tainted the reputation of one of its best-known culinary products.

3/30: Impact of meat recall beginning to show "The full costs of the biggest beef recall ever are beginning to emerge six weeks later and they are hitting retailers, meat processors, other businesses and the government." And by "the government," they of course mean, "by you, the taxpayer."
And: "The USDA says it will seek restitution from Westland/Hallmark. The firm has laid off its 200 workers and isn't expected to reopen." Uh huh. And so the firm is going to come up with that restitution, the money it owes us taxpayers, how exactly?

3/26 Buried lede: "Roughly 1.4 million American children younger than 18 - and 11 percent of girls between 13 and 17 - identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans, according to the American Dietetic Association." Don't remember seeing this stat before. More than one in ten teenage girls is vegetarian. Interesting.

DOGS AS LIVESTOCK

What a crazy idea, huh? "Seoul City Administration recently decided to put dogs into the category of livestock." Those barbaric Koreans! How can they confuse animals that are thinking, feeling, suffering and exulting members of our families with animals that are just unfeeling machines? I mean, come on, it's not as if they're treating the dogs with the respect they deserve, like we do...

VEGAN DIET FOUND TO HAVE MULTIPLE BENEFITS

A new study from Sweden has found that a vegan diet fights arthritis and heart disease - but the rub is, in this case it's a gluten-free vegan diet. So no seitan.

Of course the fact that they chose to try a gluten-free vegan diet against conventional diets doesn't mean that only gluten-free will work; mored studies should be done. Meanwhile, we do know:

"The study, published in Arthritis Research & Therapy, found the diet raised the levels of natural antibodies that fight the damaging compounds -- phosphorylcholine -- that cause the chronic inflammatory symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

The diet also protected against heart attacks and stroke by lowering cholesterol levels and lowering body weight, the study said.

In contrast, none of the indicators differed significantly for the control group on the conventional healthy diet, the study said."

ANOTHER (MILLION-POUND) FRIDAY MEAT RECALL

Sorry, it just occurred to me to check what the USDA was up to last Friday while we were all chatting about Steve Mendell's testimony. You're not going to believe this, but there was yet another Friday recall of 943,000 pounds of poultry with bad giblets. The press release doesn't try very hard to clarify what makes some giblets dangerous and others not, but it does say they're "adulterated" by apparently unwelcome portions of chickens' innards, and it is a CLASS I (HEALTH RISK: HIGH) recall. Too bad no one heard about it, huh?

APPROACHING THE TIPPING POINT?

Consumer demand for U.S. ground beef could fall if circumstances that lead to the recall of a record 143 million lbs of meat in February happen again, a top U.S. Agriculture Department official said on Monday. "The industry is right now fighting an image problem with the American consumer," Richard Raymond, the agriculture undersecretary who oversees USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said during the Reuters Food Summit. "We have to make certain what happens with Hallmark never happens again. Another hit like that and I'm afraid you see consumption of ground beef going into a tailspin."

Guess that's why the USDA isn't investigating whether other plants are violating the rules as badly as the randomly-picked Westland/Hallmark, huh? Don't look, don't find, as Michael Hansen says.

And for the record, that "isolated incident" has plenty of company in the more immediately dangerous world of foodborne illness: "The meat industry was hit hard in 2007. A series of large recalls, attributed mostly to E. coli O157:H7, prompted USDA to expand testing and recall infected meat more rapidly to combat the pathogen. The department said 21 recalls related to E. coli in meat occurred, compared with just eight in 2006."

WHAT DID THE MENDELLS KNOW?

"The operations manager at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. knew about cruelty and food safety violations at the Chino plant and, in at least one case, he ordered it, an ex-employee said in an interview from jail. Stan Mendell, the brother of company president Steven Mendell, once instructed workers to lift a fallen bull to its feet with a forklift so it could be slaughtered, said former worker Rafael Sanchez Herrera, who has been charged with animal cruelty."

The whole article, from the Press-Enterprise, which continues to own this story with ongoing exhaustive reporting, is worth a read. Here's the lead anecdote, spelled out: "Sanchez said he remembers Stan Mendell stopping at the pens leading to the slaughterhouse one afternoon last August or September before getting in his nearby car to go home. A bull with an injured foot had collapsed. Mendell ordered Ugarte, who in turn ordered Sanchez, to lift the fallen animal to its feet using a forklift, Sanchez said. 'It was Stanley that told us to do it,' Sanchez said, adding: 'Stanley watched.'"

In short: "Sanchez said he does not know if Steven Mendell was aware of abuse of collapsed cows. But Stan Mendell knew, he said." Well, it's a good question how much Steve Mendell knew. But given the two of them were brothers, it stretches credulity to belive the CEO was as shocked as he professed in his infamous hearing.

UPDATE 3/21: "How well do owners know their meat companies?" asks the Capital Press. And: "Why would [Mendell] have agreed to a voluntary massive recall he knew he would destroy his company if he hadn't seen all the evidence and thought it wasn't a safety problem?"

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO PLANKTON

Good news / Bad News: "Now trollers are expecting the worst bulletin they’ve ever received: the largest salmon fishing closure from northern Oregon to Mexico in the history of the industry - zero commercial trips in 2008, with a few minor exceptions." That's the good news, unless you're someone who has decided to base his livelihood around killing fish. The bad news is that it's because there are hardly any fish left. "Forecasted returns of chinook salmon on California’s Sacramento River are so dismal that there’s little hope regulators will allow a fishing season for West Coast boats - a prospect that will hit the Oregon Coast hard, as salmon is one of the only viable fisheries during the summer months.

One Fisherman says, "In my opinion, we won’t have a commercial fishing season. It’s a dire situation." Yep, sure is, though not as dire as it is for the fish that are caught. Maybe it's time to look for a different job.

MAD COW MURMURINGS

Maybe it's nothing. But I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition of stories...

Too little testing for mad cow, critics say
"Don't look, don't find" might be a more apt way of describing this country's testing program, said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union.
A 2006 USDA Inspector General report noted that because the testing program was voluntary and not random, it could not be determined whether the government had tested a representative sample of the highest-risk cattle, such as non-ambulatory cattle and those showing signs of a central nervous disorder. The report faulted sample collectors for not determining the health histories of the animals. The cause of death in most cases was recorded as "dead -- unknown cause."

2 Quebec deaths being investigated for CJD
According to CKRS-FM radio in Chicoutimi, Que., the deaths there of a person in December and another in February are being treated with extreme caution by federal health authorities amid concerns they possibly had a form of CJD. The radio report, which first aired Wednesday, said two patients have never died of CJD within such a short period of time in one area of Canada.
If the disease comes from exposure to infected beef products prior to the ban on specified offal in human food in 1989, as is now widely accepted, then there could be more cases if the incubation period is very long," the agency said.

WHALE RESCUE: WE FAIL, DOLPHIN SUCCEEDS

Two pygmy sperm whales, a mother and her calf, were found stranded on Mahia Beach. According to CNN, rescuers "worked for more than one hour to get the whales back into the water, only to see them strand themselves four times on a sandbar slightly out to sea. It looked likely the whales would have to be euthanized to prevent them suffering a prolonged death."

Note that humans' magnificent intellect and mastery of tools led us in this case to one viable option: Using our tools to kill the animals, who "kept getting disorientated and stranding again They obviously couldn't find their way back past (the sandbar) to the sea." Then along came Moko the dolphin, who "approached the whales and led them 200 meters (yards) along the beach and through a channel out to the open sea."

Altruism is one of the now-discarded "things that separates us from the animals," as this example illustrates. But the altruistic impulse is moot if there's no capability to carry it out. Just as there are things we can do on land that dolphins can't, we must acknowledge there are underwater activities in which their intelligence will always outstrip ours because it's paired with knowledge and capability.