(2013-12-31) Cows Are Being Fed Chicken Shit And The Fda Has Done Nothing To Stop It

Cows (meat) are being fed chicken shit and the FDA has done nothing to stop it. ...some of these farming methods are more than just unappetizing: they could be deadly. One practice in particular could allow for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the gruesome and fatal neurodegenerative disorder more commonly known as mad cow disease.

The practice in question is feeding what’s known as “poultry litter” to farmed cattle. Poultry litter is the agriculture industry’s term for the detritus that gets scooped off the floors of chicken cages and broiler houses. It’s mainly a combination of feces, feathers, and uneaten chicken feed, but in addition, a typical sample of poultry litter might also contain antibiotics, heavy metals, disease-causing bacteria, and even bits of dead rodents

this practice is worrisome because both the excrement and uneaten pellets of chicken chow found in poultry litter can contain beef protein, including ground-up meat and bone meal. Which means—if you can follow the gruesome flow chart here—that cows could be, indirectly, eating each other.

As the US Department of Agriculture has made quite clear, cows really, really shouldn’t be doing that

The US Food and Drug Administration wisely banned the practice of feeding the remains of dead cows to living ones back in 1997. But the agency has never prohibited feeding those same remains to chickens and other poultry, nor does it currently prohibit feeding poultry litter to cattle.

Just how much poultry litter actually gets collected, processed, and fed to cows isn’t precisely known

The FDA has estimated that between 1 million and 2 million tons of it are fed to US cattle every year.

In early 2003, shortly after the first US cow infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy was discovered in Washington State, the FDA responded to mounting public anxiety by announcing that it would ban the use of poultry litter as cattle feed. But once Big Ag stepped in, the agency suggested a different course of action.

Why does Big Ag want to keep feeding poultry waste to cows? That’s an easy one: It’s plentiful, expensive to dispose of by other means, and relatively rich in protein

in August 2009, more than a dozen national consumer and animal welfare organizations formally petitioned the FDA to put an end to this practice once and for all.

The agency’s self-imposed deadline for responding to the petitioners was February 2010. Those petitioners are still waiting for an answer.

this might sound familiar: it has taken the FDA more than 30 years to act on the well-known risk of antibiotics use in livestock

*especially now that new, atypical strains of BSE have entered the picture.

Wait—what’s that? Well, here in the United States, all three cows confirmed to have contracted BSE since 2003 have tested positive for an atypical strain of the disease, as opposed to the more widely studied (and better understood) “typical” strain.*

With only three US cases of BSE-infected cattle detected in the last decade, the USDA claims that our current safeguards are sufficient. But as Hansen notes, the agency tests only one-tenth of one percent of the roughly 35 million US cattle slaughtered annually