Mad Cow Facts

By CONSTANT BRAND, Associated Press Writer
October 5, 2005
BRUSSELS, Belgium
Associated Press

Excerpt…

European Union veterinary experts recommended lifting a four-year ban on steaks on the bone Wednesday, including Italy’s famous Fiorentina steaks, ending a moratorium imposed during the 2001 mad cow crisis.

The European Commission said the official return of the T-bone steak to butcher shops and kitchens could happen within the next two months, after experts accepted advice from the EU’s European Food Safety Authority to raise the age limit of sales of beef with backbone to 24 months. The EU banned the sales of steaks on the bone from animals aged over 12 months in 2001, to reduce the risk of humans contracting a brain-wasting disease from eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow disease…

…The Commission said experts found a “significant decline in the number of positive BSE cases detected in the EU over the past few years and the age of those positive cases has steadily increased.”

A rare but fatal form of the disease in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is linked to eating meat products contaminated with BSE and was blamed for about 150 deaths, most of them in Britain, beginning in 1995.

EU experts last week also issued a “satisfactory” progress report on the containment of mad cow disease in Britain, raising prospects that the ban on British beef exports may soon be lifted.

The ban was imposed in 1996 when it became clear there was a link between mad cow disease in cattle and a deadly human equivalent. The incidence of BSE in Britain has dropped from 37,280 cases in 1992 to 342 last year.

10 September 2005

By now even the skeptics must realize the fallacy of R-CALF’s claim that keeping the Canadian border closed was the only thing supporting cattle prices.

And the Canadian supply factor was further diluted by R-CALF’s own actions. They forced a boost in Canadian packing capacity, increased the likelihood that Canadian calves would stay home in Canadian feedyards, ensured fewer U.S. border packers and financially weakened border feedyards.

If indeed the Canadian border saga is over – and that is not certain – people have been asking us what R-CALF will focus on now? For one thing, we’ve been telling people to watch for more obvious cooperation between R-CALF and the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) on packer ownership, so- called “captive” supply and contracts. OCM and R- CALF share the same outlook in these areas, as well as some key players. And OCM issued news releases of support when R-CALF won a round during the border case, others commiserating with it when R- CALF lost rounds.

Confirmation of this came recently when R-CALF issued a statement decrying the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. The 11th upheld the district court’s overturning of the Tyson v. Pickett verdict, a case OCM was heavily involved in. The plaintiffs in the case had claimed Tyson was using contracts with cattle feeders to “manipulate” the price of cattle and drive down prices for cash cattle. The jury of citizens with limited business experience and no serious cattle industry background were convinced. In fact, the Appeals court itself noted that “the jury may have been swayed by more than the evidence,” referring to the plaintiff’s romanticizing of the independent cattleman. But the judge in the case said proof was lacking that Tyson was doing anything more than managing the supply of cattle to keep its plants operating efficiently, lowering procurement costs and matching “price to actual quality and yield.” Horrors!

Ironically, it is common for cattle feeders to say one of the reasons they contract is to reduce their cost and time associated with marketing fed cattle. Another irony is that the alliances that R-CALF and OCM are trying to destroy are the very vehicles by which small and independent cattlemen can get the benefits of contracting that only big feeders could get years ago. Who is R-CALF and OCM really trying to help?

Rather than concentrate on R-CALF’s overheated rhetoric, let’s look at the flip side of their claims, the true implications of their positions.

They do not mention the upward pressure on cash prices that contracting a portion of the supply has. By reducing the supply of cattle available for spot or cash purchase, contracting actually can apply upward pressure to cash prices – provided the total supply is not too large.

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AFF Cattle Editorial - The Long Road Ahead
Written by Steve Dittmer
Agribusiness Freedom Foundation
Tuesday, 26 August 2005

Is the New York Times laying low because they know they’ve been caught misleading the public? Did they figure out they had been suckered overmuch by their activist sources?

Did the Times editorial department finally do some research after they wrote their BSE editorial and discover the accurate facts?

There is no way to tell, since the Times has been silent. Silent, that is, since they ran a huge house editorial (“Safer Beef,” Aug. 13, 2005) that did a superb job of providing inaccurate information on BSE in the U.S., assailed the safety of the U. S. beef supply with all the breathlessness of the National Enquirer and even invented a new indecipherable but inflammatory expression for the beef cow.

The Times has published none of the letters we’re sure they received from outraged cattlemen and beef organizations – of which the AFF was one – and not agreed to any organization’s requests for meetings, as far as we know.

But the whole episode is a perfect illustration of the constant threats the beef industry faces and the battles we have to fight. The Times didn’t suddenly wake up 20 months after the discovery of the first BSE cow in the U.S. and decide the sky was falling in regard to BSE. Claims that meatpackers use “dangerous methods that other countries ban,” USDA does “not require enough testing,” that cattle blood is “suspected of being able to carry infection,” and “The riskiest meats are ground beef, hot dogs, taco fillings and pizza toppings – the things children love,” are false claims, concepts and words directly taken from activist allegations used to attack the U.S. beef industry. Notice they managed to work in fear of the unknown, loathing for meatpackers, government mismanagement and threats to our children’s safety in just those few words.

Then they managed to work in European superiority (“European countries test all animals over a certain age”), global superiority (“More than 60 countries have completely or partly banned American beef) and the idea that American beef is not safe (“no reason to feel confident about the American beef supply,” ”boneless steaks and roasts are probably safe to eat,” and, since the USDA can’t do it, a call for more government (a food safety agency separate from USDA). Do you suppose they would endorse Carol Tucker Foreman or perhaps Patty Lovera to head up that agency? Lovera, in case you’re not familiar with the name, is the person in charge of Public Citizen’s USDA attack department and much of the Times editorial reads like one of her speeches.

Groups like Nader’s Public Citizen (PC), Consumer’s Union (CU), and Carol Tucker Foreman’s Consumer Federation of America (CFA), Global Resource Action Council for the Environment (GRACE) and a host of others constantly pound the media with these concepts and charges. They relish labeling cattle as “cannibals” as the Times did for feeding meat and bone meal in years past. But the Times may have crafted a semi-original expression on its own. We hadn’t heard about the “industrial cow” before.

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Written by Steve Dittmer
Agribusiness Freedom Foundation
Tuesday, 02 August 2005

Time, attention and money spent on turf wars cuts into one of the reasons we have organizations in the first place - to provide both offense and defense for the industry’s long-term prosperity.

A perfect example could be Matthew Scully’s book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy. Because Scully is a conservative and a former presidential speechwriter, the essay he wrote called, “Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism - for Animals,” in Patrick Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative caught the eye of conservative columnist George Will. The article disturbed Will enough that he read Scully’s book.

The result was a misguided Newsweek column from a disturbed - but misinformed - Will. He also told readers to view photos on Farm Sanctuary’s web site. Part of an attack on all species of mainstream farm production, the beef photos show mostly downer cattle and the veal ones show outdated veal production methods - not ranch scenes or even representative feedlot situations. Do- gooders often lump all of production agriculture together and attempt to force emotional reactions, legislation and regulations on everyone.

The following are excerpts from the letter the AFF sent to Newsweek’s Letters to the Editors column:

As a fan of George Will’s ability to consider facts, apply rational thinking and recognize emotion for what it is and not substitute emotion for reasoning, I was very disappointed in his “The Last Word” column of July 18. Matthew Scully may be a great writer and a good conservative speechwriter but it appears both he and Will are out of their area of expertise when analyzing animal agriculture.

To use those photos as typical U.S. agriculture reminds me of the Communists years ago taking photos of the drunks and derelicts outside our homeless shelters and addicts in the ghetto streets and telling Soviet citizens how much better off they were than the typical American.

Feedlots follow a standard of allowing 100 to 200 square feet of space per animal - but I can assure you the animals will be laying much closer than that density by choice, leaving open spaces at other corners of the pen, responding to their herding and protective instincts.

By comparison, would Scully consider outlawing the inhumane stacking of thousands of people in small rooms 15 or 20 stories in the air and calling them apartment buildings or college dorms?

Scully and Will fall into the trap of well-meaning people who have not been around animals in a production agriculture setting enough to understand how animal sensitivities differ from ours. Give a cow a windbreak, enough feed and a water source and she can not only survive but thrive in a North Dakota winter… That is a totally different level of sensitivity than humans could exhibit outdoors with no clothes under the same conditions.

Since science has not yet learned how to quantitatively measure sensitivity and pain, we must go by empirical observation. Things like weight gain, increases in size and sufficient nutrition and energy in excess of maintenance for reproduction are signs that an animal’s nutrition and behavior needs are being met — which includes the proximity of like animals to be comfortable.

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NPD Group
Business Wire
07/28/05

The latest mad cow case confirmed by the government did not cause Americans to be more worried about the disease. On June 24th the U.S. government confirmed a second case of mad cow disease in the U.S. The NPD Group’s Food Safety Monitor found that most adults have heard or read something about mad cow disease (98%). About three out of four adults knew that a second cow was diagnosed with the disease, but only 22 percent of adults were very worried about mad cow disease … up 3 percentage points from a month before the recent announcement. That’s is well below the 11 percentage point increase in consumer concern recorded after the 1st case of mad cow discovered in December of 2003.

Prior to the 1st infected cow being identified in the US, approximately 15 percent of all adults were very concerned about mad cow disease. Right after the 2003 announcement, concern rose to 26 percent. Perhaps more important is that through both of these announcements, NPD’s Food Safety Monitor, which tracks food safety concerns and eating intentions in the U.S., found that people’s intentions to eat steak didn’t change.

“During the last five years we’ve been tracking food safety and beef consumption patterns it’s clear that there are more pricing and seasonal influences on how much beef people eat, than food safety concerns,” said Harry Balzer, vice president of The NPD Group.

Beef is one of the top foods Americans eat at home or at restaurants. About nine out of ten (89%) adults eat steak regularly. After the 2nd confirmed case of mad cow disease NPD’s numbers show 64 percent of adults don’t plan on changing their eating habits of steak, while 12 percent plan to eat less steak in the next 30 days and 13 percent plan to eat more. These levels have shifted very little over the past five years.

“If there’s been any trend, it has been toward more people eating steak during the past 5 years,” said Balzer. “This is not to suggest that mad cow disease isn’t a serious issue. If we ever see herds of cows with this disease and start having the bovine bonfires seen in Britain a few years ago, then expect a change in consumer behavior, but not with the limited scale seen at this time, ” said Balzer.

Mad cow disease has never been the number one food safety issue in the U.S. Salmonella and E. Coli have consistently remained the top two concerns for Americans. About 25 percent of adults tell NPD they are extremely/very concerned about E. Coli and salmonella.

NPD’s Food Safety Monitor surveys approximately 500 adults on a bi-monthly basis regarding their food safety concerns, food safety knowledge and future eating intentions for a number of important food categories.

SOURCE: The NPD Group

The NPD Group
Cristina Hilsenrath, 516-625-2443
Cristina_Hilsenrath@NPD.com
Dora Radwick, 516-625-6190
Dora_Radwick@NPD.com

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