Researcher: Cow abuse isn’t rare
MEAT PLANTS: The USDA kept poor records and didn’t evenly enforce rules, an activist said.
10:00 PM PDT on Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Ten percent of inhumane-treatment citations by government inspectors at slaughterhouses over an 18-month period were for mishandling non-ambulatory, “downer” animals like those that led to the record-setting beef recall out of Chino, according to a study released Wednesday.The report from Animal Welfare Institute, an animal protection group in Virginia, studied 501 noncompliance records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service from Oct. 1, 2002, to March 31, 2004.The records covered slaughterhouses that process cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens and turkeys. More than half of the cases involved failing to provide water and inadequate or hazardous spaces for the animals.
About 50 of the citations concerned “downer” animals too sick or injured to stand on their own, said Dena Jones, the study’s author and an animal welfare consultant in Boston.
Among the violations at slaughterhouses across the country:
Using a rope and electric prod to right a downer cow with an open leg wound;
Pushing a cow with a forklift;
Letting downers be trampled by other cattle;
Leaving downers squeezed between dead cows on a truck for more than 17 hours; and
The kicking and shocking of a cow whose head was stuck in the bars of a gate.
Similar abuses were secretly videotaped by an agent from the Humane Society of the United States who worked undercover at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino for six weeks last year.
Workers there used forklifts, high-pressure water hoses and electric prods to get non-ambulatory cattle upright so they could proceed to slaughter.
As a protection against mad cow disease, which can be fatal to humans who consume contaminated meat, cows that go down after a pre-slaughter inspection are not allowed in the food supply unless a USDA veterinarian checks and re-approves the cow.
Westland/Hallmark’s failure to get a second inspection of downers led to the recall of 143 million pounds of beef produced at the plant between February 2006 and February 2008 and forced closure of the company, which supplied the National School Lunch Program.
The video has sparked national outrage, congressional hearings and calls for changes to the federal inspection system.
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