Libertarian Girl

An animal rights activist told me last July that a person from the animal rights movement had recently been hired by the USDA, and hopefully that would make the USDA’s policies more animal-friendly.

Chances– not likely. As Mother Jones writes, the USDA is “pretty much a trade group for agribusiness.”

In fact, the USDA is the largest purchaser of meat in the United States, virtually keeping these huge factory farms in business and consistently favoring huge companies like ConAgra over the little guy. It supposedly keeps Americans’ meat supply safe, yet it will not allow any company or farm to perform extra testing or certification to say, for instance, that a company’s cattle are free from mad cow disease. The USDA, by its actions, keeps these companies in business. However, by its existence, it keeps much of the meat industry rolling along, because people have no reason to look into what they’re eating themselves due to a false sense of security. The government says it’s OK, so this meat must be OK!

Incredibly, when the Humane Society released its investigative video of the Chino, CA Hallmark Meat Packing slaughtering plant, then-USDA Secretary Ed Schafer blamed the Humane Society rather than the slaughterhouse or USDA inspectors, supposedly for not telling the USDA sooner about the video (local California officials had requested more time from the Humane Society for their investigation). One of the slaughterhouse workers shown in the video, Daniel Ugarte Navarro, said that the abuse of downer cows had been going on for his entire 23-year slaughterhouse career and he never thought anything of it. That means the USDA, which supposedly inspected the plant multiple times a day, missed that abuse for 23 years. How safe do you feel with your meat supply with this kind of oversight?

Now, at least a few nationally circulated articles are revealing what anyone looking into it knew all along: the USDA not only keeps huge companies in business, it allows unsafe meat into the market and covers up slaughterhouse violations to make nice with these companies, creating “public health risks” in the process according to a USDA inspection veterinarian, Dean Wyatt, who just testified before Congress.

What abuses did the USDA allow to happen by ignoring their inspector, Wyatt?

“In one scene, a calf kicks after having one of its feet cut off and in another a calf vocalizes while being skinned, its head almost severed, Humane Society officials alleged.”

The abuses Wyatt was specifically referring to as being covered up occurred with baby calves that were destined for “organic veal” from the supposedly all-natural all-organic Bushway Packing plant in Vermont, uncovered by another Humane Society undercover investigation. Unsurprisingly, animal abuses of this type have never been uncovered by the USDA itself.

USDA veterinarian and inspector Dean Wyatt “describes being threatened with transfer or demotion after citing a plant for butchering conscious pigs, despite rules that they first be stunned and unconscious.”

(The USDA is the country’s largest buyer of meat for the national school lunch program.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Animals, Non-free market. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.