New killer diseases: nature strikes back against factory farming, from ANIMAL PEOPLE Jan/Feb 2004

[Guest guest]

>From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2004:

 

New killer diseases: nature strikes back against factory farming

 

GUANGZHOU, Guangdong province, China--

Representing the unholy marriage of wildlife

consumption with factory farming, an estimated

10,000 masked palm civets, tanukis, (also

called raccoon dogs), and hog badgers were

sacrificed in the first 10 days of January 2004

for the sins of the meat industry.

Mostly cage-reared from wild-caught

ancestors, the civets, tanukis, and hog

badgers were either drowned in disinfectant or

electrocuted, still in their cages, as China

tried to prevent a recurrence of the Sudden Acute

Respiratory Syndrome outbreak that killed 774

people worldwide in 2003, after killing 142

people in 2002. The animals' remains were burned.

More than three million chickens, ducks,

geese, and quail were killed elsewhere in

Southeast Asia to try to contain outbreaks of

H5N1, an avian flu virus that can spread

directly to humans. The first known

identification of the outbreak came after the

Taiwan Coast Guard intercepted six ducks after

they were thrown from a mainland Chinese fishing

boat into the water off Kinmen island. The crew

may have been disposing of sick ducks who were

taken to sea as food, but rumors have identified

the incident with everything from exotic animal

smuggling to germ warfare.

By January 21 at least six nations were

affected and 14 Vietnamese, mostly children, had

died from H5N1 symptoms, with five human H5N1

deaths confirmed.

" Southern China, where poultry and pigs

are raised alongside each other in high-density

farms, is a reservoir of mutating viruses, " Adam

Luck of the Daily Telegraph reported on January

18. " In the past, H5N1 killed only chickens,

but wild birds, ducks, and geese are all dying

in the fresh outbreak. "

" There is a vital need for information

from mainland China, " World Health Organization

virology adviser Robert Webster told Luck. " Where

the hell are all these viruses coming from? What

is going on in Vietnam is of very great concern.

If H5N1 gets out of control it will make SARS

look quite trivial--like a puff of smoke. "

" A pandemic influenza is certainly much

bigger than SARS, " microbiologist Malik Peiris

told Jonathan Ansfield of Reuters. The three

most deadly flu epidemics of the 20th century,

in 1918-19, 1957-58, and 1967-68, all

originated in the farms and live markets of

Guangdong. As recently as 1997-98 Hong Kong

civil servants killed more than 3.5 million

poultry to stop an H5N1 outbreak that apparently

came from Guangdong, despite official denials.

WHO regional coordinator Peter Cordingly

told Doan Bao Chu of Associated Press in Manila,

Philippines, that H5N1 is " a bigger potential

problem than SARS because we don't have any

defense against the disease. If it latches onto

human influenza virus, it could cause serious

international damage. "

South Korea detected H5N1 on December 15.

On December 21, after limited culling failed to

keep it from spreading, Prime Minister Goh Hun

ordered the slaughter of 2.5 million chickens and

miscellaneous other fowl. A five-year-old boy

had contracted the disease, but recovered.

The Korea Herald, not friendly toward

protests against dog-and-cat-eating, on December

26 published an extensive expose of inhumane

culling methods, denounced by Voice4Animals

founder Park Changkil.

At least two million chickens had died

from H5N1 in Vietnam by January 20, or were

killed in containment efforts --but Ministry of

Agriculture deputy veterinary director Nguyen Van

Thong acknowledged to Tini Tran of Associated

Press that as many as 900,000 infected chickens

had been sold and eaten, mostly in Long An and

Tien Giang provinces.

Thailand killed more than 850,000

chickens in 20 provinces after discovering three

human cases of H5N1.

Cambodia, between Vietnam and Thailand, almost

certainly had been hit as well. Japan killed

6,000 chickens in one infected flock. Taiwan

killed 50,000 chickens to contain a milder avian

flu before it had time to mutate.

 

BSE found in Washington

 

Also sacrificed to controlling disease

resulting from factory farming practices were

nearly 600 cows and calves in Washington state,

plus about 150 cattle in Alberta, after a test

on the brain of a downed six-year-old Holstein

dairy cow who was slaughtered in Washington on

December 9 discovered-- two weeks later--that she

had the first known case of bovine spongiform

encephalopathy, BSE for short, in the U.S.

The cattle were killed for testing, as

at least 36 nations banned imports of U.S. beef

and byproducts of cattle slaughter, because they

were either close relatives of the infected cow,

or had lived on the same farms.

BSE has been linked since 1996 to the

brain-destroying and inevitably fatal new-variant

Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease. Recent studies also

indicate that mad cow disease may be implicated

in the older form of CJD, previously considered

a condition of age, and that CJD may be spread

through blood transfusions as well as through

consumption of infected cattle.

 

SARS re-emerges

 

Fears that SARS might once again erupt in

Guangdong and spread were whetted by the

discovery of three new cases, all in Guangzhou,

the Guangdong capital. They were the first,

other than two cases of accidental self-infection

by researchers in Singapore and Taiwan, since

May 23, 2003.

The first known victim was 32-year-old

television producer Luo Jian, who fell ill on

December 16 with the coronavirus found in civets,

but swore he had never eaten or handled a civet.

Describing himself to the official Xinhua news

agency as " an environmentalist who is against the

slaughter of living creatures, " Luo said he had

recently removed a baby mouse from a bath tub

with a pair of chopsticks, and had tossed the

mouse outside through an open window. That was

his only known contact with wildlife.

The China Daily on January 6 issued an

unconfirmed report, contradicted by the WHO,

that the SARS virus had been found in 30 rats

trapped in Luo's apartment. WHO said the rats

tested free of SARS.

The chance that rats carry SARS alarmed

authorities not only because rats are ubiquitous

and virtually ineradicable, but also because

rats are eaten in Guangdong. Three weeks earlier

the newspaper Xinxishibao reported that one

restaurant in Zhuhai city serves more than 100

rat meat dishes per day.

The second known SARS victim of the new

outbreak was waitress Zheng Ling, 20, who

worked in a Guangzhou restaurant that served

civet meat.

The third victim was a 35-year-old man.

Said Guangdong health bureau official

Feng Liuxiang, " We will start a patriotic health

campaign to kill rats and cockroaches in order to

give every place a thorough cleaning for the

Lunar New Year, " January 22--a holiday marked by

public gatherings and travel to visit distant

relatives.

WHO warned that the hasty killing of

suspect animals could be more dangerous than

letting the animals live, since the exact means

by which they shed the SARS virus is still

unknown. In addition, killing the animals and

disposing of their remains destroyed potentially

valuable medical evidence.

Beijing environmentalist Guo Geng told

the <Sina.com> news web site that the civets,

tanukis, and hog badgers should have been

released into the wild, to replenish the

depleted Guangdong wildlife population.

" I'd love it if Cantonese stopped eating

them, " he said. " We shouldn't be worried about

these animals spreading disease, because when

they see a human they turn and run. "

The new SARS outbreak came a month after

an opinion poll conducted by the Shanghai #2

Medical Sciences University Public Health

Institute found that among 400 Shanghai

residents, 83% had eaten wildlife, 42% said

they would continue to eat wildlife despite SARS,

23% said they would remain avid wildlife eaters,

and only 2% agreed that wild animals deserve to

be protected for their own sake.

The findings showed almost twice the

level of interest in eating wildlife that the

International Fund for Animal Welfare discovered

in a 1998 survey of 864 residents of Shanghai and

839 residents of Beijing--but the IFAW survey

lumped the Shanghai and Beijing data together,

apparently through lack of awareness that wild

animals are not traditionally eaten in the

Mandarin-speaking north of China.

Reappraising the IFAW findings on the

presumption that the Shanghai residents responded

comparably in 1998 and 2003 produces the

inference, supported by recent observation in

Beijing, that virtually all of the wildlife

eaters polled by IFAW were in fact from Shanghai.

 

Here and there

 

" You can take some comfort in the

knowledge that the fate the civets are now

receiving is actually better than the fate that

was in store for them, " offered Asian Animal

Protection Network founder John Wedderburn, M.D.,

of Hong Kong. " Without this cull they would have

been kept confined in miserable cages and then

transported in wretched conditions to be

slaughtered, almost certainly in a worse manner

than drowning. We non-Chinese do not have the

moral ground to shout at the Chinese for eating

civets, " Wedderburn continued, " until our

countries go vegan and we get rid of our

slaughterhouses, where the methods of death are

often no better. "

" If the suffering of these animals in

Asia upsets you, " agreed PETA correspondent

Coleen Kearon, " then you will be outraged to

know that animal factory farms and

slaughterhouses in our own backyards are guilty

of the same heart-wrenching cruelty. Chickens,

who are intelligent creatures with distinct

personalities like cats and dogs, are crammed

into filthy, tiny cages and left with no room to

move. They, like the cats in the images you may

have seen from Asian live markets, are also

thrown into scalding tanks (designed to remove

feathers), often while still fully conscious. We

are outraged at images of dogs being strung up

and having their throats slit, " Kearon said,

" but we allow slaughterhouses to dangle a cow by

one leg and do the same thing, while she writhes

and screams. "

Intensive national coverage of the BSE

discovery in Washington state often reinforced

Kearon's point--though the emphasis was on human

health, not animal welfare.

" The news cracked open a door on the

industrial kitchen where America's meat is

prepared, and what we glimpsed was enough to

send even the heartiest diner to the vegetarian

entrée, " opined New York Times Magazine

contributing writer Michael Pollan. " We learned,

for example, that the beef we have been eating

might consist of meat from a cow so sick and

hobbled that she must be dragged to the

slaughterhouse...Then her carcass is often

subjected to an 'Advanced Meat Recovery System'

so efficient at stripping flesh from spinal cord

that the chances are good (35% in one study) that

the resultant frankfurter contains 'central

nervous system tissue'--precisely the tissue most

likely to contain the infectious prions thought

to communicate BSE. "

Culled from a dairy herd in Mabton,

Washington, the infected downer was slaughtered

at Vern's Moses Lake Meat Co., and deboned at

Midway Meats in Chehalis. By the time she was

found to have had BSE, her meat had reportedly

been sold to as many as eight western states plus

Guam.

The USDA screening program for BSE had

not tested any cattle from Washington since 2001,

according to records obtained by Steve Mitchell

of United Press International.

" We have been eating downers and really

picking their bones clean, " Pollan continued.

" And what did these animals eat? Many of us were

surprised to learn that despite the FDA's August

1997 ban on feeding cattle cattle meat and bone

meal, feedlots continue to rear these herbivores

as cannibals. When young, they routinely receive

'milk replacer' made from bovine blood; later,

their daily ration is apt to contain rendered

cattle fat as well as feed made from ground-up

pigs and chickens. But the grossest feedlot dish

has to be 'chicken litter,' the nasty stuff

shoveled out of chicken houses: bedding,

feathers and overlooked feed, " which may

" contain the same bovine meat and bone meal that

FDA rules prohibit in cattle feed. "

The BSE-carrying Washington downer was

fed meat-and-bone meal in Alberta in 1997,

investigators learned.

Only one day before the case was

discovered, the USDA trumpeted " the highest beef

prices on record. "

Beef industry lobbying clout had killed

the most recent of a decade of attempts by Farm

Sanctuary to pass a federal anti-downer amendment

criticized by the Humane Farming Association as

too weak to actually keep sick and injured

animals from being sold to slaughter even if

enacted. The 2003 version of the amendment just

barely missed passage in July by the House of

Representatives, 202-199, and cleared the

Senate on a voice vote in November, but was not

included in the final reconciled version of the

legislation to which it was attached.

Farm Sanctuary has also pursued

litigation against the USDA for allegedly failing

to protect public health by not regulating

against the slaughter of downers. A federal court

trial judge dismissed a 1998 Farm Sanctuary

lawsuit contending that the lack of regulation

exposed member Michael Baur to the risk of

contracting CJD. Just after the Washington

downed cow was slaughtered, but a week before

she was found to have BSE, the Second U.S.

Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the case,

agreeing that Baur had " successfully alleged a

credible threat of harm from downed cattle. "

The case may now be moot, since on

December 30 the USDA banned the slaughter for

human consumption of any nonambulatory

bovines--but the ban does not cover other

species, and does not stop slaughtering downers

for pet food.

The American Veterinary Medical

Association on January 1, 2004 approved a

statement intended to improve the treatment of

downed pigs, but stopped short of recommending

that they not be slaughtered for human

consumption.

Except for one extensive report by Melody

Petersen, syndicated by the New York Times on

November 15, 2003, the discovery of mad cow

disease in the U.S. usurped media notice of a

petition filed the day before by the Humane

Farming Association, asking South Dakota

attorney general Lawrence E. Long to enforce

animal cruelty laws at the Sun Prairie pig

complex on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation.

HFA has been helping Sioux opponents of

factory hog farming since 1998. In February 2003

the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an

April 2002 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals verdict

that may evict Sun Prairie from the

reservation--if Sun Prairie loses a crossfiled

case still underway.

Meanwhile, Sun Prairie began pig

production at 24 barns on two sites in 1999, with

combined output of 96,000 pigs per year. The HFA

petition to Long was accompanied by 65 pages of

employee interviews and photos gathered by HFA

chief investigator Gail Eisnitz. The materials

detail conditions falling short of even the

rudimentary animal welfare and sanitation

standards that factory pig farms usually claim to

meet.

Much of the cruelty may be attributable

to poorly trained staff, frequent turnover, and

high absenteeism, but those are management

responsibilities. Until basic animal welfare and

sanitation standards are met, the Eisnitz report

indicates that--as PETA charges of the entire

U.S. pig industry--the major difference between

the conditions for pigs on the Rosebud

reservation and for animals in the live markets

of Guangdong may be only that the Sun Prairie

barns have walls and roofs that hide the filth

and misery.

--Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/

 

Please do not send attachments! - please

paste information in your message.

 

Something to think about: We believe

that the Golden Rule applies to animals, too.

We don't accept the prevailing notion that

" people come first' " or that " people are more

important than animals. " Animals feel pain and

suffer just as we do, and it is almost always

humans making animals suffer and not the other

way around. Yet in spite of how cruelly

people behave towards animals -- not to mention

human cruelty to other humans -- we are supposed

to believe that humans are superior to other

animals. If people want to fancy themselves as

being of greater moral worth than the other

creatures on this earth, we should begin

behaving better than they do, and not worse.

Let's start treating everyone as we would like to

be treated ourselves.