THE LONG WEEKEND

Boy, wasn't it? So long it almost seems like it's next week already.

No matter. Let's clear out some of the itemettes we have loitering around from June...

Vegan Options More Popular Than Ever on College Campuses; ARAMARK Focuses on Meeting Customer Needs in Honor of Vegan World Day

ARAMARK nationwide research has revealed that, out of more than 100,000 college students surveyed, nearly a quarter said finding vegan meals on campus -- which contain no meat, fish, poultry or other products derived from animals such as dairy, eggs or honey -- was important to them. To better serve its customers and in honor of Vegan World Day on June 21st, ARAMARK (NYSE:RMK), a worldwide provider of managed services, has increased its number of vegan menu items on campuses and continues to work with campus vegetarian and vegan resource groups to meet customer demand.

Great... this is good news. But... what the hell is Vegan World Day?

No more circus elephants in city?

"'Bringing circus elephants to Chicago would be difficult, if not impossible, under an ordinance being developed by a North Side alderman. Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th) said she has asked the city's law department to draft the ordinance, which she aims to introduce this month. Under Smith's proposal, circuses would have to provide 10 acres of exercise area -- half indoor, half outdoor -- for each elephant they bring to Chicago. That requirement, Smith acknowledges, would be "difficult" to meet."

While I enjoy the image of circus owners having to jump through flaming hoops to get their reward, this proposal is both simple common sense and a political impossibility.

Film features vegan athletes

This includes Tonya Kay, whom some of you saw at Summerfest.

Some scientists want to shave that milk mustache

Good to see PCRM's suit getting more coverage. This one quotes Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health as saying there's no credible evidence of milk working as a weight-loss tool. "In fact, there is better evidence to suggest that recommendations to increase dairy consumption could lead to weight gain." Then, "It's easy to be skeptical of dairy-industry claims and academics who are funded by the industry they are researching," this article candidly points out, but then weasels back to "objectivity" by suggesting we rally 'round the beleagured industry. Disappointing, but ya takes what ya gets.

Indonesia plans to ban U.S. beef imports

I love this one: USDA Fails To Figure Out Why Tiger Attacked Illusionist Roy Horn

The tiger-was-hungry theory was ruled out. And there was no proof that the animal was deliberately provoked by someone in the audience, or that a terrorist sprayed it with a behavior-altering scent, or that it was unhinged by a woman with a beehive hairdo. But federal investigators still do not know what led a Bengal tiger to attack illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy during a performance nearly two years ago.

Hmmmm..... now this is a crazy idea, but... did anyone examine the possible motivation that IT'S A GODDAMN WILD ANIMAL???

And in a related note of moronic human behavior jeopardizing animals' and humans' lives...

Horses die as publicity stunt ends in stampede

It was an image meant to rekindle the romance of the Old West: A herd of wild horses brought into Calgary to mark Alberta's centennial. But officials with the Calgary Stampede were facing a public relations nightmare yesterday after at least nine horses died in a horrific stampede when the animals spooked while crossing a bridge into the city. "We were trying recreate some of the romance of the old trail rides," said Lindsey Galloway, communications manager for the Stampede. Instead, those involved faced a terrifying spectacle of being caught in the middle of a charging mass of horseflesh.

Here's a tip, folks: When a publicity stunt involves animals and is called a "Stampede," you can be pretty sure the people involved have thought this through about as thoroughly as they have your bodily safety. Might wanna stay away.

And to cap it all off, still another story about people who, you'd think, wouldn't be put in charge of animals' lives.

Another polar bear dies at St. Louis Zoo

For the second time in five weeks, a polar bear at the St. Louis Zoo has died, leaving the zoo with just one of the animals, zoo officials said Friday. Penny, a 19-year-old polar bear, died Thursday night of peritonitis. Zoo officials feared something was wrong when she refused to eat.



An examination Friday morning determined the bear was, unknown to zookeepers, carrying two dead fetuses that should have been born in the fall, said Bill Houston, assistant general curator.

So... they had the bear in a situation where she got pregnant... yet never checked to see if she was pregnant afterward? What, did they just wait around and say, nope, she's not craving pickles and ice cream, so we're OK? And... they feared something was wrong when she refused to eat? Yeah, that's about as strong an indication as you can get without doing any, you know, actual medical examination as one might be expected for large wild animals put into situations like this. Good to know those in charge of all these divere types of animals' lives have as much diagnostic expertise as every pet owner in America: She refused to eat. Something, I fear, is wrong.

OK, that's enough, back to regular bloggin on Monday (I hope).

ONE MAD COW POST TO GET YOU THROUGH THE WEEKEND

I know, I know, I know, I've been remiss in keeping you up to date on everything with the confirmation of the latest admitted US mad cow (here's the latest on it from Google). I posted the news on Metafilter Friday night and have been mostly updating with new links there. Also, I've been prepping for Summerfest, and will be there over the weekend, so probably no more posts till next week.

But one link to ponder is, of course, Steve Mitchell's latest, revealing that "The watchdog group Public Citizen filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act last December for reports documenting how certain safety policies are being violated at slaughterhouses and how banned parts of older cows, such as the brain and spinal cord, have been entering the human food supply." And you'll never believe this, but even though by federal law, the USDA has 30 days to respond to a FOIA request, "so far the agency has failed to fulfill this requirement to Public Citizen." Huh. Odd, no? But surely there's no need to be concerned.

Oh, wait. "People should be concerned," Tony Corbo of Public Citizen told UPI. "The USDA has been touting this as one of their firewalls, that they're removing these risky materials." Wait - you mean even the new, moved-inside firewalls might not be firewalls after all? Be careful saying that: Stanley Painter did, and "USDA officials have asked the Office of Inspector General to consider conducting a criminal investigation regarding Painter. Corbo and Nestor said this could be a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act."

Stay tuned. This is going to continue to be interesting, for those who have enough sense to pay attention to it.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISH OIL

Here's something the promoters of fish oil as heart-healthy neglected to mention, with potentially fatal consequences: "Fish oil supplements could trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in people whose hearts already beat dangerously out of sync, doctors report today." The finding, from a study of 200 patients with implanted defibrillators, "surprised researchers who expected to find that fish oil guards against rhythm abnormalities in patients who need protection most." There are those surprised researchers again - maybe they ought to stop assuming animal products are going to protect health, and they won't get so many nasty surprises. Let's be clear here: The surprise wasn't just that fish oil didn't help these people - it was that it can kill them.

BEEF -> CANCER. PRETTY SIMPLE, NO?

"Big study links red meat diet to cancer," trumpets the Guardian. "International scientists yesterday delivered a long-awaited verdict on red meat, concluding in a definitive study of the eating habits of half a million people that beef, lamb, pork, veal and their processed varieties such as ham and bacon, increase the risk of bowel cancer." This is no surprise, but if this is a definitive study, can we stop acting surprised when the next cancer is "definitively" linked to red meat? And can we also stop pretending that diet gurus who push this deadly cancer risk on ill-informed consumers under the guise of "low-carb" are just harmless trendmongers?

MORE ON THE MAD-ISH COW

Some interesting perspectives in the wake of Friday night's announcement of another possible Mad Cow: As you'd expect, John Stauber casts this as "The US government's elaborate cover-up of mad cow dangers in the United States has begun to unravel." And he's got good reason to say so, especially in making the point that as the USDA falls back on the "born before the feed ban" excuse, we have in fact still no actual feed ban working. Meanwhile, another group opines that "
The United States needs stricter safeguards against mad cow disease, but has not introduced them in part because of pressure from meatpackers to keep costs down." The president of this group went on to say: "The major meatpackers in the United States and Canada do not want to incur these costs. We think they are having far too much influence on the BSE policies of USDA." Wow - PCRM? GAP? Consumers Union? Nope - it's R-CALF USA, the biggest American organization of cattle ranchers. At least we can be sure the meatpackers are only having an adverse influence on USDA's BSE policies... (*cough*)

ANOTHER E.COLI RECALL

And its another one around here... "A frozen-food company has issued a voluntary recall of more than 60,000 pounds of ground-beef products following a case of E. coli contamination reported in New Jersey. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the contamination was linked to a box of Murry Inc.'s Jumbo Beef Patties recently purchased at the McGuire Air Force Base Commissary in New Jersey."

MAD COW FRIDAY REDUX

They're shameless about it now: "The announcement came at the end of a weeklong tour by veterinary experts from South Korea who inspected U.S. slaughter plants, and as Japan's Food Safety Commission convenes to conduct risk assessments based on U.S. mad cow safeguards." The announcement of what, you ask? Oh, that's right, you may not have heard because the end of the weeklong tour happened to be the end of the week - FRIDAY. Don't worry about it or anything, it's just another potential *cough* Mad Cow.

The sneaky behavior of the USDA on this suggests that this really is Mad Cow, or at least that they're pretty sure it is. This is classic behavior in obfuscating a coming bombshell (remember that the first "actual" Mad Cow was announced a few hours before Christmas Eve), part of the PR strategy to spin it that this is a non-event. And having it released to the press when it won't get covered helps it not be an event.

But in case this is finally confirmed, that won't be enough, so language gets ever more Orwellian: "This is a situation where the firewalls worked. We do not have a human health risk. This animal did not enter the food chain," says Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns. What, didn't anybody have time to brief the incoming USDA chief on the meaning of firewall that they've been using for almost a decade? The firewall was keeping BSE out of the United States, simple as that. Now all of a sudden, the firewalls are inside the system, so sure, there will be Mad Cow in the meat, but it will miraculously be stopped from getting to your plate.

Problem with that is the bottom line: Our trading partners don't care whether Mad Cow gets from the animals to our plate, they care if it's in the animals. And that's why this will continue to be a big deal, whether or not this particular animal is completely confirmed as infected. We've already moved the "firewalls" inside, virtually declaring defeat in the crusade to Keep Mad Cow Out of US Beef. Yeah, that's gonna make US beef an attractive product for export, all right.

MORE MILK MEANS MORE WEIGHT GAIN

I really couldn't improve on this Washington Post headline for laying it out on the table. Milk has dramatically failed to live up to its purported powers as a weigt-loss tool, and has been proven more of a weight-gain tool.

"Children who drink more than three servings of milk each day are prone to becoming overweight, according to a large new study that undermines a heavily advertised dairy industry claim that milk helps people lose weight. The study of more than 12,000 children nationwide found that the more milk they drank, the more weight they gained: Those consuming more than three servings each day were about 35 percent more likely to become overweight than those who drank one or two."

"I went into this project expecting that drinking milk would have some weight benefit for children. So I was surprised when it turned out the way it did," said [Catherine S. Berkey of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston], whose findings are being published in the June issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

A heavily advertised dairy industry claim, eh? Gee, isn't this pretty close to actionable? As in class? And speaking of which, as New Jersey bans sodas from its schools, it's worth noting that milk causes as much weight gain as sugar-sweetened sodas: "The researchers analyzed whether the children would have been better off if they replaced the soda they were drinking with milk but found no benefit. 'Our findings do not suggest that if children replace beverages sweetened with sugar with milk they would reduce their body weight,' Berkey said."

Well, sure, I mean, of course milk will make you fat if you don't drink low-fat milk, because... what's that? They were all drinking low-fat? Yep. "Those who drank more than three eight-ounce servings of milk a day gained the most weight, even after the researchers took into consideration factors such as physical activity, other dietary factors and growth. The association held, even though most of the children were drinking low-fat milk. 'That was surprising,' Berkey said. 'Apparently this applies to any kind of milk.'"

The dairy industry is already spinning this furiously, but this is a major, and well-deserved, blow to their credibility - as long as enough people hear about it.

REACHING THE MASSES

A lot of people listen to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast every day or so, and so congrats to Vegan Cooking School Podcast for getting your promo played on the show. First I've heard of VCS, but looks good from here - if nothing else this is a welcome alternative to the mainstream cooking podcasts.

And yeah, there really are such things.

DOLPHIN GLOVES

A more happy milestone: "A group of dolphins living off the coast of Australia apparently teach their offspring to protect their snouts with sponges while foraging for food in the sea floor. Researchers say it appears to be a cultural behavior passed on from mother to daughter, a first for animals of this type, although such learning has been seen in other species," says the AP, adding: "Researchers suspect the sponges help the foraging dolphins avoid getting stung by stonefish and other critters that hide in the sandy sea bottom, just as a gardener might wear gloves to protect the hands."

20

A less than happy milestone.

ANIMALS AND MORALS

Kudos to New Scientist, the periodical that routinely takes up provocative scientific controversies, for its "Animals and Us" special section. Even non-subscribers can get a good taste from this intro, which, while a little sloppily written, lays the issues right out on the plate:

What's wrong with the way we interact with animals at the moment? Nothing, if you don't accept that animals have their own feelings and emotions, or accept it but still don't care. But if you do care, then you will realise that the moral relationship we have with animals is deeply troubled. It becomes impossible to maintain moral blindness to the way we treat them.

Sounds a little like Gary Francione's "moral schizophrenia," doesn't it? Well, he's here to represent on that, along with perspectives from Frans de Waal, Simon Blackburn and, heh, Temple Grandin. Only Jane Goodall gets to parade in front of the "subscribe" curtain, though. This might be an occasion where it's worth buying the magazine.

MORE MAD COW MYSTERY

Steve Mitchell continues to shine a spotlight on the strange behavior of U.S. officials regarding the testing of American brains for Mad Cow, now reporting that they "have delayed sending brain samples from a deceased California man to France to be screened for human mad cow disease, leading the man's family and his neurologist to question the reasons for the holdup."

In a March 31 letter, Ronele Hicks, Patrick's wife, requested that NPDPSC send samples of Patrick's brain to Dr. Jean-Jacques Hauw at Laboratoire De Neuropathologie at the Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris. Hauw had agreed to conduct further tests that could help provide a more conclusive diagnosis. "It sounds like they didn't send the tissue and I don't know why," a distraught Ronele told United Press International.

The ordeal over sending Patrick's sample to France has rendered both Bailey and Ronele skeptical about whether they will obtain a conclusive diagnosis of his illness, and Ronele said she now wonders if NPDPSC will send the correct tissue sample to France. "That's been a concern all along," she said. "How do we know it's not some other person's tissue instead of Pat's?"

MORE SCRUTINY ON ZOOS

It's time to admit it: Humans don't know enough about ensuring the health and safety of wild animals, and should stop penning them immediately. As people begin to take notice of animals sickening and dying in zoos (incidents previously swept under the PR rug), it's inevitable that they begin to wonder about this.

Lions have starved to death at a zoo in China that's gone bankrupt: "Zoos have sprung up across China in the past decade to meet a growing appetite for entertainment among increasingly affluent Chinese, but many provide wretched conditions, inept management and cannot draw enough visitors to cover their costs." One wolf, two deer and two camels had also died in the past 17 months, it said. "Because we don't have the necessary maintenance techniques, experience and funds, we can only sit by and watch all these animals die," the zoo owner was quoted as saying. A candid statement of something that, in China, is only a moderate exaggeration of the situation here.

A polar bear being housed in St. Louis died during a two-hour surgery to remove an obstruction from his stomach. Whether or not the surgery itself was botched, the cause became clear: A piece of cloth and bits of plastic trash bag - items not found in the bear's natural habitat - had obstructed the stomach. So how'd they get there? "We have not seen anyone throw anything to our bears," Miller said. "While we think we've got the best behaved visitors in the nation, it takes just one careless mistake to jeopardize the health of our animals." How succinct: Zoos put wild animals into situations where one careless mistake can kill them.

And the list goes on: "Tinkerbell the porcupine wasn't performing well during educational shows at the Phoenix Zoo three years ago, and keepers decided to reduce her diet. They didn't want to hurt the little pincushion - just give her some incentive. But Tinkerbell died of starvation, and her death has become part of a dispute over the care of animals at the 125-acre exhibition." Aw, the porcupine wasn't being entertaining enough, so they starved her to death. Of course death was not the goal, but that's the point. This quote from the AZA sums up the disconnect: "I don't know of a single case where someone intentionally harmed an animal in an accredited zoo." No one has alleged that zoos are "intentionally" harming animals - that's a classic straw man - it's simply that animals don't belong in zoos, and keeping them there will manifest this fact in ways that inevitably harm them.

Meanwhile, too many of this variety of article are coming out for me to keep track of - covering the national elephant debate with local anecdotes, and as usual, parroting zoo officials' excuses and speculation without researching them, balancing them only with PETA. At least there's some discussion going on, and we can hope the quality of the debate will also improve.

ANIMAL EXPLOITER CHARGED WITH ANIMAL ABUSE

This is one of a story trend I just wanted to take a moment to note. "A Loyalton cattle rancher who starved at least five calves to death in December 2001 was found guilty of animal cruelty this week by a Sierra County jury. Silas Craig McHenry, 54, faces up to three years in prison and up to $45,000 in fines, as well as restrictions on animal ownership, [Truckee Animal Control Supervisor Dan] Olsen said. He was convicted on five counts of animal cruelty. 'It really sends a strong message that you just can't do this,' Olsen said." Not all that remarkable until you remind yourself that this is happening in an industry predicated on treating animals like objects. Of course it's at a ridiculous oxymoronic level right now, but the direction of the trend is at least encouraging.

LOW-FAT DIET KEEPS CANCER AT BAY

"A low-fat diet can decrease the risk of breast cancer recurrence by more than 40 percent in patients with a form of the cancer that is not sensitive to the hormone estrogen, researchers said Monday. Those patients account for a third of all breast cancer cases." And here's the sun-rises-in-the-east part: "Some researchers hailed the findings as the first evidence that lifestyle changes can reduce the risk of developing cancer." Ya think?

VEGGIE OPTIONS AT BALLPARK

If you're in Philadelphia and you haven't yet signed up with Club Veg to go to the Phillies game on June 12, get on it! Here's Scott Geiger's message:

This season is the first ever in Phillies history that veggie burgers (vegan) will be offered at the Phillies ballpark. And, vegan cheeseless veggie pizzas will be available for this game. After working with the Park for several years, Club Veg was finally able to get them to carry a vegan burger on a vegan sesame seed bun. To celebrate, we are having Club Veg day at the Phillies! Even if you aren't a baseball fan, we encourage you to come out to support the vegetarian food options.

Contact Scott at your earliest opportunity at scottg@clubveg.org.

FIGHTING CANCER: PLANT FOODS YES, ANIMAL PRODUCTS NO

These are really quite unrelated, except that they emerged on the same day and can be easily encapsulated by the above headine. "In men with recurrent prostate cancer, drinking 8 ounces per day of pomegranate juice significantly increases the time it takes for prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels to rise," says Reuters, while "[t]reatment with a shark cartilage product does not prolong life in patients with advanced cancer, nor does it improve quality of life, new research indicates."

THE ANIMALS WE DON'T WANT SMART

Here's a fun article that scratches at the surface of a fascinating conundrum in the "animal intelligence" field - it's easy for our culture to accept smart apes, cats and dogs, but we don't want to think of the animals we're eating as having any smarts whatsoever. Unfortunately, coming from ABC News, it skims and then darts away rather than probing this sore spot, but at least the issue is raised. "Was Your Meat Smarter Than Your Pet?" begins, "Testing the IQ of a sheep may seem laughable. But at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, they know better. One sheep who got a reward every time she recognized a human face correctly on a video screen scored a perfect 50 out of 50. 'If it was a monkey, no one would have any problems, possibly even if it was a dog,' said Keith Kendrick, a neurologist at Babraham. 'They would say, 'Yeah, yeah, that's expected.' But a sheep, no one really believes.'"

Intentionally or not, the article manages to show the paucity of argument on the "dumb animal" side of the equation: "John Redmore, who runs an organic farm in England, disagrees. 'We've been eating meat since we've managed to stand on hind legs,' he said. 'A natural part of being human is to eat meat.' It's natural to eat animals even if they're smart, he added. 'Yeah, they'd eat us,' Redmore said." Well, sure, the smartness has nothing to do with the "naturalness," but as usual that last term is being used speciously. Are you really saying sheep and cows would eat people, farmer John? Uh huh... now who, exactly, is smarter here?

"THAT'S PIG WATER"

Yep, but now that raw sewage is drinkable - with just a few hours of processing. "Don Lloyd dipped his empty bottle into a tank of water that six hours earlier had been flushed out of three nearby pens filled with thousands of hogs. "There, that's pig water," Lloyd proclaimed as he held up the bottle and tipped it back for a thirst-quenching chug. Lloyd's demonstration was to show just how confident he is in his system to purify the kind of putrid, waste-filled water dumped into hog waste lagoons across North Carolina." Mmmmmmm, sounds delicious and perfectly safe - just like that mad-cow free hamburger the British Agriculture Minister so confidently fed his daughter on live TV. Me, I think I'll pass on drinking "purified" hog waste-water, for as long as possible, anyway.