By Howard Lyman with Glen Merzer
I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in
Montana, & I ran a
feedlot operation there for 20 years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat
is produced in
this country. Today I am president of the International Vegetarian Union.
Sure, I used to enjoy my steaks as much as the next guy. But if you knew what I know about
what goes
into them and what they can do to you, you'd probably be a vegetarian like me. And believe
it or not, as a
pure vegetarian now who consumes no animal products at all, I can tell you that these days
I enjoy eating
more than ever.
If you're a meat-eater in America, you have a right to know that you have something in
common with most
of the cows you've eaten. They've eaten meat, too.
When a cow is slaughtered, about half of it by weight is not eaten by humans: the
intestines and their
contents, the head, hooves, and horns, as well as bones and blood. These are dumped into
giant grinders
at rendering plants, as are the entire bodies of cows and other farm animals known to be
diseased.
Rendering is a $2.4 billion-a-year industry, processing forty billion pounds of dead
animals a year. There is
simply no such thing in America as an animal too ravaged by disease, too cancerous, or too
putrid to be
welcomed by the embracing arms of the renderer.*KIM
SEZ: "I suppose some would say that this article makes my plans to feed a
cheeseburger to the cow next door a bit less sick. I'm still doing it, and there will be
pictures. Don't you judge me."
Another staple of the renderer's diet, in addition to farm animals, is euthanized pets-the
six or seven million
dogs and cats that are killed in animal shelters every year. The city of Los Angeles
alone, for example,
sends some two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a rendering plant every month.
Added to the
blend are the euthanized catch of animal control agencies, and roadkill. (Roadkill is not
collected daily, and
in the summer, the better roadkill collection crews can generally smell it before they can
see it.)
When the gruesome mix is ground and steam-cooked, the lighter, fatty material floating to
the top gets
refined for use in such products as cosmetics, lubricants, soaps, candles, and waxes. The
heavier protein
material is dried and pulverized into a brown powder-about a quarter of which consists of
fecal material.
The powder is used as an additive to almost ALL pet food as well as to livestock feed.
Farmers call it
"protein concentrates." In 1995, five million tons of processed slaughterhouse
leftovers were sold for animal
feed in the United States. I used to feed tons of the stuff to my own livestock. It never
concerned me that
I was feeding cattle to cattle.
In August 1997, in response to growing concern about the spread of bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (or
Mad Cow disease), the FDA issued a new regulation that bans the feeding of ruminant
protein (protein from
cud-chewing animals) to ruminants; therefore, to the extent that the regulation is
actually enforced, cattle
are no longer quite the cannibals that we had made them into. They are no longer eating
solid parts of
other cattle, or sheep, or goats.
They still munch, however, on ground-up dead horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, and
turkeys, as well as
blood and fecal matter of their own species and that of chickens. About 75 percent of the
ninety million
beef cattle in America are routinely given feed that has been "enriched" with
rendered animal parts. The use
of animal excrement in feed is common as well, as livestock operators have found it to be
an efficient way
of disposing of a portion of the 1.6 million tons of livestock wastes generated annually
by their industry.
In Arkansas, for example, the average farm feeds over fifty tons of chicken litter to
cattle every year. One
Arkansas cattle farmer was quoted in U.S. News & World Report as having recently
purchased 745 tons of
litter collected from the floors of local chicken-raising operations. After mixing it with
small amounts of
soybean bran, he then feeds it to his eight hundred head of cattle, making them, in his
words, "FAT AS
BUTTERBALLS." He explained, "If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell
half my heard. Other feeds are
too expensive." If you are a meat-eater, understand that this is the food of your
food.
We don't know all there is to know about the extent to which the consumption of diseased
or unhealthy
animals causes diseases in humans, but we do know that some diseases-rabies, for
example-are transmitted
from the host animal to humans. We know that the common food poisonings brought on by such
organisms
as the prevalent E. Coli bacteria, which results from fecal contamination of food, causes
the death of nine
thousand Americans a year and that about 80 percent of food poisonings come from tainted
meat. And now
we can also be virtually certain, from the tragedy that has already afflicted Britain,
that Mad Cow disease
can "jump species" and give rise to a new variant of the always fatal,
brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in humans.
For all too many humans, the first decision they consciously make about their health is
the stark one
between by-pass surgery and angioplasty, or between chemotherapy and radiation. In
reality, however, we
knowingly make choices every day that can either lead us toward these grim options, or
else toward happier
ones. We do so, of course, every time we decide what fuel to put in our bodies. This article was posted here on 12/23/00.
|
