Be careful about where you get numbers for downer cows. PETA and others notoriously wiggle the figures. They are exceedingly rare. Look at the economics for the livestock owner. I'm no fan of PETA, and I have no qualms eating meat, (but I'll hold off on beef for a while as I'm in Oregon). And while I'm sure PETA and other groups use this kind of scare to promote their agendas, I'm not hearing it. It's been drowned out by mainstream views, thankfully. When something like this surfaces, it's usually a sign of us ignoring something pretty fundamental, or crossing the line... and we've done that in feeding bovine by-products to other cows. Now, maybe that isn't what's causing the problem, but when we mess with nature to such a degree... well, somethin' ain't right. I'm eating pork tonight. André
"At least 150,000 downer cattle â those who because of injury or illness cannot walk â were sold annually for human consumption for as much as a few hundred dollars apiece, extra money for cattlemen struggling with low prices. Food safety advocates warned that these cattle could carry disease, but the political power of the industry was evident in 2002 when its lobbyists helped defeat legislation banning the commercial slaughter of downer cattle even after it had been approved by the House and the Senate." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/n...00&en=6bda0481bee5b15f&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE :eek:
_________________________________________ The NYT as usual reliable and at its' best. Fact 1. " cattlemen struggling with low prices" check any chart of historical live cattle or feeder cattle prices over several years and see that prior to Dec. 20 they were at historic highs. Fact 2. "sold for a few hundred dollars apiece" that is the price for perfectly healthy older cows in perfect condition. The price for anything less than perfect is much less. The current price for injured cows has been $20 per head versus paying $20 to have a rendering plant haul them away. Certainly no economic burden here. The vast majority of downers come from the dairy industry, mainly because those cows are very large and spend much of their life on cement and are fed very rich rations to make them produce milk. Almost all of the downers are caused by age, weight, and physical injury.
of course you are much more informed than NYT.. ;-) "At the production level, the editors at industry bible Hoard's Dairyman Magazine and USDA officials tell me farmers and ranchers typically get $1,000 a head for healthy animals and roughly $300-$500 for each slaughtered downer cow, and in some cases, as low as $100 for particularly sick cows." http://www.newsday.com/business/pri...4jan04,0,6398596.story?coll=ny-business-print :eek:
"How do we know? We don't test the brains of everyone who dies of dementia in this country. In the cases where we have, we call it Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, insisting it's different. We simply don't know that, and avoid studies to find out. In the one acknowledged case, we're told it was contracted in England! The other cases are ignored." "I eat hamburgers all the time, and I'm fine." "Good luck. Mad Cow can take 10 to 20 years to manifest, and by then can be attributed to other diseases. Remember, we don't know what causes Alzheimer's ... and it's nearly epidemic." http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36444 :eek:
The tragedy is not only the damage to us and our food supply, but that many ranchers have tried for years to have imports labeled and to have better feed-lot and slaughter-house inspections â to no avail. worldnetdaily.com ________________________________________________ This is the crux of the whole fiasco. Farmers and ranchers asked for and finally got COOL (country of origin labeling) passed the congress signed into law and then from pressure from the big three packers stalled. The cattle producers wanted COOL for two reasons 1. food saftey concerns from foreign meat. and 2. a way to slow down the importation of cattle owned by the big 3 to manipulate prices and circumvent the captive supplies rules. ( captive supply is where the monopolistic big 3 purchase enough cattle in the slaughter supply chain to be able to manipulate the market using their own cattle. This was outlawed but they just moved their captive supplies to Canada and with NAFTA can circumvent the law). A very major reason that Canadian imports were suspended last May was that since Japan and South Korea, who also import from the US, were concerned that Canadian beef would flow through the US to them when they had banned the Canadian product. This was in all the papers concerning reopening the borders back in Sept. This whole issue is centered around the captive supply issue and the panic that COOL put the big three in. The packers want producer labeling but no reporting of foreign imports and they needed a panic to be able to implement what they want and not reveal their ownership in foreign captive supply. Some in the industry knew something like this was going to happen almost 2 months ago. Follow the money and the monopoly.
http://www.ivu.org/congress/wvc96/madcow.html The most common misdiagnosis of CJD is Alzheimer's disease (Harrison, 1991). CJD was even described by Dr. Brown, our government's top CJD researcher (Wlazelek, 1990a), as, "Alzheimer's in fast forward (Wlazelek, 1990b)." The symptoms and pathology of both diseases overlap (Brown, 1989). There can be spongy changes in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, for example, and senile plaques in the brains of CJD victims (Brown, 1989). The causes may overlap as well; epidemiological evidence suggests that people eating meat more than four times a week for a prolonged period have a three times higher chance of suffering a dementia than long-time vegetarians (Giem, 1993), but this result may be confounded by vascular factors (Van Duijn, 1996). Dr. Brown even said that the brains of the young people who died from the new CJD variant in Britain look like the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease (Hager, 1996). Dr. Prusiner speculates Alzheimer's may even turn out to be a prion disease (Prusiner, 1984). In younger victims the disease could look like multiple sclerosis or a severe viral infection, according to Alzheimer's expert Gareth Roberts (Brain, 1996). An estimated two to three million Americans are afflicted by Alzheimer's (Scully, 1993); it is the fourth leading cause of death among the elderly in the United States (Perry, 1995). Twenty percent or more of people clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease are found at autopsy to not have had Alzheimer's at all (McKhann, 1984). At Yale, out of 46 patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, 6 were proven to be CJD at autopsy (Manuelidis, 1989). In another post-mortem study 3 out of 12 "Alzheimer" patients actually died from a spongiform encephalopathy (Teixeira, 1995). Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with prion diseases (Manuelidis, 1985), estimates that 1% of people showing up in Alzheimer clinics actually have CJD (Folstein, 1983). Hundreds more people may be dying from CJD than previously thought in the United States (Hoyert, 1996; United, 1995). :-/ http://www.ivu.org/congress/wvc96/madcow-biblio.html :eek: i will never eat another piece of beef as long as i live!