NationStates Jolt Archive


Discussion - Meat Safety Act

Kelssek
09-08-2004, 05:16
Alright, this is just to generate some ideas and discussion for a proposal I'll be working on.

Working title is the Meat Safety Act. The main part of it will be a ban on the feeding of dead animals and waste to livestock, and a ban on feedlotting.

BSE (bovine spongiform encephilitis, mad cow disease) and its human variant, CJD (Cruntkeld-Jacob Disease. I probably spelt it wrong, sorry) spread when cows or humans eat infected tissue. Evidence shows that the widespread practice of feeding dead sheep and cows to healthy cattle caused them to develop BSE, putting the humans who would eat them later on at serious risk of getting CJD.

Feedlots are where livestock, especially cattle, are kept in high-density pens for a few days before slaughter, usually in abysmally unsanitary conditions - cows standing in their own crap and crap of the other cows, chickens crammed together without any space to move, contaminating their own food supply with their excrement. This is done to fatten up the livestock through intensive feeding before they are slaughtered.

As you can imagine, the amount of excrement produced, especially in those high-density conditions, is disgustingly awesome. And since there's a long list of diseases that can spread through fecal contamination, one infected animal in the pen can infect the whole herd. When this is eaten by humans, you get E-coli poisoning.

Most foodborne disease is limited to a few hours of agony in the loo, but some, like certain strains of E-coli and salmonella, can kill you. In the US (I'm using US stats because they're the easiest to get from places which don't have laws like I'm proposing), 78.6% of ground beef is contaminated with fecal bacteria.

Grass and grain are relatively expensive. Restaurant steaks and most meat you buy at a supermarket comes from grass or grain fed cows. But when you want to produce cheap meat, such as is used in manufactured meat products and fast food outlets, you need cheap food. And this usually means dead dogs and cats bought from animal shelters, dead chickens, and even manure - it's estimated that cows in the USA ate 1.5 million kg (about 4.5 million pounds) of chicken crap last year.

So start talking, and I will combine this into a first draft of the proposal in the next few days.