Don't Cancel Your Cable Yet

We know times are hard unless you were skeevy enough to have Madoff with a shit-ton of loot last year. Pay thru March, Tor(rent) up, or just boot off the neighbors for a few days. You must. not. miss. the HBO premiere of Death on a Factory Farm on March 16.

It Takes Two

 

Done. Next!

Send us some of that leftover schwag, and not the dusty crap y'all were selling over at the Cafe shop. We want that prime shit: three pink gestation crate iPhone covers, a veal crate playground set, and some battery cage keychains.

November Ballot

CHF: like white on rice, baby.

New AVMA Fark Tag Debuts

Florida has one. Why not the AVMA? It’s not like they’re undeserving of the honor. Did you know, for example, according to the delegate from Vermont, taking a cat’s temperature is more distressing than producing foie gras?

If we may be so bold as to make a suggestion to the delegate, as well as a perfectly valid and science-based request for a self-funded research study using himself, TPP’s cat, and a duck as subjects:

You’re welcome. And don’t forget to tag!

Clips from AR2007

Harold Brown on the coming "agricultural apartheid," from the Effective Tactics for Agriculture panel.



The Mad Cowboy himself, Howard Lyman. Nobody works a room like Howard or scares the manure out of a table full of feedlot operators' lawyers faster.



More clips from the conference are over at DoggyTV's YouTube spot.

Cargill: Sow Crates Gotta Go

Update: We were had. So was everybody else who reported anything resembling "Cargill" and "phasing out crates."

The Pigsite (the Chron link was broken so we fixed it with a link to one of the pork industry's own getting PR-jacked, too).

“The decision is the latest example of a U.S. company putting greater emphasis on animal welfare.” Um … no.

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation that is part of Human/Animal Relationships: Biological and Philosophical Issues, current coursework in the University of Wisconsin’s Zoology department. If they’re right on schedule (and we know they are!), Agricultural Animals & Current Social Issues Part II is next Tuesday’s lecture. You can root up the info on the guest lecturer yourself, it’s too easy, and we’re not doing it for you.

There are a couple of very interesting slides in the presentation, like slides 25–26 for example:

“Selective photography” isn’t really the issue, is it? Animal density relative to housing floor space is. Both pens are dangerously overcrowded and injury-conducive irrespective of the camera angle, zoom level, or cropping.

Most interesting of all, though, is what we think might be a glimpse into the future of “group sow housing” for both Cargill and Smithfield sows:

Five or six to a pen, and way less than a minimum, safe distance for both animal introductions and individual resting areas.

Remember the “landmark decision regarding animal management” and how Smithfield CEO Larry Pope worked “with our customers, who have made their views known on the issue of gestation stalls.” Well, don’t backslap Larry or Cargill’s Dirk Jones, or HSUS, PETA, or anybody just yet over what is essentially an international trade issue. Nobody had megawatts of animal welfare go off in their head and nobody caved to consumer pressure that represents the buying power of the US pork chop market.

But, like deer in headlights, everybody did look long, hard, and just a few short years into the future to find the doors to the EU export market slamming shut. Bottom line: smart business people know who their real customers really are, and they aren’t you. Besides, you're veg by now anyway, right?

All Your B(A)SE Are Belong to Cows

New twist in tale of BSE’s beginnings

Sheep didn’t do it.

Cows eating cows did it … or maybe sheep eating cows. Their brains got sick. Then your brains got sick. Cows and sheep don’t really eat each other – at least not that they’re aware of. And thousands of mice got sick to remind you that feeding cows to sheep or sheep to cows, and either one or both to yourself, is still a bad idea.

Woo-hoo, it's new!

And coming this spring to a feedlot near you! We love to drone on about antibiotic (over)use in animal agribusiness, bacterial resistance, and the emerging threat to global public health.

Instead of doing it again, we’ll just give you some quick take-aways from today’s Washington Post article:

InterVet developed cefquinome to treat bovine respiratory disease, the most common disease in cattle. Recognizing the potential public health implications of using a close cousin of cefepime in animals, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, which oversees animal drug approvals, convened its expert advisers in September.

And what did they discover about BRD and current treatments? Available and effective. But…

The panel also learned that the disease would be a relatively minor issue but for the stressful conditions under which U.S. cattle are raised, including high-density living spaces and routine shipment on crowded trains for hundreds or thousands of miles. Those "production dynamics" suppress the animals' immune systems, explained feedlot consultant Kelly Lechtenberg of Oakland, Neb., and virtually guarantee that bovine respiratory disease will be a major problem.

Why aren’t a dozen effective antibiotic therapies for BRD enough? According to the VP of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs for the Animal Health Institute, it doesn’t matter how many there are.

Why are cows always and inevitably sick?

More to the point: why does the FDA have to wait for a person to be sickened by a resistant microbe in order to tell animal agribusiness to stop shoveling, dripping, and injecting antibiotics into their products?

Nubby and Hood

Read the story of small town citizens who came to the rescue of two neglected, abused little calves and did all they could to keep them safe. Watch the slideshow of Nubby and Hood’s intensive care at the Warren Animal Shelter.

PFW loves you, too.

Front Group Spotlight

Lawmakers Move Against Over-use of Antibiotics on Farms

As more and more scientific authorities conclude that feeding antibiotics to livestock is promoting drug resistance among bacteria that attack humans, Congress has begun to take notice.

So has the Coalition for Animal Health and the Animal Health Institute. They noticed that federal legislation to phase out the use of medically important antibiotics (for humans!) over a two-year period would put quite a damper on their non-therapeutic-use in animal agribusiness agenda. Huh?!

Antibiotics kill bacteria when they’re given at a dosage level that’s effective, or therapeutic, against a specific bacteria, and given for an effective period of time. Non-therapeutic levels of antibiotics, such as what’s added to CAFO livestock feeds, mask signs of disease, encourage resistant bacteria to reproduce, and make animals’ already fragile immune systems from overcrowding and filth even less capable of developing an effective response to disease and stress. Over hundreds of thousands of generations of animals and…we don’t even think there’s a numerical quantifier for the number of generations of bacteria.

So who are the Coalition for Animal Health and the Animal Health Institute, exactly? Are they even people? Ultimately, but outwardly they’re a floating consortium of animal agribusiness major players with a bottom-dollar interest in keeping as many “food” animals in as little physical space as possible, for as little financial input as possible, with as little regulatory oversight as possible, for as big a profit as possible. Who floats in and out depending on the need for, direction, and speed of spin?

American Association of Swine Veterinarians
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Feed Industry Association
American Sheep Industry Association
American Veterinary Medical Association
Animal Agriculture Alliance
Federation of Animal Science Societies
National Broiler Council
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
National Chicken Council
National Pork Board
National Pork Producers Council
National Turkey Federation
United Egg Association
United Egg Producers

C’mon, you know this bunch already! We keep tabs on them when and wherever possible.

Does anybody in your US government even know how much antibiotics go into livestock feed every year, year after year? You’d think somebody would, with the USDA and the FDA and all the other A-listers out there keeping the “food” animals healthy and happy and the grocery stores shelves clean and safe for you. Turns out they don’t have a clue. Surprised? Why?

It took the Union of Concerned Scientists to even attempt a rough estimate six years ago. The government’s own General Accounting Office tried to nail it down three years ago, with not much better results. But page 73 has a nice chart-type go at it.

So what’s the point of this lengthy rant with no pictures to speak of? Up top: know your front groups. Words are infinitely malleable, forgiving, disposable. But brands, like “Animal” and “Health” are Everything.

Smithfield says gestation crates will fade away

Over the next 10 years Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the US will phase out the use of gestation crates, restraint devices used in the pork industry to severely restrict the movement of pregnant gilts and sows, and which house them throughout their pregnancies of just under four months. Gestational housing of this type is the underpinning of “modern” pig farming that permits the concentration of tens of thousands of animals—and their waste products—in a single facility and a minor reduction in the number of newborn and infant piglets lost to accidental crushing or suffocation by their mother.

Two items notable by their absence from this announcement need a bit more clarification: the company’s release makes no mention of the phase-out of farrowing crates; gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing. We’re saying it one more time for the back rows and balcony: gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing.

While they both derive from the same perspective (production “efficiency”), serve the same physical function (severe restriction of animal movement), and may be identical in physical design (components and cubic feet), they do not serve the same operational function. Ask repeatedly and with insistence on a definitive answer and you’ll finally get that distinction out in the open.

Could a sow spend three months of her life in an unbedded, indoor-only, communal group pen then wind up back in the same crate she was in the year before the phase-out, spend three weeks there with her piglets, be removed to group housing for 21 days, re-artificially inseminated, and start the whole process over again? Yeah, but you’d have to account for the white space in the Smithfield release and statements to get to that scenario and it’s not one we’re making as a far-fetched assumption.

We find it more than a bit ironic that the company’s position today is this u-turn in both practical husbandry and operational philosophy “will not have a detrimental effect on our animals,” as the pork production industry has built its post-WWII mantra on the specious assertion of group and/or loose housing as antithetical to the health and safety of naturally competitive and rambunctious gilts and sows.

While we applaud this decision by one of the world's largest food conglomerates, we can’t help but wonder if this is a defensive position taken in reaction to the overwhelming groundswell of citizen initiative and backlash against the rationalization that putting a 500 lb. animal, comparatively a teenager, in a 7x2’ steel and concrete living space for the length of her life means more consumer purchasing power, thereby more consumer choice, hence more freedom.

Yes, freedom has a price. Yes, those who purchase the pork industry’s products have demonstrated time and dollar-again that they are willing to pay those few extra pennies per pound to let another creature take more than two steps forward or backward in life. Yes, it took hundreds of millions of lives wretchedly abused, tortured from birth to death, discarded and then forgotten, plus a few short years of in-house, purely science-based research, for the industry to arrive at the conclusion that a pig is still a pig, and they can make of her nothing more nor less.

Related entries.

Sunday Triple-Header

Folks in Michigan would like a state legislator brave enough to step forward in their state and make cruelty to animals a felony.

Apparently, leaving them to resort to cannibalizing their own offspring just to stay alive, die with their heads stuck in a fence trying to reach food on the other side, and rot beside the bodies of their starving herdmates is still a misdemeanor. If the pic-link to the Port Huron Times Herald video above is broken, you can download it from us.

The Nebraska Unicameral (it’s their one-of-a-kind Legislature) is considering a bill that would make animal cruelty a felony. If the bill isn't maimed or killed in Committee by the usual suspects, LB 227 would protect animals other than companion dogs and cats, i.e., ones that have hooves, horns, beaks, and snouts.

We’re ending our Sunday with a story out of the Inland Empire which, if it didn’t get your attention the first time around, might make you look twice this time. In September, 2000, Godwin Collins Onunwah put a bunny in a plastic bag, tied the bag closed, and waited for the bunny to die in his special education classroom at LAUSD’s Gage Middle School.

Since the school district didn’t provide animals for dissection, perhaps because it isn’t permitted in middle schools and only permitted in high schools if the animals are sourced through biological supply houses, Onunwah asked his special education students to supply their own animals for the exercise. The suffocated bunny was purchased by a student from a pet store. When the bunny didn’t succumb before the end of the school day, Onunwah put the closed bag in a cabinet for the weekend.

His first trial on one misdemeanor count of animal cruelty ended in a hung jury voting 11–1 to convict. He was acquitted following a second trial.

This bunny’s exquisite face is courtesy of the House Rabbit Society, where you can discover just about everything you’d need for companion bunny care and habitat.

House Rabbit Society, like the educator resource TeachKind, is a child-and-bunny-safe site, free of plastic bags, suffocation experiments, administrative leave, multiple aliases on undisclosed public employee records, and predators who target developmentally disabled children and defenseless animals. We hope you'll visit both. In at least one case, we'd like to make it a 2nd-strike felony not to.

Wiles Farm Prosecutor Files Charges

WKYC Evening News anchors acknowledge the worldwide reaction to their story in this follow-up report and interview with Special Prosecutor Frank Forchione. More than 30,000 viewers have seen the story that aired in November as a result of investigative efforts by the Humane Farming Association.

Owner Ken Wiles faces arraignment on two second-degree misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty later this month. His son, Joe Wiles, is charged with six misdemeanor counts and Wiles employee Dusty Stroud, previously seen mugging for the camera as a helpless sow is strangled by hanging, will face two counts as well. Jail time is a possibility if they are convicted, 150 90 days per misdemeanor, as well as fines of $750 per count and the mandatory surrender of the remaining animals housed at the facility.

Do the sentencing guidelines seem like paltry, cost-of-doing-business annoyances to you? We think so, too. Felony indictments and convictions for cruelty in industrial animal production facilities are far too few. The value of an innocent life, spared by the selfless acts of one brave person, is a price above rubies.

We’ll keep you apprised of developments in the Wiles Farm case as they unfold.

Inside Wiles Farm

HFA Takes Action Against Ohio Hog Factory

This is an abridged copy of the full 77–page complaint to Canton, Ohio criminal prosecutor Frank Forchione regarding conditions at Wiles Farm.

Beaten, bludgeoned to death, repeatedly shocked with an electric prod, strangled by hanging, starved, shot, drowned in their own urine and feces, cannibalized. The rescued animals we showed you yesterday survived in these unconscionable torture chambers for years.

These are the least graphic photos from the HFA petition we’re showing you here.

It’s our understanding that after the original airing of this investigation by WKYC reporter Bill Safos and the follow-up story that aired yesterday with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the station has been swamped with calls and emails from horrified viewers around the country asking what people can do to help. We have a few suggestions:

• Make sure HFA has the resources they need to pursue this criminal case through the courts.


• Let Rep. Kucinich speak for YOU, these animals, and millions more like them once again. You don’t have to be a 10th District resident to say “enough is enough.”
  
  
• Thank WKYC for their commitment in bringing this investigation to you.

Thanks for /.ing Dr. Greger!

Not! All the activity over your way has the Bird Flu book site running like a one-legged chick in a Foster Farms grow house. Nice. Real nice. But at least you're talking up the issue. :)

Surgery, spare-rib-style

Don't let the Far Eastern location or the translation throw you off. "Porking" is apparently the nearest Taiwanese approximation of "baby pig," and you could paste this clip into any US commercial farrowing operation footage without a visible seam. Except for maybe the part where you got within a mile of the place without a court order taped to your bullet-proof vest, or when you had to switch from the handheld cam to the one that looks just like the face of your watch. But we digress...



When you reach the point in your education where you're introduced to appropriate anesthesia and analgesia agents for surgical sedation and pain relief in animals, remember: it's only unacceptable for AWA-approved species in defined circumstantial roles to actually feel the pain of a knife slicing off their testicles. And in case you were wondering how baby pig came to be, here are a few seconds of agribusiness innovation that'll take you all the way back to the gleam in baby daddy's eye.



Now we could supply you with an embedded (no pun intended) hands-free, electric version of the above, as well. But being as we keep this joint mostly R-rated, you'll have to hit up PornoTube for those money shots. Once again, don't let the location, the $1.89 set decoration budget, or the fact that this time all the participants are consenting, human adults throw you. After all, where do you think they got the equipment?

World Farm Animals Day, Oct. 2

Some activity hints just to get you started:

Add one book or article to your reading list.
Be a vegan buddy for the day.
Contact your senators and representatives.
Donate to a farm animal sanctuary.
Encourage another person to go vegan for one day.
Foster a rescued farm animal.
Go vegan yourself for one day. Just one out of 365 is a start.
Help distribute literature.
Investigate farm animal cruelty in your area.
Join a World Farm Animals Day event in your area.
Keep informed about farm animal issues.
Learn how to include humane education in your curriculum.
Meet Your Meat.
Network with professionals in your field.
Oust an undesirable legislator.
Peek in on your own for a change. For once.
Question authority.
Read one journal article.
Sponsor a rescued farm animal at a sanctuary.
Type a letter to your local paper’s op/ed section.
Use your multi-million dollar acreage for something worthwhile.
Visit a farm animal sanctuary in your area.
Walk for a farm animal.
<Your_two_ideas_here>.
Zap your zits the cruelty-free way.

Now how hard was that?

And you think your case load is staggering?!

10News SanDiego

10News went to the biggest egg ranch in San Diego County. There are 1 million hens, and they are inspected every month by a vet to make sure they are healthy. Mark Brand is a poultry veterinarian and said he finds it difficult to mask his frustration with protesters.

Geez, Mark--even if you worked 16 hr. shifts 7 days a week you'd still have 171 cases an hour. Every hour. For a year. This is pretty much the point at which industrial animal production's wholly self-determined governance of "health and welfare" just becomes laughable. But far be it from us to conclude that Mark's frustrations are the ones that just don't fly.

AVAR
EggIndustry
Humane Society of the United States
United Poultry Concerns

Art vs. science, plus spin and a slide lecture

It seems that the Illinois Restaurant Association, their three remaining US "enhanced-fed" duck buddies, plus one plaintiff shill have teamed up to form the new Artisan Farmers Association and sue the city of Chicago over the Council's 49–1 vote last month to give hepatic lipidosis the boot rather than a place on the plate. Artisan Farmers Association. Close your eyes and say that out loud and slowly, enough times to get your marketing mojo working.

Find your focal point, a tiny point in the distance, slowly coming into focus, getting clearer and larger. It’s sparkling in the sun—a pond!—surrounded by reeds swaying in the breeze and alive with aquatic vegetation. Artisan Farmers Association.

You can see them now. First a splash, then a flat-feathered tail to the sky dive, then gliding over the glassy surface in perfectly interconnected circles, water ballet interrupted only by the occasional necessity of feather preening and wing flapping. They appear and disappear among the reeds. The sun is shining, they’re quack-chattering among themselves, it’s pastoral and peaceful and perfectly crafted. It’s the brand at the moment of conception. Artisan Farmers Association.

Having spent most of our adult educational and working life in the biological sciences realm, admittedly, we’re somewhat handicapped when it comes to recognizing and evaluating what constitutes art, be it conceptual, outsider, or just overpriced. But we do have some command of the origins of the English language, its hoity Latin roots, its evolving contextual usage, as well as our own humble contributions to the Urban Dictionary.

So please tell us: at what point in the lexicon of anything anywhere, did this became “artisanal?”

Foie gras production causes disease in ducks and geese. Foie gras is disease.

Your “delicacy” is illegal within the Chicago city limits. Ballot initiatives to repeal SB 1520 in CA will go nowhere. Get over it.

As I Lay Dying

Worker #3: They’re using the dead cows in the compost for bedding.
Worker #8: The bedding for the cows is compost made up of recycled manure and ground up cows that died of disease. They claimed that they don’t use the ground up cows in bedding compost anymore, but they haven’t stopped.
Worker #7: They still use ground up cows for bedding—they never actually stopped using ground up carcasses in the compost they use for bedding.
Calf Buyer: They still mix the dead cows in the compost used for bedding in the dairy barns. They don’t want the public to know this. That’s their dirty little secret.

We’ve written briefly about the deadly intersection of immigrant labor, exploitation, and the US industrial animal production complex. United Farm Workers and the Humane Farming Association want to show you a bit more scenery, this time from inside a Boardman, Oregon dairy. The principals in this facility, Bos Family Oregon Farms, also operate a large dairy farm conglomerate based in Bakersfield, CA.

Threats to public health aside, the text and photo documentation in this report and the Humane Farming Association’s subsequent petition for enforcement to the Oregon Attorney General is one of the most horrific examples of torturous abuse and neglect endured by animals used for food that we have ever seen. And we’ve seen a lot. Fair warning: the images are sickening and the accompanying interviews with Threemile Canyon Farms workers are graphically detailed in support of them.

Deliberate starvation of newborn calves, target practice among supervisors using already bullet-wounded calves, and Guantanamo-style “managerial intervention” should any worker demonstrate concern or compassion for ill, injured, and dying calves. And for what—cheap, chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, sharp Cheddar cheese, and the vague buttery flavor in trans-fat loaded margarine.

United Farm Workers’ Threemile Canyon Farms Image Gallery and a Campaign Action letter are available. Please take advantage of both.