WHAT DID THE MENDELLS KNOW?

"The operations manager at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. knew about cruelty and food safety violations at the Chino plant and, in at least one case, he ordered it, an ex-employee said in an interview from jail. Stan Mendell, the brother of company president Steven Mendell, once instructed workers to lift a fallen bull to its feet with a forklift so it could be slaughtered, said former worker Rafael Sanchez Herrera, who has been charged with animal cruelty."

The whole article, from the Press-Enterprise, which continues to own this story with ongoing exhaustive reporting, is worth a read. Here's the lead anecdote, spelled out: "Sanchez said he remembers Stan Mendell stopping at the pens leading to the slaughterhouse one afternoon last August or September before getting in his nearby car to go home. A bull with an injured foot had collapsed. Mendell ordered Ugarte, who in turn ordered Sanchez, to lift the fallen animal to its feet using a forklift, Sanchez said. 'It was Stanley that told us to do it,' Sanchez said, adding: 'Stanley watched.'"

In short: "Sanchez said he does not know if Steven Mendell was aware of abuse of collapsed cows. But Stan Mendell knew, he said." Well, it's a good question how much Steve Mendell knew. But given the two of them were brothers, it stretches credulity to belive the CEO was as shocked as he professed in his infamous hearing.

UPDATE 3/21: "How well do owners know their meat companies?" asks the Capital Press. And: "Why would [Mendell] have agreed to a voluntary massive recall he knew he would destroy his company if he hadn't seen all the evidence and thought it wasn't a safety problem?"

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO PLANKTON

Good news / Bad News: "Now trollers are expecting the worst bulletin they’ve ever received: the largest salmon fishing closure from northern Oregon to Mexico in the history of the industry - zero commercial trips in 2008, with a few minor exceptions." That's the good news, unless you're someone who has decided to base his livelihood around killing fish. The bad news is that it's because there are hardly any fish left. "Forecasted returns of chinook salmon on California’s Sacramento River are so dismal that there’s little hope regulators will allow a fishing season for West Coast boats - a prospect that will hit the Oregon Coast hard, as salmon is one of the only viable fisheries during the summer months.

One Fisherman says, "In my opinion, we won’t have a commercial fishing season. It’s a dire situation." Yep, sure is, though not as dire as it is for the fish that are caught. Maybe it's time to look for a different job.

MAD COW MURMURINGS

Maybe it's nothing. But I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition of stories...

Too little testing for mad cow, critics say
"Don't look, don't find" might be a more apt way of describing this country's testing program, said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union.
A 2006 USDA Inspector General report noted that because the testing program was voluntary and not random, it could not be determined whether the government had tested a representative sample of the highest-risk cattle, such as non-ambulatory cattle and those showing signs of a central nervous disorder. The report faulted sample collectors for not determining the health histories of the animals. The cause of death in most cases was recorded as "dead -- unknown cause."

2 Quebec deaths being investigated for CJD
According to CKRS-FM radio in Chicoutimi, Que., the deaths there of a person in December and another in February are being treated with extreme caution by federal health authorities amid concerns they possibly had a form of CJD. The radio report, which first aired Wednesday, said two patients have never died of CJD within such a short period of time in one area of Canada.
If the disease comes from exposure to infected beef products prior to the ban on specified offal in human food in 1989, as is now widely accepted, then there could be more cases if the incubation period is very long," the agency said.

WHALE RESCUE: WE FAIL, DOLPHIN SUCCEEDS

Two pygmy sperm whales, a mother and her calf, were found stranded on Mahia Beach. According to CNN, rescuers "worked for more than one hour to get the whales back into the water, only to see them strand themselves four times on a sandbar slightly out to sea. It looked likely the whales would have to be euthanized to prevent them suffering a prolonged death."

Note that humans' magnificent intellect and mastery of tools led us in this case to one viable option: Using our tools to kill the animals, who "kept getting disorientated and stranding again They obviously couldn't find their way back past (the sandbar) to the sea." Then along came Moko the dolphin, who "approached the whales and led them 200 meters (yards) along the beach and through a channel out to the open sea."

Altruism is one of the now-discarded "things that separates us from the animals," as this example illustrates. But the altruistic impulse is moot if there's no capability to carry it out. Just as there are things we can do on land that dolphins can't, we must acknowledge there are underwater activities in which their intelligence will always outstrip ours because it's paired with knowledge and capability.

MORE JOY IN SOY?

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

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

LATEST USDA FOLLIES

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

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

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

DOREEN THE DOWNER



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

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

SCHOOLS ALSO SCREWED BY USDA

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

LAW-BREAKING SLAUGHTERHOUSE'S CEO COMPELLED TO TESTIFY

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

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

WINDS OF CHANGE HIT CATTLE INDUSTRY

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

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

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

With the slaughterhouse now closed and under investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearby dairies are losing the income collected from selling the cows and instead must pay to have them euthanized.

Diminished competition and long hauling distances have resulted in slaughterhouses paying about 18 percent less than Hallmark had been willing to pay, Bolcao said. That amounts to a loss of about $84 per head.

Sybrand Vander Dussen, a dairyman and president of the Chino Basin Milk Producers Council, said the change came at a time when many dairies are struggling to stay profitable in the face of increasing feed costs.

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

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

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

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

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

BEET IT

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

***DAIRY PRACTICE EXPOSED***

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

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

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

IF IT'S FRIDAY...

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

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

SUCCINCT

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

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

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

LAW-BREAKING SLAUGHTERHOUSE'S CEO REFUSES TO TESTIFY

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

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

FOOD CHAINED

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

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

Since Westland/Hallmark closed, Chino Livestock Market has noticed a drop-off in business at weekly auctions of about 1,500 spent dairy cows from Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said owner Rod Balcao.

Slaughterhouses out of the area bid less than Westland/Hallmark did for the skinniest cows or refuse to bid on them at all because of the high chance they will not survive a long truck ride, Balcao said.

In addition, he said, if a cow were crippled or weak, a local dairy might have it hauled directly to the Chino slaughterhouse rather than send it to auction.

"That meat packing plant was an asset for all the dairymen in the community," he said.

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

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

when handling cows, including downers, "economics always rules. If you drag it, you damage the hide or damage the meat or hurt the cow. Anything like that will hurt you economically."

If a cow is not diseased but off its feet and can't go to slaughter unless it stands up, it makes economic sense for a slaughterhouse to get the cow upright, including giving the cow an electric jolt or two, Vander Dussen said.

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

SLAUGHTERERS: "WE'RE DEAD MEAT"

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

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

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

MEAT INDUSTRY ARROGANCE DESTROYING U.S. GLOBAL TRADE

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

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

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

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

NAT. GEOGRAPHIC: ANIMALS ARE SMARTER THAN YOU THINK

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

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

demonstrates that some birds possess what is often considered another uniquely human skill: the ability to recall a specific past event. Scrub jays, for example, seem to know how long ago they cached a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils.

Human cognitive psychologists call this kind of memory "episodic memory" and argue that it can exist only in a species that can mentally travel back in time. Despite Clayton's studies, some refuse to concede this ability to the jays. "Animals are stuck in time," explained Sara Shettleworth, a comparative psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, meaning that they don't distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Since animals lack language, she said, they probably also lack "the extra layer of imagination and explanation" that provides the running mental narrative accompanying our actions.

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

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

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

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

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

RICOCHETS

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

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

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

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

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