UNITED STATES, June 9, 2003: Did you know meat leftovers from a favorite restaurant may be dinner for a cow? Or that calves, instead of drinking their mothers’ milk, are fed formula made from cows’ blood? These practices, all perfectly legal, have come to light with the discovery last month of North America’s first homegrown case of “mad cow” disease. Rocked by the specter of spreading infection on the continent, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture have turned their attention to ways of keeping deadly agents that spread the disease out of cattle and cattle feed. But opening this delicate topic could have unappetizing consequences for consumers who rarely think about what those sizzling steaks and burgers went through on the way from feedlot to backyard grill. Americans have a bucolic image of cows happily chomping grass in fields. Many don’t know that modern animal husbandry practices have provided cheap, plentiful meat through such standard practices as feeding cattle not only pieces of their herd mates (before the practice was banned in 1997) but also chicken litter, leftover restaurant food and out-of-date pet food.
Scientists know there’s only one way a cow — a natural herbivore — can get bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the brain-wasting disease that in its human form has killed at least 150 people worldwide since 1996 and devastated the British beef industry. It has to be given feed by its human handlers that contains infected animal by products. In short, someone has to feed it ground-up cow.
HPI adds: Log onto “source” above for a very long and graphic explanation of how the meat industry prepares animals for consumption.
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