Here's an actual quote from the story, stated by Stephen Sundlof, the director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine: "...adding chicken litter to cattle feed is one of the primary methods of waste disposal for the chicken growers..." I found that statement astonishing. That the FDA can say, with a straight face, that the only way to get rid of chicken litter is to feed it to cows is, well, bordering on insane. The FDA is also reluctant to ban the practice of feeding cattle blood to cows. "What are we going to do with all this blood?" seems to be the cry from the FDA. The answer? Well, feed it to the cattle, of course!
You know, here's an idea: maybe we should stop thinking of cattle as waste disposal machines. If these are creatures that humans will one day eat, maybe we should be feeding them foods that, if not healthy, are at least sane. You can't take every waste product from farms and chicken factories and just feed it all to cows. It's sick, it's unethical, and it's unhealthy. Perhaps even criminal. And it is precisely these sort of practices that promote the risk of mad cow disease. If consumers really knew what was going on behind closed doors in the cattle industry, they'd boycott red meat for life (like I have). The new slogan for the beef industry should be, "Beef. It's FDA-approved second-hand chicken shit."
A mountain of chicken dung - among other things - is preventing the
Food and Drug Administration from banning blood, chicken waste and
restaurant leftovers from cattle feed, a top administration official
said yesterday.
Tainted feed from a Canadian mill is believed to have infected the
Yakima County Holstein cow that set off the U.S. mad cow crisis in
December.
But just days after the agency recommended bans on the widespread
practice of adding such things as blood, chicken excrement and
restaurant table scraps to feed, it was deluged with troubling feedback,
according to Stephen Sundlof, the director of the FDA's Center for
Veterinary Medicine.