Legalectric

From webs.wichita.edu/mschneegurt/biol103

In the “it’s about time” category…

Mad cow: A good step by USDA

Late last month, however, the USDA issued an important and welcome update on its mad cow surveillance program. Since June 2004 the government has tested more than 460,000 “high risk” beef cows — animals culled by veterinarians or renderers because they showed nerve disorders or other potential symptoms of mad cow disease, formally called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The idea is not to test for food safety, since the animals had been pulled from the food chain anyway, but to estimate how far BSE had spread in the American herd. So far, only one of the tested cows has turned up positive. Now the department will expand its tests to 20,000 animals that show no symptoms but are old enough to have developed the disease. Europe includes such animals in its testing program and has found many cases of BSE, so this is a valuable addition to the nation’s surveillance protocol.

Should we worry about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? Considering this is not something typically suspected, that we don’t test the cows, how would we know CJD? Did the man in Northfield who died of CJD a while back have CJD Variant? In the UK, you’re more likely to die of CJD than of HIV from a blood transfusion — considering all the prevantative measures with blood transfusions, YOU WOULD THINK THAT WE’D TAKE SIMILAR LEVELS OF PRECAUTIONS WITH MEAT … but as my ex-husband would say, “Goes ta show ya don’t think!”

I’m a veggie primarly because in 6th grade we toured the Swift plant in South St. Paul.

From the Minnesota Historical Society

It was either tour that plant or the Metro sewage treatment plant, and I wanted to see the collection they had of items flushed. Oh well, just my luck, I instead had to see meat packing in action, and what really did it was a couple of big barrels of eyes that were going into hot dogs. After the tour, they handed us each a cold hotdog. Urp…

This image was accompanied by a meat version of the “Beans, beans, the magical fruit” ditty…

Add to it the cumulative impacts of a couple years cooking at the Seward Cafe (some folks’ tour of da hood), plus I was a meat hauler in a past life, spending lots of time at IBP and John Morrell and Farmland (check this!), etc., waiting for animals to be killed, cut up, put in bins or boxes and stuck on my truck, where we spent the next 36-48 hours headed west to Farmer John’s, Cal-Hono, and cold storage and grocery warehouses all over California.

And then there’s the pissy deer in Wisconsin… Hmmmm… I’ve got a friend in the pissy deer area who’s displayed some obvious judgment problems… maybe that’s his problem!

How do these Chronically Wasted Deer get from South Dakota to Wisconsin? Think it doesn’t happen here? Here are some more info links.

Meat? When pigs sing and cows fly…

From: www.madcowsracing.org (Stephanie found this one a while back)