Suzanimal
01-22-2015, 03:17 AM
Horrific, disgusting, evil people.:mad::(
U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit
At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.
There are, however, some complications.
Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.
Then there are the lambs. In an effort to develop “easy care” sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.
Last Mother’s Day, at the height of the birthing season, two veterinarians struggled to sort through the weekend’s toll: 25 rag-doll bodies. Five, abandoned by overtaxed mothers, had empty stomachs. Six had signs of pneumonia. Five had been savaged by coyotes.
“It’s horrible,” one veterinarian said, tossing the remains into a barrel to be dumped in a vast excavation called the dead pit.
These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce.
Since Congress founded it 50 years ago to consolidate the United States Department of Agriculture’s research on farm animals, the center has worked to make lamb chops bigger, pork loins less fatty, steaks easier to chew. It has fought the spread of disease, fostered food safety and helped American ranchers compete in a global marketplace.
But an investigation by The New York Times shows that these endeavors have come at a steep cost to the center’s animals, which have been subjected to illness, pain and premature death, over many years. The research to increase pig litters began in 1986; the twin calves have been dying at high rates since 1984, and the easy care lambs for 10 years.
As the decades have passed, the center has bucked another powerful trend: a gathering public concern for the well-being of animals that has penetrated even the meat industry, which is starting to embrace the demand for humanely raised products.
It is widely accepted that experimentation on animals, and its benefits for people, will entail some distress and death. The Animal Welfare Act — a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened — aimed to minimize that suffering, yet left a gaping exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture.
To close that loophole, more than two dozen companies and universities that experiment on farm animals have sought out independent overseers and joined organizations that scrutinize their research and staff — a step the center has resisted as far back as 1985, when a scientist wrote the director with a warning: “Membership may bring more visibility” to its activities, “which we may not want.”
The center’s parent agency, the Agriculture Department, strictly polices the treatment of animals at slaughterhouses and private laboratories. But it does not closely monitor the center’s use of animals, or even enforce its own rules requiring careful scrutiny of experiments.
As a result, the center — built on the site of a World War II-era ammunition depot a two-hour drive southwest of Omaha, and locked behind a security fence — has become a destination for the kind of high-risk, potentially controversial research that other institutions will not do or are no longer allowed to do.
“They pay tons of attention to increasing animal production, and just a pebble-sized concern to animal welfare,” said James Keen, a scientist and veterinarian who worked at the center for 24 years. “And it probably looks fine to them because they’re not thinking about it, and they’re not being held accountable. But most Americans and even livestock producers would be hard pressed to support some of the things that the center has done.”
Dr. Keen approached The Times a year ago with his concerns about animal mistreatment. The newspaper interviewed two dozen current and former center employees, and reviewed thousands of pages of internal records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
That reporting shows that the center’s drive to make livestock bigger, leaner, more prolific and more profitable can be punishing, creating harmful complications that require more intensive experiments to solve. The leaner pigs that the center helped develop, for example, are so low in fat that one in five females cannot reproduce; center scientists have been operating on pigs’ ovaries and brains in an attempt to make the sows more fertile.
Even routine care has fallen short. Of the 580,000 animals the center has housed since 1985, when its most ambitious projects got underway, at least 6,500 have starved. A single, treatable malady — mastitis, a painful infection of the udder — has killed more than 625.
The experiments have not always helped the meat business. Industrywide, about 10 million piglets are crushed by their mothers each year, according to pig-production experts, and studies have pointed to bigger litters as a major contributor. Not only do they generate more and weaker piglets, but the mothers have grown larger because they are kept alive longer to reproduce.
Certainly, the production of meat is a rough enterprise. Yet even against that reality — raising animals to be killed, for profit — the center stands out. Some of its trials have continued long after meat producers balked at the harm they caused animals.
The center’s director, E. John Pollak, declined to be interviewed, but in written responses, Agriculture Department officials said the center abides by federal rules on animal welfare. Many current and former employees vigorously defended the center’s work, saying it has helped improve the lives of animals, and people, around the world.
“We’re just as concerned about the humane treatment of animals as anyone else,” said Sherrill E. Echternkamp, a scientist who retired from the center in 2013. Still, he added: “It’s not a perfect world. We are trying to feed a population that is expanding very rapidly, to nine billion by 2050, and if we are going to feed that population, there are some trade-offs.”
The center, in fact, is used as a classroom for teaching animal care. For about 25 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has sent veterinary students into the center from an adjacent building for on-the-job training. Until recently, the university owned all of the animals. But decisions about their use and treatment are made by the center.
Center officials said that while even one death from starvation, exposure or disease “is too much,” the fatalities have been relatively few, given the huge herd. Others, however, find the number of casualties troubling.
“It should have been the best research center in the world, and it’s not,” said Gary P. Rupp, a longtime director of the veterinarian teaching program who retired in 2010 to raise his own cattle. “The death loss was higher than it should have been.”
....
‘Rough Handling’
Months into his new job at the center in 1989, Dr. Keen said, he got a call from a fellow worker asking him to help with a “downed cow.”
“There was a young cow, a teenager, with as many as six bulls,” he recalled. “The bulls were being studied for their sexual libido, and normally you would do that by putting a single bull in with a cow for 15 minutes. But these bulls had been in there for hours mounting her.”
The cow’s head was locked in a cagelike device to keep her immobile, he said. “Her back legs were broken. Her body was just torn up.”
Dr. Keen wanted to euthanize the animal, but the scientist in charge could not be tracked down for permission. A few hours later, the cow died.
The episode was unusual in its violence, and current center officials said they were not aware of it. Yet Dr. Keen and co-workers recounted other instances they said attested to the same problem: a recurring failure to fully consider the pain that animals suffer during experiments, or in everyday life at the center. Some employees blamed inadequate training or budgets; others pointed to friction between scientists bent on their research and veterinarians, who take an oath to protect animals.
The center has about 30,000 animals, tended by about 44 scientists, 73 technicians and other support workers. The scientists, who do not have medical degrees, and their assistants euthanize and operate on livestock, sometimes doing two or more major surgical operations on the same animal.
A year before Dr. Keen encountered the dying cow, Robert A. Downey, executive director of the Capital Humane Society, in Lincoln, Neb., alerted by the staff, complained to the center director. “Experimental surgery is being performed in some (not all) cases by untrained, unskilled and unsupervised staff,” Mr. Downey wrote. “This has resulted in the suffering of animals and in some cases the subsequent death of animals.”
During a visit, he said, he saw animals headed to surgery that fell from carts or were pushed to the floor by their handlers, while two other workers in the operating room ate doughnuts. The director responded that the center was reviewing its surgical procedures and recommending improvements in animal care.
John Klindt, a scientist who retired in 2008, defended his fellow researchers in an interview, saying they were mindful of animal health and comfort. “A vet has no business coming in and telling you how to do it,” he said. “Surgery is an art you get through practice.”
The center does not have the veterinarians to be present during experiments, even if it wanted them to. Twenty years ago, it employed six scientists with veterinary degrees, including Dr. Keen. Today it has none. One staff veterinarian, not a scientist and junior in status, advocates for animals, helped by a seasoned technician and veterinary teachers and students from the university.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1
U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit
At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.
There are, however, some complications.
Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.
Then there are the lambs. In an effort to develop “easy care” sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.
Last Mother’s Day, at the height of the birthing season, two veterinarians struggled to sort through the weekend’s toll: 25 rag-doll bodies. Five, abandoned by overtaxed mothers, had empty stomachs. Six had signs of pneumonia. Five had been savaged by coyotes.
“It’s horrible,” one veterinarian said, tossing the remains into a barrel to be dumped in a vast excavation called the dead pit.
These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce.
Since Congress founded it 50 years ago to consolidate the United States Department of Agriculture’s research on farm animals, the center has worked to make lamb chops bigger, pork loins less fatty, steaks easier to chew. It has fought the spread of disease, fostered food safety and helped American ranchers compete in a global marketplace.
But an investigation by The New York Times shows that these endeavors have come at a steep cost to the center’s animals, which have been subjected to illness, pain and premature death, over many years. The research to increase pig litters began in 1986; the twin calves have been dying at high rates since 1984, and the easy care lambs for 10 years.
As the decades have passed, the center has bucked another powerful trend: a gathering public concern for the well-being of animals that has penetrated even the meat industry, which is starting to embrace the demand for humanely raised products.
It is widely accepted that experimentation on animals, and its benefits for people, will entail some distress and death. The Animal Welfare Act — a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened — aimed to minimize that suffering, yet left a gaping exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture.
To close that loophole, more than two dozen companies and universities that experiment on farm animals have sought out independent overseers and joined organizations that scrutinize their research and staff — a step the center has resisted as far back as 1985, when a scientist wrote the director with a warning: “Membership may bring more visibility” to its activities, “which we may not want.”
The center’s parent agency, the Agriculture Department, strictly polices the treatment of animals at slaughterhouses and private laboratories. But it does not closely monitor the center’s use of animals, or even enforce its own rules requiring careful scrutiny of experiments.
As a result, the center — built on the site of a World War II-era ammunition depot a two-hour drive southwest of Omaha, and locked behind a security fence — has become a destination for the kind of high-risk, potentially controversial research that other institutions will not do or are no longer allowed to do.
“They pay tons of attention to increasing animal production, and just a pebble-sized concern to animal welfare,” said James Keen, a scientist and veterinarian who worked at the center for 24 years. “And it probably looks fine to them because they’re not thinking about it, and they’re not being held accountable. But most Americans and even livestock producers would be hard pressed to support some of the things that the center has done.”
Dr. Keen approached The Times a year ago with his concerns about animal mistreatment. The newspaper interviewed two dozen current and former center employees, and reviewed thousands of pages of internal records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
That reporting shows that the center’s drive to make livestock bigger, leaner, more prolific and more profitable can be punishing, creating harmful complications that require more intensive experiments to solve. The leaner pigs that the center helped develop, for example, are so low in fat that one in five females cannot reproduce; center scientists have been operating on pigs’ ovaries and brains in an attempt to make the sows more fertile.
Even routine care has fallen short. Of the 580,000 animals the center has housed since 1985, when its most ambitious projects got underway, at least 6,500 have starved. A single, treatable malady — mastitis, a painful infection of the udder — has killed more than 625.
The experiments have not always helped the meat business. Industrywide, about 10 million piglets are crushed by their mothers each year, according to pig-production experts, and studies have pointed to bigger litters as a major contributor. Not only do they generate more and weaker piglets, but the mothers have grown larger because they are kept alive longer to reproduce.
Certainly, the production of meat is a rough enterprise. Yet even against that reality — raising animals to be killed, for profit — the center stands out. Some of its trials have continued long after meat producers balked at the harm they caused animals.
The center’s director, E. John Pollak, declined to be interviewed, but in written responses, Agriculture Department officials said the center abides by federal rules on animal welfare. Many current and former employees vigorously defended the center’s work, saying it has helped improve the lives of animals, and people, around the world.
“We’re just as concerned about the humane treatment of animals as anyone else,” said Sherrill E. Echternkamp, a scientist who retired from the center in 2013. Still, he added: “It’s not a perfect world. We are trying to feed a population that is expanding very rapidly, to nine billion by 2050, and if we are going to feed that population, there are some trade-offs.”
The center, in fact, is used as a classroom for teaching animal care. For about 25 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has sent veterinary students into the center from an adjacent building for on-the-job training. Until recently, the university owned all of the animals. But decisions about their use and treatment are made by the center.
Center officials said that while even one death from starvation, exposure or disease “is too much,” the fatalities have been relatively few, given the huge herd. Others, however, find the number of casualties troubling.
“It should have been the best research center in the world, and it’s not,” said Gary P. Rupp, a longtime director of the veterinarian teaching program who retired in 2010 to raise his own cattle. “The death loss was higher than it should have been.”
....
‘Rough Handling’
Months into his new job at the center in 1989, Dr. Keen said, he got a call from a fellow worker asking him to help with a “downed cow.”
“There was a young cow, a teenager, with as many as six bulls,” he recalled. “The bulls were being studied for their sexual libido, and normally you would do that by putting a single bull in with a cow for 15 minutes. But these bulls had been in there for hours mounting her.”
The cow’s head was locked in a cagelike device to keep her immobile, he said. “Her back legs were broken. Her body was just torn up.”
Dr. Keen wanted to euthanize the animal, but the scientist in charge could not be tracked down for permission. A few hours later, the cow died.
The episode was unusual in its violence, and current center officials said they were not aware of it. Yet Dr. Keen and co-workers recounted other instances they said attested to the same problem: a recurring failure to fully consider the pain that animals suffer during experiments, or in everyday life at the center. Some employees blamed inadequate training or budgets; others pointed to friction between scientists bent on their research and veterinarians, who take an oath to protect animals.
The center has about 30,000 animals, tended by about 44 scientists, 73 technicians and other support workers. The scientists, who do not have medical degrees, and their assistants euthanize and operate on livestock, sometimes doing two or more major surgical operations on the same animal.
A year before Dr. Keen encountered the dying cow, Robert A. Downey, executive director of the Capital Humane Society, in Lincoln, Neb., alerted by the staff, complained to the center director. “Experimental surgery is being performed in some (not all) cases by untrained, unskilled and unsupervised staff,” Mr. Downey wrote. “This has resulted in the suffering of animals and in some cases the subsequent death of animals.”
During a visit, he said, he saw animals headed to surgery that fell from carts or were pushed to the floor by their handlers, while two other workers in the operating room ate doughnuts. The director responded that the center was reviewing its surgical procedures and recommending improvements in animal care.
John Klindt, a scientist who retired in 2008, defended his fellow researchers in an interview, saying they were mindful of animal health and comfort. “A vet has no business coming in and telling you how to do it,” he said. “Surgery is an art you get through practice.”
The center does not have the veterinarians to be present during experiments, even if it wanted them to. Twenty years ago, it employed six scientists with veterinary degrees, including Dr. Keen. Today it has none. One staff veterinarian, not a scientist and junior in status, advocates for animals, helped by a seasoned technician and veterinary teachers and students from the university.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1