Cows are not natural carnivores.
Nor are they natural cannibals.
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December 31, 2003
It's the Cow Feed, Stupid!
by John Stauber
The USDA's much ballyhooed new measures to address the emergence of mad cow disease in the US are wholly inadequate. Until there is a complete and total ban on all feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock, coupled with the testing of millions of animals, mad cow disease will continue to amplifying and spread in US animal feed and among livestock. Eventually we will see cases of human mad cow disease emerging. It was a decade after the recognition of the first mad cow in Britain that the human deaths, continuing today, began appearing.
We know now that in the US the so called "firewall," the FDA's 1997 feed regulation misnamed a "feed ban," has been woefully ineffective, a farce. Sheldon Rampton and I exposed this in our 1997 book, Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?
We waited to see what the FDA would do before we concluded our book in the fall of 1997. The FDA wrote feed regulations that allowed the livestock and animal feed industry to continue their dangerous practices that are spreading mad cow disease in North America.
The USDA knew way back in 1991, more than a decade ago, that a feed ban was necessary to protect human and animal health, but sided with the livestock industry. In a 1991 report I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act USDA said, "the advantage of this option is that it minimizes the risk of BSE. The disadvantage is that the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial." (Mad Cow USA, p. 149-150)
more:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1231-07.htm
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