Meat Facts

2008-09-25T15:43:00.002-04:00

A BLESSING

If you happen to be in or around Philadelphia, be aware that the fourth annual Blessing of the Animals from Public Eye Philly will be held this Saturday, September 27th, at the Unitarian Society of Germantown, 6511 Lincoln Drive. Please note that "The blessing is not affiliated with any religion or religious practices" and that "Friendly animal companions must be on leashes or in carriers."

2008-09-23T14:55:00.000-04:00

OBLIGATORY TIE-IN TO ECONOMIC NEWS

A new study - research funded by a veggie-oriented company - has found that vegetarianism is a good way to save both money and the earth: "VEGETARIANS save 20 per cent at the checkout and have sixfold lower greenhouse gas emissions than carnivores, a new study shows. Research comparing diets heavy, light and free of meat has found that vegetarianism is cheaper, healthier and easier on the environment. The findings show it costs $508 a week to feed four adults on a traditional meat diet. A reduced meat diet costs $418 a week, while a vegetarian diet costs $394."

In the classic journamalism style, this is "balanced" by a cautionary note that "dieticians" say vegetarianism isn't necessarily better. This is sourced, further down to one guy, the creator of the diet plan that did the most poorly in the study, pointing out that doughnuts can be vegetarian, and they're not good for you, ergo, that somehow supposedly outweighs the statistical data presented above. Great work there, Tamara!

2008-09-17T13:49:00.002-04:00

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH?

That may be overstating it, but that's exactly what this headline says: "Study Finds Fountain Of Youth, Vegan Diet And Exercise." The study, in the journal Lancet Oncology, is summarized this: "The fountain of youth apparently lies in following a lifestyle that includes exercise and a vegan diet." All righty then.

2008-09-12T08:25:00.001-04:00

NOT KOSHER

After the largest producer of Kosher meat in America was charged with more than 9000 child labor violations - including having children under 16 handling dangerous circular saws and meat grinders - Rabbi Menachem Genack of the Orthodox Union said that his organization may strip Agriprocessors of its kosher certification.

This would be a huge blow, but then again, all the company has to do, apparently, is install a new CEO to "give people a new sense of confidence" in the firm's compliance with the law. Wait, is this the Orthodox Union or the USDA?

The takeaway is twofold: Even food that is supposed to be handled according to the strictest, most exacting standards for specific consumers who buy it on that basis can come from abysmal, fundamentally immoral conditions, and those consumers have no knowledge of it, no way of finding out, other than undercover video. And secondly, this bears repeating: Anyone who says animal activists care more about animals than humans should take a good hard look at the slaughter industry and what it's doing to its human employees. That's not to mention, of course, the health effects and global warming effects on humans that are directly correlated with meat consumtion. Clearly, it's meat-eaters who don't care about either animals or people.

2008-09-08T17:17:00.002-04:00

ONE MORE TIME...

It's a well-worn refrain to those of us who have been listening, but the point is that a lot of people still remain deaf to the facts:

"People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist. 'I want to highlight the fact that among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider.'"

2008-09-05T13:29:00.000-04:00

ABOUT THAT SARAH PALIN THING

I was going to post about the new (emphasis on the word "new") VP candidate's penchant for hunting, but I found this post by Ryan at VegBlog that just about covers everything I was gonna say, so... why do the heavy lifting? Go read his post.

2008-09-03T15:01:00.001-04:00

MEATLESS ~~MONDAYS~~ TUESDAYS

Hey, I don't care which day we pick, but it might help to coordinate these pitches. Or better yet, people should be encoraged to follow their Meatless Mondays with Tofurky Tuesdays, Wheat-Based Wednesdays, etc. etc.

2008-09-01T17:06:00.003-04:00

WHY THEY HATE US

Been a while since I've kvetched about fellow animal activists, so this is overdue. Another brilliant mink release, this time in Utah, of about 600 mink from a mink farm. Shockingly, "most of the mink were recovered, but several died after being hit by cars or from stress after they were returned to the farm."

Let's be clear: There's a quantum difference between a captive-animal rescue and a captive-animal release. While both make a political statement and get publicity, one of them shows compassion for the animals involved and the other just uses them as means to an end, not much differently from how they're being used by the institutional exploiters.

2008-08-30T11:04:00.000-04:00

STILL MORE VEGAN HEALTH BENEFITS

Vegan Diet Reduces Risk of Arthritis, Heart Attack and Stroke is the headline for this report on a small study that found that "eating a vegan, gluten-free diet may reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes in rheumatoid arthritis patients, as well as reducing the severity of the disease." So the headline may be a tiny bit overblown, as the gluten factor wasn't controlled for separately. But on the other side, I find it interesting that those on the non-vegan diet were eating the same carb-fat-protein ratio. That should knock the whole "it's the fat" excuse down a bit.

2008-08-28T12:13:00.000-04:00

CHINO UPDATE

Hey, remember the largest meat recall in US History? The one caused by a couple of rogue slaughterhouse employees who were skirting the rules?

The main guy says he'd been abusing downer cows "had been going on for 23 years and "nobody ever complained or disciplined him for the manner in which he did it."

Many additional interesting details in the story. Give it a read.

2008-08-27T16:14:00.004-04:00

SPELLING IT OUT: MEAT = CLIMATE DESTRUCTION

It's no revelation, but this new study puts its data points in good, media-friendly sound-bite form:

"Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters' diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said on Tuesday. A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometres (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said. [PDF of study]

"But the food a vegetarian consumes in 12 months is responsible for generating the same emissions as driving 2,427 kilometres. Going vegan -- giving up meat and dairy products -- would cut the emissions released in making what you eat more than seven-fold, to the equivalent of driving 629 kilometres."

Some great international headlines:

Going vegan the way to reduce carbon footprint

'The Cow Is a Climate Bomb'

Meat-eaters, the end is nigh

Too bad that as of this writing the story has apparently not seen the light of day in any US media outlet. Shocking, huh?

RELATED: Just prior to this study, E Magazine came out with a cover story on the topic: The Meat of the Matter:
Our Livestock Industry Creates More Greenhouse Gas than Transportation Does

2008-08-26T16:03:00.000-04:00

MONKEY SEE

As usual, I find this animal-behavior study a little suspect, in that behavior that could be instinctual for evolutionary reasons (keeping the entire clan alive rather than just yourself would increase chances for population expansion) is considered only as an analog of a human mental process. BUT: That said, this is still cool:

"Monkeys can experience the joy of giving in much the same way as humans do, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. Tests in capuchin monkeys showed the animals consistently chose to share food with another monkey if given the option, suggesting they are capable of empathy, the team at the Yerkes Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta found."

"They seem to care for the welfare of those they know," Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes, said in a statement.

2008-08-26T15:10:00.000-04:00

BREAKING: FRUIT & VEGETABLES GOOD FOR YOU

Yet another for the pile of studies showing health benefits:

"Antioxidant-rich fruit and vegetables such as oranges, carrots and broccoli can reduce the risk of diseases such as cancer of the larynx, oesophagus, cervix and lungs... The study by Edith Cowan University nutritionists found that people who ate two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables a day could cut their risk of developing a range of cancers, heart and blood vessel disease, metabolic syndrome, and bone disease.

The researchers said while some of the protection against common diseases came from the weight loss associated with diets high in fruit and vegetables, there was now good evidence that phytochemicals and vitamins such as A, C and E in fresh produce had their own powerful antioxidant effects."

I thought there was already "good evidence," but I guess now the evidence is even better.

2008-08-26T14:06:00.000-04:00

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO BS

"A University of Guelph study published Thursday said 25 percent of fish sold in Toronto and New York are mislabeled. The university study isn't based on fish tales, but DNA analysis. According to the samples analyzed by the university, tuna was actually tilapia, halibut was hake, and red snapper was sold as lavender jobfish, Labrador redfish, perch or cod."

Gosh, I wonder why they don't have this problem with plums, lettuce or bananas?

2008-08-25T13:59:00.001-04:00

RECALLORAMA

I'm not going to try to catch up on every recall from the past month, but a couple notable ones...

First, this recall was still going on through mid- to late August, with even Whole Foods getting dinged for handling the potentially E.coli-tainted meat.

Then just after I left Canada there was this huge Maple Leaf recall of 220 deli-meat products, which has resulted in sicknesses and deaths and, of course, a class-action lawsuit. Gee, it would be a shame for that meat producer to go the way of Topps, wouldn't it?

2008-08-25T11:04:00.000-04:00

BACK FROM VACATION

I was on vacation for a couple weeks there, but took a longer vacation from blogging, what with preparing for the big 50th Vegcast (more on this later). Anyway, I'll try to catch up on the most important developments over the past month or so, but feel free to write in with any I've missed.

2008-07-03T17:20:00.002-04:00

WATERMELON = VIAGRA!

The concept that meat-eating interferes with sex drive has been well documented and promoted to the max - but what about the flip side? Well, yes, as it turns out, at least in the case of watermelon, you can actually increase your sex drive by eating plant foods. Texas A&M researchers found that "watermelon causes the same type of effect as Viagra and other drugs used for erectile dysfunction."

2008-06-30T18:45:00.001-04:00

~~BIG~~ HUGE KROGER RECALL

Once again it's impossible to estimate how big this recall is, but in a virtual Friday (Thursday night) recall that I just found out about (and you?), Kroger has reacted to a wave of E.Coli cases by pulling back "all varieties, weights and sizes of ground beef bought in Kroger stores between 21st May and 8th June in Michigan and in central and northern Ohio (Columbus and Toledo). Neither FSIS nor Kroger have said how big the total amount of beef affected is." Gee, I... wonder why.

UPDATE 7/3: After the traditional announce-and-expand strategy, and now that everyone's on the road to their July 4th cookouts, the powers that be have finally pinned a number on the amount (and the supplier: Nebraska Beef) 5.3 million pounds of tainted meat. Here's a choice quote: "The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service said in a statement Thursday that it has determined these products may have been produced 'under insanitary conditions.'" Insanitary - that's when your conditions are so unsanitary, it's INSAYYYYYNE!

2008-06-28T12:13:00.003-04:00

POST-SUMMERFEST: 'MYTH' CONCEPTION

I'm back from Summerfest, and one of the most interesting developments was this site: HumaneMyth.org, developed by James LaVeck and Jenny Stein, of The Witness and Peaceable Kingdom fame. Last year you may recall they were bitching about the animal industry's seemingly successful bid to split the animal movement along welfarist/abolitionist lines, and this year they've moved forward and done something about it. The site has a good overview of the fallacy of "humane" anything involving animal imprisonment, as well as some compelling teaching tools, like this anti-dairy slide show.

2008-06-18T17:48:00.001-04:00

SUMMERFEST

I'll be in Johnstown through the weekend (where I'll be performing the song mentioned below), so blogging will pick back up sometime next week.

2008-06-16T16:42:00.001-04:00

SOME OLYMPIC CHAMPS ARE VEGETARIAN...

Here's a very noteworthy story, one that would be interesting for its content alone - showing how veganism is compatible with great athletic performance - but what puts it over the top is that it's right there on ESPN, written by one of their own, and is attracting a good big of mainstream attention. Keep it up!

[Note: Title above is a lyric from "Some Monks," the new single off the album Electric Green by Green Beings.]

2008-06-14T15:32:00.002-04:00

IT AIN'T JUST EIGHT BELLES AND BARBARO

An astonishing three horses per day are being sacrificed on the altar of horse-race gambling. And that is low-balling it: "Thoroughbred race tracks in the U.S. reported more than three horse deaths a day last year and 5,000 since 2003, and the vast majority of horses were put down after suffering devastating injuries on the track," reports a wire service, which adds, "Countless other deaths went unreported because of lax recordkeeping."

UPDATE 6/17: I guess this could be categorized as good news for horses. Gotta be thankful for whatever you can get.

2008-06-12T16:36:00.000-04:00

POL: TURN SF ZOO INTO RESCUE CENTER

This is pretty big, if only because the standard "As if! That'll never happen!" reply from the zoo, about this radical proposal, is absent in this case. "The San Francisco Zoo would transform to a center that primarily houses rescued domestic and exotic animals and those confiscated by law enforcement under legislation proposed at City Hall Tuesday by Supervisor Chris Daly." Daly also noted that the notorious tiger attack on Christmas was "rooted in fundamental animal welfare deficiencies at the zoo."

2008-06-10T14:43:00.004-04:00

THE WHOLE WORLD ISN'T WATCHING

Or maybe much of it is, but there doesn't seem to be much of a peep here in the US over the fact that South Korea's previously wildly popular president is now on the brink of being forced from office due to his acquiescing and accepting potentially BSE-tainted US beef. (Many analysts have quibbled that South Koreans are inflating concerns about how dangerous the beef is - but those who have followed the Keystone Kop antics of the USDA in monitoring and testing US beef know there's plenty to worry about.)

Protests have numbered in the tens of thousands and have turned violent, at least one farmer has committed suicide in protest, and the entire cabinet has offered to resign over the matter. This is because the US refuses to back down and accept continuing restrictions, and the populace look on their leader now as a patsy to the globally greedy US beef industry, which, well, he is.

2008-06-07T12:15:00.002-04:00

HORSE-RACING AUTHOR: "SPORT" IS ON ITS LAST LEGS

I only came across this now, after the result at the Belmont, which adds a layer of irony. According to the tagline, Nan Mooney is "author of 'My Racing Heart: The Passionate World of Thoroughbreds and the Racetrack' and has written for The Blood-Horse, the journal of record for thoroughbred horse racing." So when this author says horse racing is "hanging on by its fingernails," it's worth noting.

Even better, though, is this line: "Sure, the gambling end of things is supposed to be risky, but racing cannot afford for the lay public to become too awash in cynicism." Heh. Yeah, the gambling end of things sure was risky for all of those who put down large sums of money at 2 to 5 only to watch in despair as the favorite came in dead last. And yeah, I think that, more than events like the killing of Eight Belles, might have an impact on public cynicism.

The only question is, when horse racing aficionados themselves put out pieces trumpeting the fact that horse racing is "on its last legs," who will have the nerve to take the poor hobbled industry out back and shoot it?

2008-06-05T11:12:00.002-04:00

MAKING THE CONNECTION

Granted, it's probably easier to go vegetarian in Taiwan than in the cowboy-and-beef-soaked USA, but still, this is heartening, and points to growing awareness of the indisputable connection between livestock production and carbon emissions. If these politicians and role models are actually committing to change their eating for the rest of their life that's pretty astonishing. Even if this is sloppy reporting and they're only going vegetarian for one year, that's still pretty impressive, and it would be great if we could get some version of this going over here.

2008-06-04T10:44:00.000-04:00

CRUEL SUMMER

This story is noteworthy because it's not noteworthy. Remember when the concept of a farmer being cruel to a farm animal - especially a cow - was on the outer edge of believability? It was only a few years ago. Now these charges are commonplace. Incremental change is under way, though I don't know how many farm animals exactly have benefited from it so far.

2008-06-02T13:52:00.001-04:00

"KFC Canadian franchisee, PETA in accord"

That's the headline. And also, that's the problem, says Gary Francione.

2008-05-29T16:34:00.005-04:00

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

Danielle Konya of Allentown. Here's the Morning Call: "Vegan Treats has long been known in vegetarian circles and its desserts frequently sweep awards at Veg News, Vegetarian Times and Satya. The bakery supplies most of the vegan and vegetarian restaurants in New York and Philadelphia, and has just entered the Washington, D.C., market, where word spread in a matter of days. In New York alone, Vegan Treats has more than 40 accounts, including kosher restaurants. Her desserts have been served at mainstream restaurants such as Tavern on the Green."

2008-05-27T15:30:00.000-04:00

SCHOOL STOPS FORCING STUDENTS TO KILL CHICKENS

I rag on PETA enough for the many things they do wrong, especially when it comes to dealing with children, so this is a good opportunity to herald them for doing something right: Pressuring school administrators to end a program that had children raising chickens from infancy and then killing and eating them. It worked.

Of course, as some pointed out, there was hardly anything unique about this - "4-H" clubs are devoted specifically to the practice of teaching children to raise animals for slaughter, even if they don't kill them themselves. Doubtless there are plenty of other programs like this in schools nationwide. But now that this one has been ended, it provides an example for others to follow.

Oh, and enough of that "this was raising kids' consciousness to turn them vegetarian" BS. If you want to devote class time to that there are plenty more effective ways to do so that don't involve killing animals. Do the kids all need to join the army and be part of a "My Lai" incident in order to understand that war atrocities are a bad thing?

2008-05-23T14:58:00.002-04:00

OPRAH GOES VEGAN

OK, let's not get too excited, here. After all, this is the woman who said Howard Lyman "has just stopped me from eating another burger!" some 12 years ago, and that one didn't seem to stick.

This time, however, she's not making an absolute, permanent promise, and if anything, that's probably a good model for a lot of people. Oprah is going vegan for 21 days, and in the process exposing millions of people to the specifics of this non-mainstream lifestyle. So that right there is a positive. Whatever she decides on day 22 is gravy, so to speak. Knowing that she has the option to revert once she gets though this period may help to stick to it during that period - then there's always a chance she'll return to it afterward - who knows, maybe permanently.

UPDATE 5/28:
If nothing else, it's good to see a woman whose every word so many hang on putting out verbiage like "Wow, wow, wow! I never imagined meatless meals could be so satisfying" and I'm ever more surprised at how I don't miss anything and feel so satisfied at every meal." Let's hope she doesn't sour on this later and start channeling Rick Berman or something.

2008-05-18T16:29:00.000-04:00

ANOTHER (HUGE?) FRIDAY RECALL

Here's an interesting Friday recall to add to the massive pile: JSM Meats is recalling beef products for E.Coli. The contaminated beef went to stores in 11 states. It's a Class I (High-Risk) recall.

Now, how much meat is being recalled? The USDA says they don't know. It's an "undetermined" amount.

Excuse me? They don't know? Why not? If I were cynical and jaded through years of following the USDA's machinations to minimize and eliminate the PR damage the meat industry causes itself, I might suspect that there's a large amount of meat involved and though the agency does in fact know how much, they're not saying in the initial story. Why? Because they can let this "undetermined" story work through the news cycle, then "discover" the amount to announce halfway through the next, so it comes only as an added-detail to an existing, "old" news story. It's similar to the ploy, er, sorry, coincidental pattern of behavior, where a recall is announced for a small amount of beef, then expanded a few days later to a huge amount.

Of course, that's only if I were so cynical and jaded as to believe that. But being my own sweet, naive, cockeyed-optimist self, I know the real reason the USDA has no idea how much meat is involved in a recall they're overseeing is that they're simply a bunch of incompetent buffoons. Right?

2008-05-14T15:25:00.002-04:00

VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE

This NYT "Freakonomics" blog entry has gotten a bit of Internet buzz, including here in the comments section of Meat Facts, with the focus being a new paper suggesting slaughterhouse workers are prone to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the nightmarish duties of their job. The interesting sidelight, though, which I missed when it came out, is a paper by Amy Fitzgerald suggesting a correlation between communities with slaughterhouses and those with high rates of violent crime. I have attempted to obtain a copy of the report but so far have only the abstract to point you to, so I can't say for sure how airtight the case is. Still an interesting, and largely common-sensical, idea worth looking into.

2008-05-09T16:25:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-05-07T16:15:00.000-04:00

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:

you realize this is ubiquitous.

2008-05-03T17:09:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-05-01T17:01:00.002-04:00

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,

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.

2008-04-30T16:35:00.001-04:00

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."

2008-04-27T16:32:00.000-04:00

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."

2008-04-25T15:32:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-04-23T15:04:00.001-04:00

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

2008-04-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-04-10T17:40:00.001-04:00

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?

2008-04-09T17:30:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-04-01T13:20:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-03-25T13:10:00.001-04:00

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...

2008-03-21T17:05:00.002-04:00

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."

2008-03-19T13:12:00.000-04:00

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?

2008-03-18T15:51:00.000-04:00

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."

2008-03-17T15:43:00.005-04:00

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?"

2008-03-16T16:17:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-03-15T16:38:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-03-15T15:28:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-03-07T18:15:00.002-05:00

MORE JOY IN SOY?

Fermenting takes the allergy out of soy, says a new study. Despite my moniker I've never been an advocate of eating soy the way most people eat meat, but this could make a difference to a lot of vegetarians who have had to completely do without.

"When we fermented soy seeds, flour, or meal by introducing certain microorganisms, inmmunoreactivity was significantly reduced - by as much as 99 per cent. This shows that we have the potential of developing nutritious, hypoallergenic soy products," said researcher Elvira de Mejia from the University of Illinois.

2008-03-07T14:42:00.002-05:00

LATEST USDA FOLLIES

It's a pity the national media has the attention span of a 2-year-old, because there are some noteworthy - and entertaining - things going on in the aftermath of the downer recall.

Just a couple highlights for now: In the words of the Cattle Network site: USDA To Hallmark: We Want Our Plaque Back. Yes, the USDA has officially rescinded Hallmark/Westland's "Supplier of the Year" award from 2005 - and to show how serious this is, they want the meatpackers to return the plaque itself. No, seriously.

But to show there's no hard feelings between the agency and the industry it, *cough* "regulates," the USDA stonewalls before congress on lifesaving information that might upset Big Meat. As the WSJ succinctly put it, USDA Won't Disclose Who Sold Recalled Beef. "Agriculture Department officials, under fire on Capitol Hill over the largest meat recall in U.S. history, told legislators that they can't disclose a list of 10,000 establishments -- from food distributors and processors to grocery stores and restaurants -- that sold the recalled meat. But a rule change, in the works for the past two years, would allow the disclosure..." wait for it... "if it hadn't been held up by bureaucratic delays." Damn those bureaucratic delays! They're probably the same ones that stopped the USDA from being able to carry out the kind of undercover investigation the HSUS was able to that exposed this flagrant lapse in food safety!

2008-03-05T00:03:00.001-05:00

DOREEN THE DOWNER

Mark Fiore delivers another "helpful" explanation in animated form, with so many excellent screen grabs I couldn't settle on one.

The sad thing is, though, while his treatment of the issues is certainly cartoonish, most viewers will probably think he's exaggerating for humor, when everything he's saying is literally true - it's really kind of soft-pedaling the actual horror that's being referenced. Still, a worthy primer for those who won't look at the actual video.

2008-03-04T21:10:00.004-05:00

SCHOOLS ALSO SCREWED BY USDA

I keep trying to get across the point that the immorality of exploiting animals for meat is inseparable from associated moral concerns: The abysmal treatment of slaughterhouse workers, the over-the-top torture of the animals, the threats to consumers' health both from direct illnesses and long-term liabilities. Add to that list the school-lunch administrators meat producers depend on to prop up their business: In the recent recall, they were screwed over royally by the USDA. Due to the whole everything-we-do-is-proprietary-shhhhh-trade-secrets routine the meat industry is allowed to purvey, schools couldn't get key life-saving information about whether or not the meat they had came from the downer-slaughtering plant, even as parents were demanding answers. Additionally, the mechanics of the recall mean huge capital expenditures for schools with no details on how they're going to be reimbursed for what they're spending to comply and dispose of all the bad meat.
UPDATE: I forgot to include, in that list, surrounding communities (not to mention far-flung communities) who have their health threatened in a very immediate way by the huge amount of fecal waste generated by meat producers.

2008-03-04T20:54:00.002-05:00

LAW-BREAKING SLAUGHTERHOUSE'S CEO COMPELLED TO TESTIFY

OC Register: Steven Mendell of Corona del Mar will be summoned to Washington to testify about beef recall.

If, as planned, the committee authorizes the subpoena, Mendell will be compelled to testify on Wednesday, March 12, at a hearing titled "Regulatory failure: must Americans live with unsafe food?" Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who chairs the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in the panel's announcement that it "will not tolerate stonewalling."

2008-03-03T16:35:00.006-05:00

WINDS OF CHANGE HIT CATTLE INDUSTRY

Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of cutthroats: The continued fallout from the Humane Society video, combined with the ongoing incompetence and corruption of meat processors and their supposed overseers, is adding up to significant turbulence for the industry that has for so long been untouchable.

One blow is this Wall Street Journal article, School Lunch at Risk for Years, which looks at USDA audits from the past 5 years showing problems with unsafe meat being delivered to schoolchildren, "suggesting more widespread problems than those that triggered the biggest food recall in U.S. history." Got that? More widespread problems than those in the Chino plant. Or, here, the WSJ will spell it out more clearly for you: "The reports appear to contradict USDA and meat-industry assertions that violations at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. plant in Chino, Calif., which voluntarily recalled 143 million pounds of ground meat Feb. 17, were an 'isolated incident,' as officials said at the time." Read the whole thing for some idea of how pervasive and prevalent this problem has been, of meat producers all over figuring they can game the system and pass of anything they want as edible meat.

Additionally, there's a ripple effect on milk producers who had relied on the lax standards of Hallmark/Westland to pass off the most thoroughly exploited cows imaginable.

So the dairy industry doesn't look like a good one to go into right now unless you're looking for a good way to lose some money. On the other hand, all careers in cattle are looking pretty bleak, according to one industry analyst on the Cattle Network site:

Barry Dunn, Texas A&M Kingsville, put it this way: "The industry is about to face a confluence of economic conditions and policies that, taken separately, would be sobering. The fact that they will happen simultaneously over a very short period of time is almost numbing."

In other words, hard times comin' to your town, cattlemen - more specifically, in the words of the title, The Winds of Change. The rest of the piece tries to turn the crisis into positive suggestions for blunting the impact, but these sound like things anyone who's in the business should already have thought of. Then again, one missing piece of advice is to keep screwing up and relying on your cronies in the USDA to cover for you, so I guess this represents progress.

UPDATE 3/4: USDA Long-Term Projections for Beef, Pork & Poultry Consumption: Per capita beef consumption declines through the projection period AND: Bovine tuberculosis outbreak in Minnesota has "everyone really nervous right now." AND: Livestock Risk Management Workshop scheduled for April 14 in Vernon, Texas

UPDATE 3/4: Dropping milk prices could spell disaster, farmer says

2008-03-02T18:09:00.002-05:00

BEET IT

Beet Juice Lowers Blood Pressure says a new study by British researchers reported in the journal Hypertension. So if you like beets, great, another win for fruits and vegetables. But keep 'em away from me. I don't like beets, daddy!

2008-03-02T17:39:00.004-05:00

***DAIRY PRACTICE EXPOSED***

That's the sensationalist headline the Kansas City Star puts on this story from the Chicago Tribune, detailing how diary cattle that are in "rough shape" from being intensively milked for years, wind up in 17% of the beef our country produces - something implicit in the Humane Society video that they're just now reporting out.

Yes, Virginia, milk is a murderous industry. It's a fact of which vegans have long been well aware, but one that vegetarians try to avoid thinking about and about which the general public has so far been clueless. Granted, the Chino story is no longer front-page for most of the public, but the fact that major newspapers are devoting ink to this is welcome. And if the specter of depleted cows being treated like garbage isn't enough, the story also mentions the prevalance of Johne's disease in dairy cattle being slaughtered and its possible connection to Crohn's disease in meat-eating humans. Again, the unethical treatment of the animals and potential health liabilities for those eating them are two sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, after a solid start, the piece backs off into standard mainstream claptrap, "balancing" the stark facts with blather from warm-&-fuzzy dairy farmers about how those facts simply don't, apparently, exist, with laugh-out-loud statements like this: "You don't get into a business like this unless you care about animals." Oh really? Can we get Steve Mendell to back that up? By the way, where is he these days?

2008-02-29T17:06:00.003-05:00

IF IT'S FRIDAY...

No one could have predicted it would be at this time of the week that the USDA would choose to announce a recall of three of its employees.

And you gotta love this: Painter said a local union representative told him earlier Friday that a third inspector was also placed on leave, but he could not confirm it with the agency. "Apparently, they found enough evidence to suspend those people," Painter said. "When I asked them why exactly, they said, 'I don't know.' I don't know if I buy that."

2008-02-28T23:24:00.003-05:00

SUCCINCT

Harkin condemned the USDA rules that rely on slaughterhouse officials to call a veterinarian back if a cow falls down after already passing its inspection.

"I think that's a very poor requirement," Harkin said.
"Talk about the fox guarding the hen house."

I agree - it's about time we did talk about it.

2008-02-26T16:12:00.003-05:00

LAW-BREAKING SLAUGHTERHOUSE'S CEO REFUSES TO TESTIFY

Boy, that's a shocker, ain't it? With his presence "requested" by congressional investigators, Steve Mendell simply blew them off. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell "expressed disappointment that Mendel refused to testify before the panel," saying "We also wanted to hear from the head of the California meat packing company who recently recalled 143 million pounds of beef, including 55 million pounds destined for our schoolchildren. It appears he has refused our offer to testify voluntarily. We now will have to consider whether we need to compel his appearance to probe how on-site USDA inspectors could have missed these safety problems and the inhumane treatment of the animals that were slaughtered there."

Now we can watch and see if congressional investigators mimic the USDA, cutting the poor guy some slack (after all, he's had a prety bad month, right?), or show some backbone and subpoena this criminally profiteering bozo.

2008-02-26T12:21:00.001-05:00

FOOD CHAINED

Here's a good in-depth look at the slaughterhouse behind the downers-in-food scandal - in fact, a little too in-depth sometimes (not every knock at a neighbor's door really needed to be chronicled).

Two key points jump out: 1) As the headline says, if Westland/Hallmark goes down, it's going to make things tougher for area dairy producers, who of course, deserve to have it as tough as their cows do.

A loss of that dairymen's asset is a boon to compassionate people as well as anyone who cares about human health or the environment. Good riddance.

2) The article ends with a de facto admission that this was no isolated incident by two rogue workers - as well as a tacit admission that both compassion and human health always take a back seat to meat producers' profits. Sybrand Vander Dussen, a Corona dairyman and president of the Chino-based Milk Producers Council, says that

Of course, it's not actually up to the entry-level slaughterhouse workers to judge whether a cow is "not diseased" or not, it's the USDA vet's job, which is why that rule exists. While it's possible the workers could somehow tell the animals weren't diseased and wanted to keep the line moving at all costs, it's also eminently possible they didn't think they would like the verdict of the vet if notified. Either way, their criminal actions were, as Vander Dussen indicates, within the normal realm of slaughterhouse priorities, as are, no doubt, those of thousands of others going on right now.

2008-02-24T12:01:00.006-05:00

SLAUGHTERERS: "WE'RE DEAD MEAT"

With apparently no intended irony, the general manager of Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co told The Wall Street Journal on, ahem, Friday that the company would almost certainly have to close, using colorful terminology: "If the USDA wants payment back, we're dead meat. We're done." said Anthony Magidow. "There's no way we could pay it all back." Would it be mixing metaphors too much to call this - the perpetrators of so much egregious suffering and death seeing themselves as equivalent to the garbage product they've put out for the past two years - as "delicious"? OK, how about "poetic"? Whatever - a major meat producer giving up the business is good news, and a signal to all who would attempt to fill that gap that getting into such a business today is a terrible idea.

So in the long run, this works out equivalent to my "option A" for the USDA. But I will really be astonished if they include "option B."

UPDATE: Here's a passable attempt at a big-picture "meat safety" overview from just the plants around San Diego. It exposes a good crop of extremely unsavory details about meat processing, but utterly fails to address the central issue of this recall - downers, and therefore potential BSE, in the food supply - and winds up pretty much endorsing meat processors' viewpoint that USDA inspections are too diligent and nitpicky. "[I]nspectors have such a lengthy checklist that invariably, they find something wrong." Invariably? Take a look at that video, pal - seems somewhat, shall we say, variable.

2008-02-24T11:01:00.003-05:00

MEAT INDUSTRY ARROGANCE DESTROYING U.S. GLOBAL TRADE

Speaking before meat packers and processors, Schafer said the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. recall announced earlier this week had already prompted diplomats to ask why the U.S. can't produce safe meat. "As people look for reasons to protect their own market places ... they say you can't even send us safe meat," he said. "Do we need to issue new regulations and things? Right now we're just not prepared to do that."

Comical - or it would be, if lives as well as entire economies weren't at stake. First, let's remember that the US meat industry has a long history of sending unsafe meat to its trading partners, so the "looking for reasons to protect their own market places" line is classic sleight-of-hand. The fact is the USDA has gotten away with so much sloppiness and so little scrutiny here among the meat-eating media that they forget other countries actually may take trade standards, and the health of the populace, seriously. And still the agency stubbornly denies any need to do anything such as, ahem, "issue new regulations and things." Eloquent.

Also, ya gotta love this: "The agency has no plans to test any of the recalled meat, said Ken Petersen, assistant administrator for the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service. Petersen said the meat already is being removed from the food supply, so there is no reason to test it. 'Testing it isn't going to tell me anything,' he said." Of course not. Only whether the prevalence of BSE in the meat you were rubber-stamping for the nation's schoolchildren was nonexistent, tiny, or at a level that could and should cause Americans to avoid factory-farm beef altogether. And when you're the industry-puppet USDA, what's the point in that?

UPDATE 2/26: US to Far East: Where you gonna get your beef from, then - Canada? (A reminder that yeah, it does matter if a cow is sick when it gets into the food supply.)

2008-02-22T12:13:00.008-05:00

NAT. GEOGRAPHIC: ANIMALS ARE SMARTER THAN YOU THINK

The venerable photo-heavy magazine has a nice feature this month, "Inside Animal Minds," that pulls together a few relatively recent experiments (relatively, I said - Betty the Crow's wire-bending was six years ago, and Alex the Parrot, who started making headlines in the late '90s, has since died) that collectively show humans' notion of inherent mental superiority over animals has no apparent basis other than wishful thinking. Every intellectual process we come up with as the definitive exemplar of "this is what separates us from the animals" is eventually toppled when an appropriate experiment is devised that can truly test it scientifically.

Here's a passage that deftly illustrates many people's chauvinistic attachment to the Humans-Uber-Alles fantasy: Research by Clayton and Emery at Cambridge University

We'll ignore the fact that animals' episodic memory has been proven by other experiments with other types of animals. Let's just look at Shettleworth's so-called logic: Since animals lack language, they must lack a mental narrative and therefore an ability to think back through time. The fallacies in this are profoundly risible: First, the premise, that animals lack language, is trotted out as a given, with no proof whatsoever. Yet many experiments have found animals communicating among themselves in ways that suggest languages we may not yet have decoded, and different kinds of animals have managed to bridge that gap that we've been incapable of - i.e. learning to communicate in some rudimentary form of human language. So, baldly stating that animals lack language is highly questionable at best.

After this unsound premise, the next step is an implicit assertion that since humans' mental narratives are associated with language, language must be the cause, the progenitor, of those narratives. Again, completely unproven, and on its face a classic converse error of the "Socrates is a cat" type. But still, let's go ahead, just for fun, and grant a) that animals lack language, and b) that human mental narratives are based on language.

This still in no way tells us that non-human animals' mental narratives must be based on language. In fact, if animals do indeed lack language, yet are able to show intellectual processing in all these experiments, that makes it even more likely that they would have some non-linguistic way of organizing their thoughts, and therefore their memories. Yet Shettleworth's statement of utter illogic is supposed to stand on a he-said-she-said par with actual scientific experiments proving this capability in animals. (As Clayton points out, every time a criterion for mental capability in animals is met by a scientific proof, the skeptics "move the goalposts".) There are few more poignant examples of how humans' mental superiority over animals must be true simply because we so fervently wish it to be true.

And why do we wish it to be true? Well, here National Geographic, unsurprisingly, drops the ball, staying far away from this issue, but clearly, if the supposed border between humans and animals is breached, it means we can't automatically exclude the latter from our community of beings who deserve moral consideration. And that would imply considering not just parrots and scrub jays and dolphins, but the pigs, cows and chickens we needlessly slaughter for our entertainment. This was a point made in an article of which I'm very fond from a couple years back (PDF). It lacks the beautiful pictures, yes, but in my totally unbiased opinion, gets directly to the very heart of this issue.

UPDATE 3/4: I noticed the photo of the groundhog was no longer loading and clicked through to find that National Geographic has pulled the entire story from their site, less than a week into the month for which the issue is dated. What, is the concept of animal intelligence that threatening? What gives?

2008-02-19T14:54:00.002-05:00

RICOCHETS

By now the HSUS video of downers being abused is a well-established American icon, but I can't let go of that "bombshell" analogy, so now we have all the stories where the facts and their respective spins go bouncing around from one media format to another, with the requisite newspaper editorials condemning this supposed isolated incident and demanding "action" to assure we can all swallow animal corpses without fear, and with "reaction" from "experts" like Temple Grandin.

Grandin, who makes her career off the meat industry, tends to low-ball its ill effects (outside of, you know, making the cattle nervous and anxious when their kill chutes are poorly designed), so it's worth noting that she baldly states that the stuff seen in the video - which, cruelty aside, is all about flouting USDA regulations and slaughtering high-risk downers - is probably going on right now at "10 or 15 percent of the plants" in the United States. In other words, even if we lowball Grandin's own lowballing and take the 10% estimate, take the record-setting amount of meat just recalled because there were downers in it (and once again, downers are the most likely to be carrying BSE) and multiply it by 650. I don't even want to figure out all the zeroes in that.

We'll let this one Baltimore Sun article stand in for all the others, as it does have a couple more good gems: F'rinstance, try to reconcile these - the USDA promises to "ramp up" its inspection process, while at the same time claiming that "We know our inspectors were correctly inspecting the plant" in question. Huh? If they were already correct, how can you make them more correcter?

And Amanda Eamich, the spokeswoman behind that quote, also blithely states that (quoting the article) "the department's investigation found that the mistreatment documented on the video was an exception to its practices." Uh huh... an exception to its practices? Or to its supposed policies??? After all, if this stuff was going on and the USDA official present couldn't find it, how can the USDA speak with any credibility about what was or was not regularly happening at this plant... or any other, for that matter? What exactly is their basis of data by which they can determine this is an "exception"? The plant's records of its own violations? What? Inquiring stomachs want to know.

And as one last tidbit... A Mad Criminal is on the loose! While one of the two men wholly responsible for this 143-million-pound recall has been taken into custody, the other remains at large! That means Luis Sanchez could be out there somewhere forcing downers to walk to slaughter even as we speak! Doesn't the law enforcement here seem a little lackadaisical? I mean, we're talking about the two most evil men in the whole slaughter industry, the two who refuse to follow the rules and who, all by themselves, came up and implemented this plan to subvert USDA regulations - and one of these two is still out there, continuing, no doubt, to instigate more isolated incidents!!! The horror! Seriously, though, I hope that no language barrier prevents these two from singing.

2008-02-18T02:07:00.004-05:00

THE 143-MILLION-POUND BOMBSHELL

Hey folks, remember how all last week and the week before the USDA kept saying there was no evidence the downers were ever made into meat? Well, as of Sunday afternoon, there suddenly was ... yes... evidence the downers were ever made into meat! And on that little distinction rests the largest beef recall in U.S. history. Because while the chance of illness, according to the USDA, is "low," there's almost no doubt now that American consumers over the past two years (at least) have been eating beef from animals too sick to stand up on their own! Hey hey! Animals that are therefore most likely to suffer from Mad Cow disease! But don't worry, to the USDA that's only "Class II." It's a low risk - to them, anyway.

On his blog Wayne Pacelle says "It's not up to The HSUS to do the USDA's job," yet that's exactly what's happened here, and it bears repeating: The largest beef recall in US history was initiated by an outside agency acting in secret while the USDA inspector (according to the USDA) was right there on the premises. If food safety and animal-cruelty prosecution were up to the USDA, this would all still be going on at Westland/Hallmark. And of course, duh, it is all still going on all over the country, but after this, a lot of meat producers have got to be pretty nervous about exactly what's going on down at the kill floor. I'd call that a good day's work.

2008-02-15T01:30:00.003-05:00

MACHINES

Heh. You know a paper thinks a story's big when they give it an address like this:

http://www.charlotte.com/poultry/

And indeed, here the Charlotte Observer has a terrific, nearly epic, investigation of working conditions at their local slaughterhouse chain, House of Raeford. It highlights - while failing to make explicit - the connection between how animal-killing companies treat non-human animals and how they treat human ones. It's all replaceable machine parts to them. Pain and suffering can't exist in a machine. You think I'm exaggerating? It's impossible to.

Hispanics

a natural movement for them.

So weilding a knife is something hispanics are "naturally" good at. This is the type of brain trust we have running this life-and-death, mostly death, industry. Says a lot.

So, kudos to the Observer for taking this on so vigorously. But of course it needs to go further. "This nation should no longer be content to enjoy holiday feasts and turkey sandwiches and fried chicken dinners while poultry plant workers endure crippled hands and ruined limbs," yells one editorial. OK, you first, pal. Let's see "this nation" put its money where its mouth is. Ha. If this nation had any willpower or brake on this nation's compulsion to shovel dead animals into this nation's gaping maw every single day, companies like Raeford wouldn't exist. Conversely, if you care about how workers' suffering is being ignored, is it so hard to care how animals' suffering also is?

2008-02-09T00:54:00.000-05:00

THE USDA THINKS YOU'RE STUPID

As the fallout continues to spread from the HSUS downed-cow video bombshell, the issue I raised last week continues to reverberate, and unsurprisingly, many incurious journalists continue to give it a pass. An exception is this unnamed AP reporter, who reports the company line that "there's no evidence any downed animal entered the food supply" and then follows right up with this retort from Wayne Pacelle:

tape that showed a number of downers that went into the kill box where they're slaughtered,”

(Parenthetically I should also note that this reporter did the two minutes or so of googling to establish that "Federal regulations call for keeping downer cows out of the food supply because they may pose a higher risk of E. coli, salmonella contamination, or mad cow disease since they typically wallow in feces and their immune systems are often weak," while many other lazy and/or gullible journalists pulled the old "according to" dodge, e.g. "HSUS also contends the animals pose a higher risk of picking up bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses like E. coli 015:H7, because they’re not able to stand, and are lying in feces in pens." Yep, just one crazy opinion...)

The USDA believes (and perhaps rightly so) that they can get away with this clear and obvious lie - that there's no evidence downers were made into meat - because few reporters want to get into the nitty-gritty of the way a slaughterhouse works, and because their spokespeople are experts at smoke and mirrors, pretending to answer questions while spinning and weaving like the slipperiest politician. In this press briefing from *cough* Friday, spokesman Kenneth Peterson baldly states right at the top, "To date there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations that downer cattle entered the food supply," failing to mention whether there's some trick photography on the video they were provided or whether the downers that go offscreen are actually entering a swimming-pool area rather than a kill floor.

A Dow Jones reporter tries an appeal to sheer logic: "But what would be the purpose of the inhumane handling of the cattle? In other words, is there any possible other purpose for forcing a fallen cow to their feet other than, say, bypassing the downer prohibition? I mean is there absolutely anything that could be the reason behind this except for that?" But Peterson is ready with an utterly transparent load of nonsense that has nothing to do with what was just asked: "Well, I can't, you know, muse on people's thinking other than to say it's not necessary in a plant that operates effectively, and it's certainly not appropriate. And so perhaps they have some animals that they thought they could get up to move." Get up to move where? To that little-known swimming-pool area, perhaps?

And if all else fails, there's the old standby of "Next question." A Press Enterprise reporter brings up the previous "violations of humane handling" at the plant. First Peterson pretends there was only this one little isolated problem of excessive electric prodding in 2005. Then...

Isn't it clever how he answered yes, they had a documented problem with foodborne pathogens in 2002 without ever actually admitting that? And when the reporter tries to nail that down...

Perfect. Don't worry, folks, there just happened to be these rogue employees using cattle prods that are not even "allowed on the property" of the plant, in addition to several other cruel activities, and the inspectors just happened to all fail at catching this ("Did they have knowledge of perhaps when my inspectors would be around?" Peterson innocently wonders, having apparently not read the reports that hello, yes, a USDA food safety inspector came at predictable times -- 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.), and, get this, while those once-in-a-lifetime aberrations were occuring it just so happened that there was an undercover camera running. That's the story, and the USDA will help the meatpackers stick to it. It's what they do. Because they really think you're stupid enough to buy it.

POSTSCRIPT: Off-topic in terms of the USDA's assessment of your mental fortitude... but I loved this tidbit from one of the above articles: "On Thursday afternoon, protestors stood outside the company at Yorba and Schaefer avenues waving placards that said 'Stop Corporate Greed' and 'Hallmark Tortured Sick Cows.' Passing motorists honked their horns or flashed a thumbs-up." Then: "Two women in a black Honda Civic sat across the street with homemade signs saying 'We support Hallmark Meat Packing' and 'Get the whole story.' They declined to comment." Get the whole story. But not from us!!!

2008-02-06T13:08:00.000-05:00

HOW DID VEGETARIAN DINOSAURS GET SO BIG AND STRONG?

I swear I'm gonna just keep recycling these three images until long after everybody's sick of them. But only a meat-addled brain would not understand that the earth's largest and most powerful land mammals tend to be entirely vegetarian. So is it really so freakin' inconceivable that enormous sauropods would have been well-nourished by an entirely plant-based diet? Still, as long as people think this is news, I'll certainly go ahead and help spread the word.

2008-02-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

MORE FALLOUT

Of the options I delineated for the USDA in the tortured-cow video case, it looks like they're leaning closest to... option "c." The plant has been "shut down" by the agency, which sounds powerfully conclusive and close to my option "a" when rendered as a headline, but the fine print explains that "the suspension will remain in effect and the Westland Meat Co. will not be allowed to operate until written corrective actions are submitted and verified by the USDA to ensure that animals are humanely handled." This means the focus is indeed on this one incident at this one location, as though the practice of torturing downers - and indeed, food animals in general - were not widespread throughout the industry.

Not a big surprise: As the hubbub dies down, the average consumer hears, if anything, that the tortured-cow plant was "shut down," end of story, so they can continue consuming meat from all those other animal-friendly facilities that put little mints on the animals' pillows before killing them.

UPDATE: Something I missed previously - Businessweek reports that not only In-N-Out but also Jack-In-the-Box has banned Westland meat. Basically, if you're a burger restaurant with a hyphenated name, you don't want anything to do with this beef - for now, anyway: In-N-Out seemed to categorically ban this supplier forever, where Jack-In-the-Box is just "until further notice." Also, clear across the continent, NYC Public Schools took all burgers off their menus. All of these, however temporary, are big developments, attaching name-brand entities to the concept of rejecting meat that is both unsafe and (not coincidentally) unethical.

LATEST INCONCEIVABILITY: Dean Cliver, professor emeritus of food safety at UC Davis "said he was especially shocked by the news, because as someone who has worked on food safety for 45 years, he believed in the federal inspection process. 'That the most intensive inspection system we have was asleep on this situation bothers me enormously,' he said."

Yeah, good eye, professor emeritus. I mean, really, who could have predicted... ?

2008-02-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

MORE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN ZOOS

Here's an interesting piece on an In-Defense-of-Animals-sponsored visit to the SF Zoo - you know, the tiger-attack zoo - by international "zoo experts," in which the latter denounce many of this particular zoos exhibits as "like something from the 19th century" or "third world" or "like a zoo you would see in Eastern Europe." They pointed to "unnatural" and "aberrant" animal behavior, "such as pacing polar bears and giraffes that have licked and chewed the side of their barn."

I can't decide whether the best quote is that the zoo demonstrates "a lack of animal-mindedness" or that it "seemed to be run like a department store, with officials putting emphasis on showing a varied menagerie instead of focusing on the animals' well-being."

But let's be frank: This is smoke and mirrors in terms of the real problem with zoos. "Animals" don't start zoos in order to have a nice place to stay; of course zoos don't have "animal-mindedness." The first symptom of animal-mindedness would be freeing the animals, something that would have to top almost all the animals' agendas. And of course it's run like a department store instead of a place focusing on animals' well-being: That's what zoos are all about. Sure, maybe the SF zoo is more egregious than some others in some of the particulars of this, but talking as though the problems listed are particular to this zoo obscures the point: Zoos are prisons for animals - the bigger the animal, the harsher a prison it is.

2008-02-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

KILLING IS DEADLY

A favorite trope of anti-vegetarianism is "You care more about animals than you do about people" - the concept being that meat-eaters put their caring where their mouth is, and value the welfare of humans more than "animal lovers" do.

This is BS, of course: The underpaid, highly stressed humans - mostly immigrants -who have to do the most dangerous job in America in order for the meat industry to exist are as invisible and objectified by meat-eaters as are the animals that are killed. And in addition to the routine injuries from blades of one sort or another, the CDC has just identified another ailment derived from work in pig slaughterhouses, one that looks to have afflicted thousands of pork plant workers over a decade.

The fact that slaugterhouse workers are treated "like animals" is not a coincidence or an unfortunate system glitch that needs to be rectified: It's part and parcel of a system that, above the lives of human and non-human animals, values nothing more than profit; it's also an intrinsic part of the Western "taste" for cheap, plentiful meat. Quite simply, anyone who eats meat values their own taste buds more than they do other people's lives.

2008-02-02T02:40:00.000-05:00

FALLOUT

Here's a good roundup of the latest developments in the downer-meat scandal. This one focuses on the revelation that HSUS went directly to prosecutors with the video and were asked not to go public yet and waited a month before releasing the clips on their site when no prosecution was forthcoming.

And the HSUS investigator I lauded - and still do - goes into detail about what was going on at Hallmark and how frequently.

Some choice bits:

* The USDA inspections came regularly at 12:30 and 6:30 so that workers had plenty of time for misdeeds such as those captured on video. This squares with what Howard Lyman and others have reported about the USDA's joke of an "inspection" process.

* The In-N-Out burger chain pledged to never use hallmark beef from this point forward.

* Geez, Wallace Shawn is getting to be a regular around here: "Anthony Magidow, general manager of the meat processing portion of Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., said Friday that he could not believe cows had been mistreated at the facility until the Washington Post reporter who broke the story showed him the video last Monday." Yeah, it was just too incredible to contemplate that these rogue operators might be flouting the rules, given that "one was a supervisor with 30 years of experience at the company and another had worked there for 12 years." Maybe you should get down to the kill floor a little more often and see what your most trusted employees are up to, Mr. Magidow, if you were, indeed, not aware such things were going on.

But here's the best part:

* "Magidow said there is no chance that any of the seven animals that were tormented in the videotape wound up in meat that went into the national school lunch program." OK, that's the view from guy who's unable to believe what's going on because he's out of the loop - how does that square with the actual eyewitness testimony? "The undercover investigator said many cows approved for slaughter later went down, and he frequently saw those animals enter the kill box. Workers never notified the USDA officer on site after animals went down, he said." Hmmmm. Too bad you're so unaware of what your longtime employees are up to, Mr. Magidow, 'cause it sure sounds like downed animals were made into meat - and if there was no notification, nobody knows which downers wound up where.

And all snark aside, this is what it comes down to. This clueless bozo thinks he can play games with peoples's lives (not to mention animals') by sitting there and declaring the animals didn't get made into meat. So let's consider this logically for a second... these longtime employees have a downed animal, and rather than use some of the equipment they have on hand to forcibly move cattle, they spend minutes of precious time (remember the profit margin depends on cattle coming into the slaughterhouse as rapidly and regularly as possible) taunting and torturing the animal to make it walk... and then once it's walking they just walk it out of the facility and into more paperwork, rather than send it to the kill floor and be done with it. How credulous are we supposed to be? Why would anyone let him get away with such patent nonsense when lives are at stake?

The USDA is still probing. It's a chance for them to come out swinging and show they're not just industry patsies by a) closing Hallmark completely and b) undertaking a thorough investigation of this practice throughout the industry. Or they could always go with c) declaring that this was all just a simple misunderstanding, isolated at this one location and on these particular dates when it just so happened that a camera was running, and everybody should go ahead and eat all the meat they possibly can. Wonder which the USDA will choose? Place your bets now.

2008-01-30T23:47:00.000-05:00

BOMBSHELL

A heartfelt shout-out to HSUS, with whom I don't always agree, but who know how to play this game - and are willing to do so. Specifically, whoever essentially took their life in their hands to infiltrate this place and get this powerful video is a certified hero, in my book.

Of course the 'game' is that the media helps fuel the outrage over this specific incident as though it's some crazy one-in-a-million event, but HSUS knows that's better than the outright, constant silence and denial that would reign otherwise.

Reuters isn't as bad as some of the coverage, but everywhere you see crap like this: "Besides the issue of animal abuse, the Humane Society believes the practice of using downer animals poses a risk to the nation's food supply." The next couple of sentences then explain exactly why the practice of using downer animals poses a risk to the nation's food supply, as a matter of simple fact, not some "belief" of HSUS's.

And though politicians are always promising to Get To The Bottom Of This while the spotlight's on, Dick Durbin at least sounds serious: "U.S. Senator Dick Durbin ... on Wednesday called for an immediate federal investigation into the safety of ground beef used in the school lunch program. "The treatment of animals in the video is appalling, but more than that it raises significant concerns about the safety of the food being served to our nation's children." Yes, it sure does, Dick. It sure does.

While the content of the video itself is obviously tragic, the crop of headlines it's generated is upon making its way to the mainstream media is oddly satisfying...

> Video Reveals Violations of Laws, Abuse of Cows
> Video of workers abusing cows raises food safety questions
> USDA Suspends Meat Company From Supplying Federal Programs
> Meat Plant Shut Down: Video Shows Animals Tortured
> Meat Company Fires 2 Over Cruelty to Livestock
> Sick Cattle Used to Feed School Children
> Bad Meat Delivered to Schools
> Beef pulled from school lunch program
> Waterboarding torture used on cattle
> HSUS video a new headache for packers, USDA

I'll be on the lookout for more...

UPDATE 2/5: There have been a whole slew, but ya gotta love Suspect beef: In your child’s school lunch?

2008-01-27T23:23:00.000-05:00

NY TIMES OP-ED: BYE BYE, CHEAP MEAT

Interesting piece in Sunday's Times. Bittman ticks off the liabilities of the meat industry in the West and sees it as inevitable that the public will eventually figure out how extreme these liabilities are, and react.

the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.

Well, a guy can hope, can't he?

Anyway, the last sentence of Bittman's bio "shirttail" is especially interesting - in that I wonder if this same piece would have run if they couldn't say that.

2008-01-24T23:36:00.000-05:00

ADD 'METABOLIC SYNDROME' TO THE LIST OF ILLS FROM MEAT

"Eating just two servings of meat a day can increase the risk of developing metabolic syndrome by 25 percent compared to consuming meat twice a week, according to new research." Interestingly, they don't give the figure it increases the risk over, say, not eating meat at all.

I know, I know... inconceivable!

Diet soda was also implicated in this case. I was one of those who quite definitely got headaches from it. Stopped drinking it a little over 10 years ago and have not had a headache since. So... go to hell, diet soda.

And to keep track for future reference, as much as anything else:

"This study is the third in three months to flag up potential risks with high meat consumption. Last December, a study by the USA's National Cancer Institute found that a high intake of red and processed meats may raise the risk of lung and colorectal cancer by up to 20 per cent. In November, the World Cancer Research Fund published a study which directly linked diet to cancer, with alcohol and red and processed meats posing particular risks."

2008-01-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE KILLS

While we're still waiting for fact and allegation to be sorted out in the escaped-tiger story, here's an illuminating peek into how the situation was handled, as reflected in the 911 recordings.

Now, after an emergency rescue, it's always easy to Monday-morning-quarterback the situation and second-guess the rescuers' effectiveness or decision-making. That said, an interesting fact (as presented here, anyway) stands out: Life-saving rescue was probably delayed by zoo employees' inability to believe that one of the big cats had escaped: "That is virtually impossible. ... I can't imagine how he could have possibly gotten attacked by a lion. He would have had to have gotten in [the big cat enclosure]. I just can't see it." The rescuers have to weigh one of the victims' unambiguous pleas, "My brother's about to die out here!" against this "authoritative" claim.

Why would zoo employees find an escaped lion or tiger "virtually impossible"? For the same reason - stay with me now - that a relative promised me in 2002 that "They're not gonna find any Mad Cow in American cows. There isn't any. Our government wouldn't let that happen."

When it comes to management of animals and their by-products, underqualified or outright incompetent individuals are given a free pass to distort the truth as they report on their own situations; and the public, which might apply a certain skepticism to analogous non-animal claims, buys it - because they need to believe that the reality presented by animal activists is wrong. They need to believe that it's ethically OK to eat animals, that it's not unhealthy and/or outright dangerous, and in this case, that the animal-exploiting institution that pays them is truly looking out for their welfare as well as that of its captive animals - rather than, say, lowballing the construction of an enclosure and lying about it.

Think this is a stretch? Remember that the disbelieving calls were coming from the zoo cafe. What kind of food do you suppose they were used to serving and eating there? And recall that one of the many ways the National Zoo demonstrated its insuitability as animal handlers was feeding beef and fish to vegetarian apes. For an entire group of people - those who were supposed to know best about caring for animals - the notion that meat would not constitute the best possible food was inconceivable.

Additionally, the wariness of the rescuers in confronting an escaped animal predator points to how incomparably dangerous such a situation is: With most (not all) dangerous humans an appeal to either logic or self-interest can be applied: Drop the weapon or you will die. Such a cause-and-effect statement cannot be conveyed to an escaped tiger. Thus it will fight you to the death.

Yes, escapes of this particular sort are rare. But if and when they do happen, and they do, they illustrate how insane it is to keep wild animals - at the very least, the predatory ones - in such proximity to large numbers of city dwellers. That this continues not only to happen but to be portrayed as essential heartwarming Americana is, well, hard to believe.

UPDATE 1/20: Some new details, though with wildly varying levels and quality of sourcing. And some things that make you go Hmmmm: "It is unclear what Paul Dhaliwal told police as there is no summary of his account in the search warrant affidavit." Uh... huh.... and "Matthews said investigators could not determine how long those items [possible thrown matter in the tiger cage] had been there, because the zoo's operations director, Jesse Vargas, 'told me that they could not answer any questions regarding the tiger and/or the tiger exhibit per their attorney's request.'" Okeley-dokeley.

UPDATE 1/29: Well wouldn't ya know, now that the media glare has died down, it just ain't all that important to sort out fact from allegation in this case. Authorities basically threw up their hands and said "I don't know and I don't care." I'll see if the boys' lawyer makes good on his supposed efforts to clear their good name before I post again on this, but it bears repeating that nothing they did or did not do can exonerate the zoo for building a tiger enclosure that a tiger can jump out of and kill people.

2008-01-13T15:58:00.000-05:00

SCIENTISTS: SOME ANIMALS HAVE CONSCIOUSNESS

In a similar pattern to the last post, behavioral studies over the past couple decades have increasingly shown that the concept of "dumb" animals has been a function of humans' inability to understand animal thinking rather than something intrinsic to the animals. Here's the latest:

"[S]some scientists have said an organism must be conscious if it has 'episodic memory.' This is basically the memory of the 'what, where and when' of events in life. New research has found that some animals may have just this sort of memory."

Let's recap that: It's a syllogism - if A has 'episodic memory,' then A is conscious. Some A have episodic memory. Therefore, some A are conscious.

I must admit when I read through the specifics of the experiment, a heightened sense of smell seemed like a possible alternate explanation, so this kind of thing should be replicated wherever and however possible to nail down the conclusion. But of course, even that would show that animals' capabilities are beyond our current ability to judge. And of course there are also multipled other studies on other kinds of animals showing some form of consciousness. So add this to the ledger.

2008-01-12T15:47:00.000-05:00

YET ANOTHER STUDY LINKS MEAT TO BREAST CANCER

A new study has found that eating meat increases breast cancer risk up to a whopping 23 percent, echoing previous studies by finding a correlation in the disease with total meat (lower), with red meat (higher) and processed meats like sausage and baloney (highest). It now seems this connection is beyond dispute, but I'm sure the meat industry and its meat-swilling patsies in the media will find a way to keep it "an open question."

2008-01-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

DEATH BY DAIRY

Like meat, cows' milk can be unhealthy - deadly, even - for humans either in a long-term way or more immediately. Here are two stories reflecting those tendencies, making the case pretty definitively that anyone who considers milk a "health food" needs to wake up and smell the data.

Long-term: Nonfat milk linked to prostate cancer, announces Reuters, referring to two studies that found "the amount of calcium and vitamin D in the diet appears to have little or no impact on the risk of prostate cancer, but the consumption of low-fat or nonfat milk may increase the risk."

The buried lede here is that prostate cancer has long been pegged as tied to dietary fat, but here it's the lower-fat varieties of this substance that are the more dangerous - just as many vegan doctors and researchers have predicted for years. "Skim milk was linked with advanced prostate cancer," the story reports, citing a result common to both studies. "Calcium from non-dairy food, by contrast, was tied to a reduced risk of non-advanced prostate cancer."

Immediate: Third person dies from bad milk is the head for this report on a listeria outbreak tied to a dairy in Massachusetts, a reminder that milk is a product that eminates from an animal's hind end, and as with meat, this can cause problems.

Let's be clear: These three deaths, while tragic, are pretty extreme cases for milk; they're outliers in the overall context. But look at the kind of coverage they've gotten (virtually nill, outside Massachusetts) and compare it to the apocalyptic national hysteria generated by every death that can be taken to have anything to do with veganism. By the standards of Nina Planck and her ilk, these three deaths prove that all cow's milk should be withdrawn from the market immediately, if not before!

UPDATE 1/9: Add to the casualty total a woman who contracted listeriosis from milk and recovered but suffered a miscarriage. And enjoy the standard of fine journalism practiced by the Associated Press in the opening paragraph: "Customers like [Whittier Farms milk] products because they are a hormone-free taste of old New England." Amazing! Alone in the world, this one dairy has somehow figured out how to produce cows' milk for sale that contains no hormones! Someone should look into this - maybe it was that new, secret process that somehow introduced the listeria.

2008-01-08T11:28:00.001-05:00

DAN PIRARO BLOG

One of the highlights for Philly vegetariana in 2007 was a weekend visit by Dan Piraro (for the Veggie Cabaret), whom I had the chance to drag around town to various noteworthy locations. Dan's a genuinely funny, genuinely committed vegan who, oh yeah, also draws a widely seen and much loved comic called Bizarro. He's now started a blog on Blogger, so check it out and give him a big bloggy welcome!

2008-01-07T16:59:00.000-05:00

RECALLS - YOU MISSED 'EM, SO DID I

Usually I'm here to tell you about recalls that you didn't hear about (due to the USDA's canny strategy in playing the media timing game) but this time, since I missed blogging all of December, neither of us heard about them. And it looks like I missed some November ones as well. Please note that I'm not excluding non-meat recalls for this period - that's all there is:

November 15: 98,000 pounds of frozen sausage roll products - Listeria

November 24: 95,927 pounds of ground beef products - E. coli

December 6: 990 pounds of beef and chicken products - undeclared milk (most common food allergy) and soy

December 10: 98,772 pounds of liver sausage - undeclared milk

December 17: 102 pounds of hamburger patties and bulk ground beef - E. coli

December 25: 88 pounds of beef patty product - Listeria

And, finally, the one I just heard about, which was announced Saturday (ahem)...

January 5: 13,150 pounds of steaks and ground beef products - E. coli

Yeah, Atkins can raise your health risk within a month - if you're lucky, that is, and don't happen to get one of these batches.

2008-01-07T12:24:00.000-05:00

STOP THE PRESSES: ATKINS RAISES HEART-ATTACK RISK

I know it's beating the proverbial dead horse, but a lot of misguided people continue to try to find nourishment in said dead horse, so it's worth noting that a team of medical scientists found that the Atkins diet raises your heart-attack risk after only one month. The lead researcher asked rhetorically, "Why not start out with a diet that will be healthier for you in the long run after weight loss?" (Hmmmm... maybe because institutions like the New York Times give Atkins cultists like Gary Taubes platforms to spout their pro-meat wishful thinking unfettered by facts about health and nutrition? Just a guess.)

2008-01-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

YEAR OF THE TIGER

Couldn't pass up that phrase in packing up my contrition for letting December go by without a single blog entry along with the topic for this New Year's one, which is the big Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Fransisco Zoo.

I will have more to say on this as information is solidified and distinquished from rumor or lies. Already the Zoo has lied about the height of the wall the tiger got over - prettty much the most crucial fact they could have said anything about - and there have been various descriptions of the behavior of those who were mauled as intentionally taunting the big cats. The Zoo seems to think that if those descriptions are true, they're somehow exonerated. The inevitable lawsuits over this incident and previous fiascoes should should help clarify that issue for them.

However this all turns out, there are a couple interesting facts to keep in mind: The AZA, which so famously raised a huge stink about zoos sending elephants to sanctuaries instead of other zoos, holding their zoo accreditation hostage on the outcome of those decisions, seems to be much more laissez-faire about its official standards for things that mean the difference between life and death - the height of enclosures for large wild predators. In contrast to the elephant situation, the AZA's tiger specialist says about these crucial standards, "in no way do I have the power to implement them or demand that they be met."

And lastly, all the talk about "what went wrong" and what can be done to make sure this never happens again is utterly bogus. What went wrong is that large wild animals were held captive in the midst of a heaviliy populated human environment, specifically so that humans could come and derive entertainment from the situation - as the mauled brothers, and the teenager who was killed, did according to their own definition of entertainment. This incident is not an aberration, either for the SF Zoo or for Zoos in general. It's just one extreme, fatal example of the underlying idiocy of city zoos in the 21st century.

UPDATE 1/7: It shouldn't be surprising for another animal-exploiting institution managed by the USDA, but America's zoos have almost zero oversight when it comes to such life-and-death issues as escaped animals: No agency keeps track of how many escaped-animal incidents zoos have, "private" zoos are not even expected to disclose such information, and "even the main zoo oversight association does not release records of zoo escapes - and the only time zoos are required to report such incidents to the association is if there is an injury." California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine calls the oversight setup "the fox guarding the hen house." Sound familiar?

ALSO: I love the sign in the photo on this page. After all, if there's one thing imprisoning sentient animals for their entire lives in order to provide momentary entertainment for passersby says loud and clear, it's "Respect."

2007-11-25T23:27:00.000-05:00

DEMAND AND SUPPLY

A University of Minnesota study has found that school lunch sales don't decline when healthier meals are served, and that more nutritious lunches don't necessarily cost schools more to produce." So... what's the excuse now for continuing to serve tripe to kids?

2007-11-21T16:53:00.000-05:00

RAT PIE, RAT PUDDING, RAT SORBET...

Here's the latest illustration of how the warped mindset of our meat-and-milk culture warps journalism. Granted, this is British tabloid "journalism," but it's only a more condensed form of the rest.

Heather Mills' latest bizarre rant: 'Why don't we drink milk from rats and dogs?' is the headline of this report on standard piece of vegan rhetoric pointing out how unthinkable it would be to drink these other animals' milks, yet we find it not only attractive but "natural" that we should be stealing milk from mother cows. In the mainstream world, though, doing that is not considered "bizarre," yet using logic and analogy to highlight the actual bizarreness becomes a "bizarre rant." It's the journalistic equivalent of fingers in the ears and "la,la,la, I can't hear you!"

RELATED? Just saw the movie Ratatouille, and couldn't help noticing that all the foods presented as staples of Paris' greatest restaurant were vegetarian, with the title dish, so epochally flavorful as to cause a Proustian epiphany to the food critic, is vegan. Make of it what you will.

2007-11-17T16:46:00.000-05:00

HOW YOU KNOW TOFURKY HAS ARRIVED

Mainstream US newspapers mention it and spell the product's name correctly.

2007-11-10T16:41:00.000-05:00

ANIMALS THINK...

Heh. Although it was somewhat misleading to me, I have to applaud the headline applied (almost certainly not by the writer) to this op-ed - you just don't see that many references to little-known early Talking Heads songs these days.

2007-11-02T12:28:00.000-04:00

WATER WE WAITING FOR?

The news broke this week that 36 states in the United States could see a water shortage within five years. More intensively, Atlanta is now dealing with a real-world, right-now water shortage, and one Tennessee town has already run out of water, having to restrict its availability to 3 hours a day.

It's clear that there is an overall water emergency, although its effects will be felt by different people in different localities at different times. But once it hits a community, measures such as not washing your car for a while will only stave off the inevitable for a tiny bit. Meanwhile, there's one long-term, nationwide measure that gets zero news coverage, even though it would, by the most meat-industry-friendly estimate, triple the availability of freshwater (more realistic assessments put the ratio between 20 and 100 to 1): STOP EATING ANIMALS.

Oh noes! Not that! Our precious habits! Such a radical solution!

Fine... call me back when you're ready to admit there's an emergency.

2007-11-01T22:59:00.000-04:00

NEWS FLASH: BACON AND OTHER PROCESSED MEATS CAUSE CANCER

In a familiar routine, the news that a major scientific study has (again) confirmed a causal connection between processed meats (bacon, sausage, lunchmeat etc.) and cancer has already been swamped by stories of "defiant" meat-eaters who oh-so-bravely continue to eat the crap in question despite warnings from "scaremongers." (How come those noting lead content in toys aren't "scaremongers"? I suppose they are, to Mattel.)

What's both amusing and sadly predictable in the situation is the media presentation as though this was one new, sole piece of data, when it's actually an overview of reams of science confirming something that's already been pretty well known for at least a decade.

We get it - to meat-lovers, no amount of science is sufficient to alter your eating habit. But really, if "living it up" is your highest goal in life, great, go ahead and kill yourself - as long as you do it without ruining the environment and killing animals, more power to you!

2007-11-01T11:27:00.000-04:00

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SPINACH? (UPDATED)

I know, eating plant foods is just as dangerous as animal foods, because don't you remember how there was that big spinach recall last year? And the peanut butter? And, like, a few years back there was a problem with green onions?

Meanwhile, if I hadn't checked the FSIS recall list for info on today's 3.3 Million-pound meat Pizza recall for E.coli (which has already caused more than 20 illnesses across 10 states - hear about this one?) I would otherwise have not heard (as you also didn't) of these additional meat recalls just within the past few weeks: 173,554 pounds of frozen ground beef products for E. coli; 1,900 pounds of ground beef products for E. coli; 8,200 pounds of frozen ground beef products for E. coli; and, in addtion to smaller recalls, 4,374 pounds of various cooked beef and chicken products that may be adulterated due to inadequate verification and documentation of processing activities as required by the establishment's Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan. Hmmmm. That one kind of begs the question, adulterated with what? But the wise USDA realizes that we don't really want to know the answer to that.

Heckuva job, news media! Remember, when millions of pounds of meat products are found to be contaminated with animal feces, that's "dog bites man" - Borrrrring. But when the animal feces cross-contaminate plant food products, now that's a story!!! Crack out the Drudge siren!

UPDATE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4: Hey hey hey, another weekend recall to add to the crop - Over a Million Pounds of Cargill Hamburger Tainted with E. coli, and yes, that's the second Cargill recall in less than a month. How many people do you suppose will a) hear about this one at all, or b) have any notion that Cargill has had two separate recalls recently? Hmmmm, a real toughie.

2007-10-29T11:15:00.000-04:00

HUNTING ON THE DECLINE - AWWWWWW

Saw this at the beginning of the month and noted it but didn't publish the entry. Now that I'm ready to, the link on the newspaper site has already expired. (Bradenton, is it possible people might want to read columns that are more than five weeks old?) So I'll link to a forum where someone helpfully posted it. Some highlights:

Heh. Wanna bet, Mr. Misunderstood Wildlife Conservationist? We're reading it all right, and laughing at your pathetic attempts to justify this narcissistic anachronism.

2007-10-19T10:36:00.000-04:00

MILK IS MURDER?

Here's a cute mainstream article about a supposed romantic rift ("dating dilemmas") within the veg community between vegans and vegetarians. I probably wouldn't make note of it, but the good thing is, there's some nice ink for our favorite Vegan Freaks.

Frankly, any coverage of what veganism is probably helps in the long run, but it's kind of pathetic that mainstream sources have to tart such coverage up into confections such as this rather than address the real societal and industrial issues pertaining to this ideology. A sample quote: "Neither group eats meat. But that doesn't make life easier for vegans who try to date 'murderous' vegetarians."

Uh huh. I guess I don't get out much, because in my interactions with hundreds of vegans and vegetarians I have so far failed to ever encounter a single vegan referring to vegetarians as "murderous." But it makes good copy.

2007-10-12T15:55:00.000-04:00

RECALLORAMA

Dunno when I'm going to have a chance to sort out and publish those backlogged entries, but for now Meat Facts is all-meat-recall, all the time. I'd say most consumers who are paying attention to the news probably have a vague idea that there was a big E.Coli recall around the beginning of this month, but how many do you suppose know there was a pretty damn large E.Coli recall a week later that was unrelated? Probably not so many. Yet probably still more than those who've heard about this week's two meat recalls for the same root cause - fecal matter in the meat - but two different names, listeria and salmonella.

There was a recall on Wednesday of 35 tons of Chicken Fettucine Alfredo for listeria, and while that's a lot of stuff to throw out (no worries since very few of the people who bought it will hear about this), it pales next to the one announced late last night, practically Friday - a recall so massive they can't even say yet how big it is, for all of ConAgra's chicken and turkey pot pies, which are marketed under the "Banquet" label as well as many store brands. If and when they release an exact poundage on this one, I'll update this for your maximum informativity. This one, oddly, was originally announced as a "psssst, stop selling that because it might be tainted" non-recall, with the company dragging its feet until... hey... the end of the week... for the huge news to come out! Amazing how these coincidences keep piling up, ain't it?

2007-10-07T17:39:00.000-04:00

RECALL MANIA

OK, as you can tell I haven't had a lot of time to get to the Meat Facts interface lately and post new stuff. I have a bunch of interim posts from late September in draft form that I will fill in later, but let me just say right now: WTF is up with our War on E.Coli? Looks like that's one war that's already been lost!

First we had this ho-hum midweek recall...

Then, early Saturday (ahem), it was expanded to one of the largest meat recalls in history...

Then, it emerged that ONCE AGAIN, the USDA had dragged its feet on announcing the recall, as though trying to make it clear that business concerns were always paramount over the health of actual consumers...

Then, while everybody was talking about the Topps situation, there was yet another Massive Friday Recall - more than 400 TONS of beef- that was "unrelated" except insofar as the root causes of both recalls - feces in the meat as an unavoidable by-product of current industry practices - tends to relate them. (And of course, it's worth mentioning that neither of these were "abundance of caution" recalls - actual people, mostly children, have suffered terrible problems - including kidney failure - from unwitttingly consuming this feces-laced meat.)

Now it turns out Topps is (again announced on the weekend, strange for a "business" story, no?) going out of business. Yes, the biggest meat supplier in the USA is going out of business. You might think this would be front-page news all over America, but then, we must have our priorities.

2007-09-12T00:40:00.000-04:00

PREACH WHAT YOU PRACTICE

This is an interesting ongoing story, and now's as good a time as any to include a snapshot of it: Dave Warwak, a vegan since January, has been "preaching" a vegan lifestyle to students at Fox River Grove Middle School - until administrators sent him home on leave for the offense. For a while the issue was framed as "Show me where it's illegal to tell kids about veganism," but now it's moved into a newer, and in my opinion more strategically dubious, area: Vegan teacher won't return to school until school stops serving milk and meat. Um, OK. Seems like kind of a longshot. I mean, a reeeeeal longshot. Seems counterproductive. But on the other hand, if he wins this...