ANOTHER HUNTER SUFFERING MORAL DRIFT

As I've pointed out, one of the problems with hunting is that basing your hobby around killing defenseless beings can rub off on a guy, leading other transgressions, from minor legal ones to the the wrong beings getting killed. Sometimes the deaths are accidental. Other times it seems a little more complicated. John McNaughton "Mack" English, 26, collected a string of hunting violations in one county. "On July 4, English was cited for hunting deer at night with a light; hunting in a public road; and hunting from a vehicle. Deer-hunting season doesn't start until autumn. On Nov. 9, English again was charged with hunting deer at night with a light and hunting from a vehicle. On Nov. 25, he was cited for using bait to hunt ducks."

But since hunting teaches us that might makes right, English didn't interpret these citations as indicators that he needed to clean up his act, but rather tried to hire an assassin to kill the rangers who ticketed him. See, the outsourcing - that's what got him into trouble. If only he'd practiced more often shooting defenseless beings, he could have gone the DIY route!

ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS CJD (vCJD?) CASE

Once again, hard-charging Steve Mitchell has uncovered an odd CJD case that no one in charge seems to want to discuss, but which relatives consider to be full-blown Mad Cow. "A Connecticut woman who physicians initially suspected in 2000 of being the nation's first case of human mad cow disease appears to have been overlooked by state and federal health officials," he reports. Not only did her doctor initially suspect that form of the disease "based on electroencephalogram readings of Jodi's brain waves," but her case, at age 50 (very young for "sporadic" CJD) should have automatically triggered an investigation by the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center. But folks there are extremely cagey about discussing why no investigation seems to have happened, using the old, irrelevant "patient confidentiality" excuse so well-bandied by the National Zoo. None of it proves Americans are dying from real Mad Cow, but this story alone would make you wonder about the whole situation.

UPDATE 3/28: Speaking of those pesky suspicious CJD cases, The New York Times has now put its imprimatur on The Case of the Cherry Hill Cluster. Just ran across it - I'll have more after I read it. You too, huh?

AFTER READING: Well, it's an OK piece, I suppose, but typical of NYTMag style, I guess, in that it was either assigned with, or the author decided on, certain undeclared biases as to what the real story is. Skarbek is painted as a woman driven to distraction by her quixotic obsession, with clumsy Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole references, and the focus is on her and her motivations rather than the more relevant food-safety question. Almost no other clusters, nor the vast amount of lying and smokescreening done by the USDA on Mad Cow, are mentioned. Ultimately, the story is either willfully dishonest or ridiculously incompetent: I'll give "D.T. Max" a pass on the highly relevant factoid that CJD is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimers, but in an article whose core question is whether there might be a strain of variant CJD that resembles "sporadic" CJD, there's ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION of the bombshell discovery, earlier this year, of exactly that type of BSE - and experts' opinion that this means we should be looking for it in human CJD. That omission alone is incredibly lame, and kind of sinks the credibility of the whole piece, unfortunately.

HOG HELL

This will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog, but large hog farms are, simply put, hell on earth.

The odor knocks visitors off balance the moment they walk in the battered front door of HKY Farm. It's not so much a barnyard smell as a noxious combination of manure, ammonia and death that intensifies as one moves toward the barns. Next comes the sound of dozens of sows screaming and thrashing at their cages at the arrival of visitors and the prospect of food, a noise so loud and unsettling that a farm manager puts on ear plugs as he enters.

Inside, HKY Farm looks like a third world prison for pigs. Dozens of dead piglets are dumped in piles or encased in pools of manure beneath the floor, having drowned there after falling through a hole. Dead hogs remain in their cages, discarded and stiff in walkways or rotting in pens as other pigs gnaw at their carcasses. Many of the 1,800 or so pigs that are alive are emaciated, crippled or covered with open sores, having been poked by jagged iron bars from broken cages or fallen through slats that separate them from the manure pits below. The nursery, heated to protect the piglets, is swarming with flies, and the "sterile room" where food and medicine are stored includes yet another pile of dead pigs stacked in front of a refrigerator and bags of pig feed.

Then there's the manure. It's piled in mounds in cages and concrete pens where the animals live, dripping down the walls and floating as particulate matter in a fetid brown haze that permeates the buildings.

And guess what? This ain't even the worst of them ("critics say HKY is hardly unique among the thousands of large hog farms that have sprung up in the past decade"), and they'll keep on going until people band together and stop them. Which is what some brave souls are doing. As the Chicago Tribune reports (via Miami Herald), "increasingly, neighbors themselves are heading to court, complaining that the odor and gases wafting toward their homes are making them sick and destroying their property values."

Hog industry advocates insist that "the backlash has been driven by urban residents who move to the country and don't like the smells that come with it." Now, you may have wondered about the sentence I italicized up there. Does that square with this? I know the smell of the country, I know it well. It's not something that knocks you over. It's not the smell of death. That's not the smell of the country, it's the smell of screw-everybody CAFOs. (The GAO noted that 60 percent of the largest CAFOs are unregulated.)

And lest we forget what's driving the other side, well, it's pretty simple. This article notes in passing that "the No. 2 official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jim Moseley, is a champion of industrial-style hog production and the former manager of Infinity Pork, a hog CAFO in Indiana. Illinois' Department of Agriculture director, Chuck Hartke, is a former farmer whose son now runs the family's factory-style hog farm."

NY TIMES ETHICIST: DON'T BUY FUR

Randy Cohen, the "Ethicist" for the New York Times Magazine, has weighed in on the fur issue, and not surprisingly, finds that "there is no justification for harming animals to make something as frivolous as a fur coat." It's also, unfortunately, not surprising that he's able to see that, but dismisses the suffering of food animals. "A case can be made for some exploitation of animals -- as food or in important medical research -- when there is no meaningful alternative, and when their suffering is minimized." Yeah, but there are plenty of meaningful alternatives to eating animal products - and their suffering is rarely, if ever, "minimized." Admittedly, he only says "a case can be made" for it, and I guess I'd respond that "a case can be made" against it, too. But it's funny how the ethics of causing pain and suffering to animals for something as frivolous as a particular habitual food taste escapes even our deepest media thinkers. (Via Fund for Animals)

WHOLE LOTTA CJD GOIN' ON

The death last week of Ronald Swartz of Denville, NJ is being examined as possibly the third case of CJD, the extremely rare ("one in a million") disease, in a little over a year in an area with a population of 789,000. Plus, the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in Cleveland has "reopened the case of a Philadelphia woman who died in 2000 and is included among the cases in a possible cluster of CJD cases tied to southern New Jersey. Carrie Mahan, 29, died from a brain disorder that was never identified but physicians initially suspected of being the nation's first case of variant CJD."

This is showing up on the Washington Times site, which means we'll probably see a fuller Steve Mitchell-bylined story in a day or two - I'll keep you updated.

UPDATE 3/24: Yep, here's the long-form version, Five CJD deaths in north N.J. in 15 months. In reading through it, I'm inferring that the five number here is because that includes confirmed or probable deaths, while the Wash. Times version limited itself to confirmed. But there are some interesting additional tidbits... The case of the Philadelphia woman, Carrie Mahan, "has baffled neurologists, such as Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti, director of the Surveillance Center, because Mahan's condition was never identified conclusively. However, many experts, including Dr. Nicholas Gonatas -- the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Mahan -- thought it was CJD. Now Gambetti plans to determine if newer, more sensitive tests developed since 2000 can detect the presence of prions, the agents thought to be responsible for both CJD and vCJD, in Mahan's brain tissue." Steve Mitchell also notes that "Another factor driving the decision to re-examine Mahan's diagnosis could be the opinions of neurologists who observed the slides of her brain when Gambetti recently presented them anonymously at a neurology meeting. Allen said Gambetti told him most neurologists there had agreed the condition looked like CJD."

And on the other coast, the Seattle Times is noting the trend: "More people are wondering whether their elderly relative might have suffered from CJD -- a degenerative disease of the nervous system -- or its variant, the human form of mad cow disease. And with so little known about the deadly diseases, some are asking if any of those cases might be traced back to bad beef."

Another interesting piece in this one has to do with the meaning of "sporadic CJD." "Labeling traditional CJD 'sporadic' is a way of getting around the fact that no one knows what causes it, said Dr. Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale University. Parting with the prevailing theory, she believes the culprit is more likely some type of infectious agent, not misfolded proteins. 'Spontaneous CJD just means we don't know where the infection is coming from,' she said. There's also evidence that some cases of CJD could be mistakenly tagged Alzheimer's or some other type of dementia. Swiss officials found a CJD rate of three cases per million after improving their tracking system -- triple the previously accepted rate." Just sayin'.

USDA BSE TESTING CHIEF QUITS

Bobby Acord, administrator of the USDA's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service, resigned today, for personal reasons. You know, more time with his family and all that. Oh yeah, and also he didn't think we should be widely testing for Mad Cow. A year ago, he said "There is no scientific evidence to support anything beyond what we're doing in this country, quite frankly." This was when they were still doing 10,000 cows a year and expanding it to 20,000. A simpler time, no?

And in what I assume is a coincidence, on the same day, the head of Japan's Gyudon rice bowl chain Nakau also announced he will step down due to the Mad Cow crisis. After all, What kind of gyudon shop doesn't serve gyudon? In a somewhat humorous note, the company ran out of beef due to the ban on American imports of dubious safety. But "bowls of rice topped with chicken, introduced to replace the beef, have fared poorly in the wake of the outbreak of bird flu in Japan."

"DEAR ABBY:" GO VEGETARIAN

Is it a coincidence this column appeared just before the Great American Meatout? "Abby" is talking about a specific case, but her use of the imperative is clear. When a questioner describes an unwelcome house guest who complains - "The steak isn't cooked the way he likes it, or I don't toss the salad the way his mom does. ... How can I get this moocher out of my home without causing trouble between my husband and myself?" Abby says: "That's easy. Stop feeding that moocher steak, go vegetarian, and toss the salads YOUR way."

MY OWN VEGAN IDAHO

Call me an East-Coast city slicker, but I had no idea there were more than one or two vegans in the whole state of Idaho. But in this NY Times story about John Kerry, a tossed off comment about this one town mentions that "[its] rebellious teenagers tend to be "hard-core vegans." Hey, aren't the B-52s vegan? It all makes sense now...

FACTORY FARMS WIPING OUT LIFE ON EARTH

What. You think that's overstated? Well, yeah it is. But not as much as you'd think."The Earth may be on the brink of a sixth mass extinction on a par with the five others that have punctuated its history, suggests the strongest evidence yet." The main decline in extinctions is linked to nitrogen pollution. And guess what? "Atmospheric nitrogen pollution is caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and from intensive agriculture, especially from the volatilisation of animal waste."

GORILLA ESCAPES, INJURES FOUR, SHOT TO DEATH

It would be funny but for the tragedy: "Dallas Zoo officials said they can't explain how a 300-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure, injuring four people before he was shot to death." What a shocker, huh? Whodathunkit? Sorry, but this kind of thing makes me sick. One of the kids hurt in the escape was a toddler, who will be scarred for life at the least, physically and mentally, from this. There's also the death of the gorilla. But hey - that's all right, because the more important thing is keeping wild animals on display in the middle of cities. Yep, it's a necessity!

UPDATE 3/25: Gorilla Escape Now A Federal Investigation Investigators have searched all over the southern section of the Wilds of Africa Exhibit and can't find where Jabari could have escaped. Zoo officials are looking into a tip that teenagers were throwing rocks or ice at the gorilla. The agitation may have caused Jabari to miraculously leap over the wall and electric wire.

HISTORIC USDA ACTION ON ELEPHANTS

"For the first time since elephants began entertaining people at American circuses more than 200 years ago, the federal government has removed a herd of circus animals from an owner accused of mistreating and mishandling his animals," reports the Washington Post. The bozo in question is "one of the largest providers of circus animals in the nation," who was in trouble last year for much of the same, and previously for an elephant that escaped a performance and went on a fatal rampage. The difference here is that the USDA is acting like it's going to take large-scale, gratuitous animal abuse a little more seriously. We'll wait and watch to see if this is followed up, but it's a notable step.

Still, the "fairy tale ending" may be illusory, as the person taking charge of the elephants' care remarks: "Cuneo has made a lot of money on the backs of these animals, and now he's getting rid of them when they're less and less useful to him. Because there is TB in the herd, it's going to be very difficult to find homes for them individually or in some groups. We think they need to remain together as a herd, and that's going to be very hard to do."

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISH OIL

The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports that the levels of flame retardants (yummmmm) have increased dramatically in cod liver oil, the most popular fish oil used in supplements by people trying to improve heart health. Once again, the "necessity" to include fish oil in the diet has a "liability" flip side, one that's missing from plant sources of Omega-3s.

DOWNER ISSUE GETS MUDDIER

The USDA is still dogding and weaving and flip-flopping on the Mad Cow downer issue, but now Dave Louthan and Tom Ellestad are as well - specifically on the question of whether Ellestad's plant processed downers at all. Felicia Nestor "said she has reviewed Ellestad's records and the facility was processing less than 20 percent downer animals, which was legal until the USDA banned downers from being slaughtered for human consumption in late December." Well, yeah, great, but his affidavit says ZERO downers. What gives? Meanwhile, Louthan is saying "Ninety percent of animals processed there were downers." WTF? The most frustrating thing is that though the USDA vet has supposedly spoken publicly now, there's no Q&A with vet over Louthan's "Smoking Gun" document - the missing temp, antibiotics listings for this particular cow. I continue to believe that that's where the real issue lies, and we'll have to see where this goes from there.

PLEASE PAY ATTENTION

Even in a USDA-naysaying article on Common Dreams, the claim is baldly repeated that USDA "will test" 200,000 to 280,000 cows. At least there's a note that it's beginning in June and going for a year and a half, rather than the oft-heard timeline of "this year."

Meanwhile, though, Steve Mitchell is reading the fine print. His phrasing is: "USDA's plan, which aims to test as many high-risk animals as possible over a 12-18 month period, could involve screening more than 200,000 cows, including some 20,000 healthy, older animals." (My italics.) But he goes on to note that the 1-in-10-million concept "assumes all animals potentially infected with mad cow will be found among downers -- or animals unable to stand -- as well as dead animals and those showing symptoms of central nervous system disorders. Lurie noted, however, this is a faulty assumption, because hundreds of seemingly healthy cattle in Europe have tested positive for the disease. In addition, there are significantly more non-downers than downer and sick animals in .S. herds."

Also, this was interesting: "Robert LaBudde, president of Least Cost Formulation Ltd., a food industry consultancy in Virginia Beach, Va., said he thinks there are as many as 120 additional infected animals in the United States. Approximately half of those cases could be in animals with no apparent signs of disease."

Mitchell brings in critical views from different perspectives: "Consumer groups expressed concern about that specific aspect of USDA's plan, because the agency intends to allow rendering facilities to process downer and sick cattle before the results of the mad cow test are known, then dispose of the rendered product later if there is a positive test. Disposing of the infected material might not reduce the risk, however, because the rendering machinery will be contaminated."

And one more thing to think about comes from the GAO's Felicia Nestor, who's concerned now that the USDA has announced a start date, and has identified the 40 slaughtering facilities that will be screening healthy, older animals, "that ranchers and farmers will know to avoid those plants. They also could begin culling their herds of any older animals prior to the June start date."

DEADLY BIRD FLU PANDEMIC: "INEVITABLE"

The avian flu galloping across Asia poses "the most serious pandemic threat since 1968," Keiji Fukuda said Monday at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. A pandemic caused by a flu strain that is new, deadly to humans and highly contagious "is inevitable," he said. I'm just sayin'.

USDA PROMISE: 200,000 COWS TESTED THIS YEAR

I didn't blog any of the stories last week saying the USDA supposedly was going to increase Mad Cow testing, because I wanted to wait and hear the USDA commit to it publicly and explicitly. Well, now it's official - I guess... listen to how it's made public: "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year, up from 20,000 last year, a legislative aide told Reuters on Monday. Yes, that's right - it's not an announcement from the front office, but "a legislative aide, who was briefed by U.S. Agriculture Department officials." Well, who was this aide? "The aide, who wished not to be identified, said the one-year testing program would allow inspectors to be 99 percent confident that if there was one case of mad cow disease among 10 million cattle, it could be identified." WTF? Wished not to be identified? See, this is what worried me about this so-called promise. Who's going to stand behind it? We don't even have a damn spokesman's name yet! Something tells me they're not going to actually test 200,000 cattle this year, but I'm putting that as a headline to remind us that that's the claim.

PM UPDATE: The USDA now has a release up about this, and it supplies enough context to show that already the con is on. The statement above from Reuters that "U.S. animal health inspectors will test between 200,000 and 260,000 cattle for mad cow disease this year" is incorrect, since this plan doesn't go into effect until June: "USDA will begin immediately to prepare for the increased testing, with the anticipation that the program will be ready to be fully implemented June 1, 2004. In the meantime, BSE testing will continue at the current rate." PLUS: They're already backing off the concept that they "will test" 200,000 to 280,000 - note that every mention of that is couched as a conditional - "if we test this many, we can be this certain." In the transcript of the USDA press briefing, Bill Thomson of Oster Dow Jones brings this up - "you're not giving us an estimate on how many animals you will test. Is there a possibility that you'll test less than 201,000 animals?" and DeHaven comes out and says: "You guys are doing your best to get me to identify a number, and I'll emphasize again that the goal of this is to test as many of that target population as we can." Then: "It's possible that we would collect somewhere less than 200,000." So this blog entry hasn't even been up all day, and already, the "promise" that's been reported as fact in all major newspapers is revealed to be non-binding. It's the difference between saying "I'm going to do such-and-such" and "I'll do my best!"

AND: More evidence this is a smokescreen for business as usual: Scott Kilman of the WSJ asks, "Under the old program employees of meat packing companies or meat plants often picked that animal. Will that now be the job of a federal employee?" and DeHaven hedges, basically saying that since they're doing the best they can, it doesn't matter who picks the cows to test. He says the answer will be in "the plan on our website," but, lo and behold, it ain't. The plan spells out who physically collects the samples, but not who picks. But come on, folks, give 'im a break - he's doing the best he can!

UPDATE 3/16: No matter how much DeHaven and Veneman tap-dance about this, "we're doing our best" isn't good enough for Japan - which is, of course, the bottom line.

AND: It's apparently also not good enough for US meatpackers.

A SORRY 'SPORT'

An op-ed in The Frontiersman points out that "the race is so grueling that, on average, 54 percent of the dogs who start the race do not make it to the finish line." I didn't know that and can't vouch for its accuracy, but I haven't seen anyone challenge it. What they did challenge, apparently, was a Frontiersman reporter's heckling at the race itself. "At this year's Iditarod Musher's Banquet, a Frontiersman reporter, who was not on official assignment, booed one of the mushers and was involved in a confrontation with several people." The Frontiersman goes on to say "we apologize to the Swingleys, Dick Mackey, the Iditarod Trail Committee, the mushers and anyone who was offended by the conduct of our reporter." That conduct sounds unprofessional for a journalist - but the conduct of the lead "musher" is, of course, above reproach: "Norwegian musher Kjetil Backen kept the slimmest of leads yesterday in the 32nd annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, arriving a minute ahead of Mitch Seavey after stopping outside the Unalakleet checkpoint because one of his dogs collapsed and died." Awww, poor guy. What an inconvenience! And get this - "Backen asked for help from a reporter and photographer who were on a snowmobile outside the checkpoint. Backen said his dog had died and to go get race marshal Mark Nordman because the musher didn't want to carry the dead dog in his sled bag into the checkpoint." Gee, hope that wasn't the same reporter. Is carrying dead dogs around professional conduct? I have a feeling there's an apology due somewhere there.

COST-BENEFIT FOLLIES

Another state has the Bird Flu: "More than 300,000 chickens on Maryland's Eastern Shore were destroyed yesterday to stem a fresh outbreak of avian influenza. The flu has infected birds in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in recent weeks and is threatening the heart of the tri-state Delmarva economy." Just wondering - is it wise to have an economy so tied to animals that a flu can torpedo several industries at once? And - forgetting for the moment the egregious ethics of killing 300,000 "food animals" without even turning them into food - is there in fact another industry that routinely has to destroy and discard such a large amount of its core product because of problems generated by the product itself?

MEAT IS MEAT, AFTER ALL

Those not repulsed by consuming dead flesh in a variety of tasty products may think twice if that flesh is human. Such is the case in British Columbia, where "health officials issued an alert urging anyone who may have meat from Robert Pickton's farm near Vancouver to contact police. Mr Pickton, 54, has been charged with 15 murders of women, most of whom were linked to Vancouver's sex trade." But don't worry - "The risk to human health for those who consumed the products is extremely remote, based on the fact most pork products are typically well-cooked, which is known to effectively destroy most infectious agents," local health authorities said in a statement. Well, then. All along the trouble with cannibalism was that we weren't cooking our fellow humans enough.

_________*NEW FEATURE: MONTHLY VEGAN*_________

In an effort to focus on the positive as well as the negative here at Meat Facts, I'm starting a new feature of including one story a month of the human-interest vegan. This is a story about some local person and/or family going vegan and how it's improved their life to one degree or another, and recipes for people to try in case they're so moved. This is not to diss the story genre, because each of these deserves to be heard, it's just that usually I haven't included them because there's no news hook, nothing that will be truly new or noteworthy to Meat Facts readers, since each of these is practically another introduction to the concept of veganism. But now I'm ignoring that concern, and I'll spotlight one a month. Here's March's Monthly Vegan.

"We did it for health reasons, and this was well before mad cow disease was in the news a lot," said Roger Browne, an engineer who had a health screening before beginning the vegan diet. He's since lost 35 pounds, feels great and plans a follow-up physical exam to compare the results of the diet. "We decided to avoid animal products, including dairy, which seems to be a source of allergies for a lot of people," he said. "I have a lot more energy since changing my diet and don't get as 'loggy' late in the day. At each meal, I eat until I'm full and my snack is often a handful of mixed nuts -- usually a no-no for other people."