BRITISH SKITTISH?

The saying goes, "There'll always be an England." But maybe not, if they keep eating millions of eggs with toxic drugs in them or the two-thirds of turkeys that are infected with campylobacter. Boy, it's a good thing we have such a powerful watchdog as the USDA making sure none of that bad stuff is happening here...

PINK, ELEPHANTS

Not much of a story, but who could resist being able to use that headline? "Pop star Pink has asked magicians Siegfried and Roy in an open letter to liberate their 55-year-old elephant. Gildah has been part of the duo's act for 13 years but has been kept alone in a Las Vegas pen since Roy Horn was mauled by a tiger in October." Good luck on that one, Pink.

MAD COW JUST MAY BE HERE

It's not a new question, but, ya think Mad Cow might be already in the USA? While the scourge continues to spread across Europe (no longer newsworthy, of course), and finds frightening ways to transfer, the orthodox answer to the question of BSE in our cattle is "no way!" - but the stonewall is starting to crumble. For one thing, a "US Beef Delegation" is now in Europe expressly studying "a post-BSE cattle industry" and visiting "directly with the international experts on BSE regarding the risks that such a disease poses to the US cattle industry." Interesting. Perhaps they've heard the news about the clusters of vCJD cases around the US that may or may not be Mad Cow.

A UPI story reports that our monitoring system for cases of CJD "could be missing tens of thousands of victims" by mistakenly considering "sporadic" CJD as unrelated to Mad Cow. "Clusters of CJD have been reported in various areas of the United States -- Pennsylvania in 1993, Florida in 1994, Oregon in 1996, New York in 1999-2000 and Texas in 1996. In addition, several people in New Jersey developed CJD in recent years, including a 56 year old woman who died on May 31, 2003. Although in some instances, a mad cow link was suspected, all of the cases ultimately were classified as sporadic." Here's the thing, though: "People who develop CJD from eating mad-cow-contaminated beef have been thought to develop a specific form of the disorder called variant CJD. But new research, released last December, indicates the mad cow pathogen can cause both sporadic CJD and the variant form."

It's not just scientists, but courts, who are beginning to question the assurance that there couldn't possibly be Mad Cow here. A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday revived Farm Sanctuary's lawsuit aimed at stopping the sale of "downed" animals for human food because of a fear of mad cow disease. The lower court had said the risk to the food supply was too hypothetical and speculative to allow Farm Sanctuary to sue the USDA. The appeals panel disagreed - in other words, the risk is no longer so "hypothetical and speculative" in legal terms.

WINGS OF TERROR

As "the flu" becomes the latest "horrific" terror to grip our nation's psyche, it's worth noting that these viruses don't just appear out of nowhere. They come, as often as not, from animals kept for food. And the way we treat animals is directly related to the danger our species is putting itself in: "Today, the growing number of birds and pigs raised for human food consumption and housed in close quarters serve as 'mixing bowls' where influenza viruses trade genes, increasing the likelihood that a novel strain will emerge, experts say." This is serious stuff, folks: "Until 1997, researchers thought that flu viruses passed from birds to pigs to people. But a 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong showed that an avian influenza could directly infect and kill humans. Many hoped that outbreak-contained with a massive slaughter of chickens-was an isolated incident. But last year, in China and in the Netherlands, bird flu again infected and killed people and spread from person to person."

Meanwhile, South Korea has just been hit by a "deadly bird flu." 20,000 chickens died at a farm outside of Seoul earlier this month. "Since then, the agriculture ministry has culled 5,000 other chickens at the farm as a precaution and has quarantined poultry within a 10 kilometer (6-mile) radius. On Tuesday, ducks at a farm near Umsung also tested positive for the bird flu, and authorities ordered 3,300 of the ducks to be killed and buried." The AP article offers this: "South Korean officials say there is only a small chance of the virus crossing from birds to humans because most strains of H5N1 are not transmittable. " Oh, whew, that's reassuring. But then they turn right around and inform us, "Early this month in Hong Kong, a 5-year-old boy came down with bird flu, but not the same H5N1 strain that caused a deadly outbreak in 1997." Uh-huhhh.....

UPDATE 12/23: The Bird Flu is Spreading Fast Nationwide, reports Reuters, with half a million chickens and ducks so far killed to try to stop it.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO TUNA...

There have been rumblings about mercury in tuna for pregnant women, and now they're turning into full-fledged across-the-board warnings. A new U.S. advisory recommends a limit of 12 ounces of fish and/or shellfish each week. Hmmm. Kinda hard to keep up the Omega-3 intake on that paltry amount. Tuna joins a rogues gallery including some fish - swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish - that should be avoided altogether.

FOOLING AROUND WITH ATKINS CAN BE DEADLY --ATKINS V.P.

Collette Heimowitz, vice president of Atkins Health and Medical Information Services, told the BBC that anyone on the Atkins Diet must "follow the programme to the letter" to avoid the risk of side effects, and that it could in fact be "deadly" to mix high carbohydrate foods with high fat foods. She was reacting to a BBC show in which three doctors followed the diet for a month: One of the doctors was hospitalised and given morphine to control chronic stomach pains. He had to be fed intravenously. Another found that her levels of "bad" cholesterol had risen above a clinically safe level. Nigel Denby, a dietician who closely monitored the health of the three doctors as they followed the diet, said "The nature of the diet can affect the way bones use calcium. This, in turn, can lead to an increased risk of developing kidney stones. [Atkins-style diets] have been associated with an increased risk of osteoporosis. If followed for a prolonged period of time, high protein, low carb diets can actually be harmful to your health." Say, didn't that guy Atkins follow the diet for a prolonged period of time? Oh yeah...

PANEL: VITAMINS' "PERCENT DAILY VALUE" IS WAY OFF

"The familiar 'percent Daily Value' figures included in Nutrition Facts boxes, which are required on the labels of most food products in both countries, are not based on the most current scientific information," said a federal advisory panel on Thursday. The amount of vitamins and minerals recommended as part of a healthy diet should be drastically changed to more closely resemble the needs of an average person, they said. If the FDA adopts the changes, the recommended daily values of some vitamins and minerals would change dramatically. For example, the amount of iron and Vitamin B-12 that is recommended each day would be cut by two-thirds. Vitamin D would also be reduced. The recommendations for fiber and Vitamin C, meanwhile, would increase slightly under the proposed changes. Hmmmm. What does that diet sound like?

And not only that..."Some of the strongest recommendations come in urging regulatory agencies to reduce daily allowances of cholesterol, saturated fats and trans fats to as low a level as possible and to set one combined daily limit for saturated and trans-fatty acids. That could mean recommending consumers eat as little as half the daily amount of saturated fat currently recommended." Hmmm. What kind of food is high in saturated fat? Heck, the panel may as well have come out and simply said "The average American should be striving toward veganism" and been done with it.

ANIMAL PRODUCTS: OBSTACLE TO HEALTH

Heh. "Obstacles in Way of Healthy School Lunch" is the headline on this who-knows-what-can-be-done story. Wonder what those "obstacles" might be? Oh yeah - "Two-thirds of the $939.5 million the USDA spent on lunch commodities in fiscal 2003 went toward meat and dairy products. A little more than one-quarter of the total went toward fruits and vegetables, mostly canned and frozen." The piece does give a shout-out to visionary educator Antonia Demas, director of the Food Studies Institute, mentioning her conviction that "the classroom must be part of any solution. She wants nutrition education mandated the same way New York schools are required to teach HIV prevention."

ANIMALS THINK ABOUT THINKING, HAVE PERSONALITIES

Are animals as smart as Donald Rumsfeld? The Defense Secretary's famous "gaffe" about "unknown unkowns" made a lot of people scratch their heads, though it seems perfectly lucid to me ("We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.") But it appears that animals may at least know that there are things they don't know. In an article headlined "New UB research finds some animals know their cognitive limits," it's reported that some non-humans "have shown the capacity for 'metacognition,' or thinking about thinking, considered to be one of humans' most sophisticated cognitive capacities."

At the same time, the oft-derided "anthropomorphising" that pet owners do, asserting that their dogs and cats have individual personalities has been confirmed as factual by scientific study. "Confirming dog owner suspicions, a new study reveals that dogs have personalities, and that these character traits can be identified as accurately as similar personality attributes in humans. Experts suspect that many other animals also possess unique personalities." The import of both of these is summed up by James King, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and an expert on primates: "Tool using, culture, and language have recently been shown to not be uniquely human. Now, we are seeing that our personality and personality dimensions are also not uniquely human, but shared with non-human primates and even dogs." So once again, what is it - other than the practice of killing other animals needlessly - is it that "separates us from the animals"?

UPDATE 12/13: Don't know how this fits into the equation, but worms are genetically wired for getting drunk.

CHENEY VICTORIOUS OVER 70 FEROCIOUS BIRDS

Our vice president is "catching heat" (read: hearing two or possibly three "tsk tsks") over his brave act of facing down hundreds of pheasants and ducks in a canned hunt. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "he and nine other hunting buddies shot at 500 ringneck pheasants, killing 417 of them. The V.P. was credited with offing 70 of the birds, as well as an unknown number of mallard ducks." I've already made some salient comments about this on Metafilter, so you can go there if you want more commentary.

SOMEBODY ALERT GARY TAUBES

Gosh, it looks like the drumbeat of popular culture might actually have an effect on people's eating patterns that overrides the Power of the Pyramid: "The more television children watch the less fruit and vegetables they eat, probably because the advertising they see leaves them craving junk food instead, a study said Monday."

NATIONAL ZOO'S NEGLIGENCE KILLED 23 ANIMALS

This past weekend, the Washington Post had a nice thorough two-part series on the National Zoo's problems, showing exactly how animals died needlessly due to carelessness and/or incompetence on the part of management. "[I]ncompetence in management and veterinary medicine," says the zoo's pathologist, "has led to poor animal care, animal suffering and even animal deaths." Worse, he says records were altered as the zoo tried to cover up its fatal blunders. The zoo's director, Lucy Spelman, speaks on the record and is consistently contradicted by her own documents as to what happened when and why.

Reading through the case histories, a couple of trends become apparent: Animals sometimes die because Spelman seems to not understand their biology, and how can she for so many different kinds of animals? And animals die because the zoo staff are busy with other problem animals. These two problems are the flip-side of a zoo's appeal: A large number of a wide variety of animals grouped together in one spot for easy viewing. Additionally, there are several cases where an animal died of something internal or non-obvious because the staff was concerned with treating how the animal looked to the viewing public (e.g. Nancy the elephant and her lame foot, who turned out, after death, to have had tuberculosis - which was never tested for - or the zebras whose diet was cut in half, and who died, because Spelman thought "they looked fat"). This is another intrinsic problem with the concept of a zoo. They never exist to benefit animals, only to force animals to serve human needs for entertainment.

So a zoo rejoices when a polar bear goes from psychotically pacing one-third of the day to just one-sixth, never stepping back to say, "hey, you know what the problem might be here? Polar bears don't belong here, in this freakin' state, much less in a tiny cage!" The WashPost series, though, brings this thought that much closer.

UPDATE 12/11: MORE ANIMALS DIE AT INCOMPETENT ZOO Rat-Borne Disease Kills Zoo Monkey, Cheetah Also Infected at National Zoo.

GOT EXERCISE?

Researchers said today that girls who do regular jumping exercises around the age of 10 may add bone mass that could delay the onset of osteoporosis in later years. They should also be eating plenty of kale, of course. It's nature's perfect food.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE BLOG

If you've read Gail Eisnitz' Slaughterhouse, you know there's no shortage of disturbing stories coming out of these killing factories. Now Virgil Butler, an ex-Tyson employee, has launched The Cyberactivist, a blog chronicling some of the things he saw on the job. These are some eye-opening tales, if true, of mismanagement, discrimination, secrecy, working drunk, etc., and always at the expense of the chickens - and Americans' food safety. Check it out. Butler's story just got covered in the LA Times, but unfortunately you have to register to read their stuff. (No wait, here it is at CommonDreams.)
UPDATE 12/9: Fascinating stuff, if occasionally way-over-the-top-nightmarish/nauseating, and occasionally a little grandiose. But the entry they're "just" chickens says what I've been trying to get across for a while about how one form of inhumanity dovetails with the other: "I have heard management say, 'They are just line workers. They are a dime a dozen.' Obviously they care even less about the chickens processed every night. They don't strike a single chord on the heartstrings of this type of person. Before very long, there are no strings left to strike a chord on. This is inhumanity. This is also what happens when a person discounts the suffering of anything by saying, 'it is just' anything." Read the rest of it.

HUNTAPALOOZA PART DEUX

OK, so here's the thing: We could go on all day listing new accounts of hunters shooting people while pursuing their hobby, but the most intriguing aspect is that often these trigger-happy hobbyists seem to have little respect for the law - not just the law pertaining to their "sport" but other laws as well - stuff like car theft, domestic violence, illegal drug possession, you know, stuff we consider an actual threat to our society, especially when practiced by guys who are shooting at things.

So my question is: Why is it that this group of people, whose members routinely kill other human beings while getting their jollies, are not sanctioned as TERRORISTS, while another group is legally defined as just that for doing what? TRESPASSING on a factory farm? TRESSPASSING - something hunters also routinely do, only while looking for something to shoot and kill? Does this make sense? Of course it does - if we admit that the point of these new laws has nothing in actuality to do with our security, and everything to do with stopping stuff like this from being made public.

UPDATE 12/8: Game wardens outnumbered, outgunned and sometimes the only one sober - yes, that's the actual headline, straight from a game warden's lips. Doesn't he know he's playing into harmful stereotypes? "When it comes to game violations, Glines said they generally fall into two categories. The first are those hunters who make honest mistakes and take responsibility for their actions. The second type of violations, however, are the blatant killers. They're the people who just want to shoot something."

UPDATE 12/11: DNR says more hunters are illegally leaving deer carcasses to rot in Minnesota.

HUNTAPALOOZA

I've already posted a couple times about idiot hunters who kill themselves or other hunters as a necessary hazard of their cherished ritual. But let's not sweep all these under the rug.

Arcadia hunter shot from blind - "This is the third year in a row that a shooter fired at a running deer in Buffalo County and accidentally shot a hunter"

Hunter Dies After Floating Blind Overturns

Bow hunter shot in hunting accident - "Cabrera was shot from about 75 yards away shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday by a 17-year-old who was hunting with his father"

Sheboygan Hunter Shot, Killed

Hunter dies after shooting self in head - "The shooting happened a day after another hunter was hurt while hunting in the same woods"

Hunter killed, two others wounded on opening day of deer season

Hunter dies after shooting self

Hunter shot dead by other hunter while driving truck

Hunter killed by bullets aimed at deer he just shot

Hunter fatally shot by his 15-year-old brother
Most dangerous game, indeed...

SELLING DEADSTOCK AGAIN AND AGAIN

An Aylmer-area abattoir under investigation in August for illegally slaughtering animals was found to have done the same twice before in 1998 without serious penalty from government officials, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Star.

"Plant owners were never fined and the plant was never shut down after the two 1998 hearings. The plant is now the subject of an investigation by police, federal and provincial officials for the illegal butchering of dead cows at night when inspectors were not present."

Boy, good thing that kind of stuff only happens in Canada...

WEASEL WOBBLE DU JOUR

I've commented before on the habit of craven journalists to ascribe facts as quotes to activists, even when those facts are incontrovertible, if they may be seen as controversial. I call this the "weasel wobble." This one's a doozy...

"According to animal rights activists, the hormone Premarin is made from urine from pregnant mares" ... no! Why would they say a thing like that?

WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING

In a move that could have dramatic repercussions in the future for factory farms and other habitual polluters, a federal judge in Owensboro, KY said that Arkansas-based Tyson Foods shares responsibility for air pollution from three factory-scale farms it helps to operate in Western Kentucky. Tyson wanted to keep reaping the profits from the farm while disavowing any connection to the pollution. A teaspoon of common sense that might - I said might - go a long way.

NEVER FORGET

On World AIDS Day, let's not forget how humans originally picked up HIV: By killing apes for food. But this is far from the only scourge our species has acquired through our addiction to animal-killing.