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.

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... ?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — 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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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."

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?

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.

HOW YOU KNOW TOFURKY HAS ARRIVED

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

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.