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I guess Thursday is Bad Cow Day. Sorry cows! I love your sweet, cud-chewing faces, but your owners have issues!
According to the Humane Society, 17% of the U.S. beef supply comes from spent dairy cows. These cows no longer produce financially viable quantities of milk and are sold at steep discount to slaughterhouses. In fact, prices for dairy cows can be as little as one-tenth the price of a well-fed beef steer on the meat market. This partially has to do with net meat gain: the dairy cow is bred for optimum lactation, not muscle mass. The price differential also has to do with condition: the dairy cows tend to be older and more feeble, depleted of calcium and afflicted with a multitude of bacterial infections, the result of sedentary, unifunctional lives.
Industrial farming costs us dearly in greenhouse gas emission levels. By some measures, the ecological impact of the farming industry outweighs even its economic impact. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock off-gassing (methane, ammonia and others from sheep dung, cow farts, etc) makes up 18% of our total greenhouse gas emissions alone. This statistic does not even include the gas guzzling tractors, coal-fueled processing machines such as automated milkers and pesticide sprayers, or petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers. You know, just to name a few.
But just as our government rewards the profit-focused mentality of factory farmers with further tax breaks and incentives, it is now rewarding their disregard for the environment. Yielding to lobbyist pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reversing a 25 year old requirement that forces industrial farmers to report their toxic gas emissions levels.
By Meredith Melnick •
February 28, 2008
If you’ve been paying attention to food news over the past month, you have surely heard of the downer cow debacle between the Humane Society and the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company. In shocking, secret footage recorded by Humane Society activists at the Chino, California livestock farm, handlers are shown using electric prods, high-pressure hoses and forklifts to rouse “downer” cows to their feet so that they can pass USDA inspection.
A downer cow is an animal that is too ill to stand up on its own. After the Mad Cow Disease scares of the late 1990s, Congress passed legislation that prohibited these animals from entering the food supply because of a slightly increased risk of spreading disease into the human population. But in September of 2007, Congress added a loophole to the measure, allowing downer cows into the food supply if a veterinarian deemed it safe. This measure was included to allow otherwise healthy animals with broken legs or torn ligaments into the food supply, but in fact opened the floodgates to profit-minded decisions in bovine health.
Much has been made of the fact that 30% of the shipment that included these particular downer cows filmed was destined for federally-run nutrition program, including the plates of low-income school children who take advantage of free lunch programs. For an in depth look at the socio-economic and children’s rights implications of this scandal, have a look at this excellent article over at The Ethicurean.
But beyond the incredibly important issue of the socio-economic food division, there are two major but separate complaints leveled against the USDA and their complicity in this incident: the issues of food safety and of animal welfare.
