It’s time to start putting people in prison for this stuff, and shut down some companies, then things might change. But nothing will change with the politicians we have today, they are all serving corporate interests first.

In 2005 I did some research on the subject for an article and found that Lester Friedlander, a former USDA veterinarian and now whistleblower, alleged there is a cover-up by the US Government. He made some very scary allegations at the time, such as downer cows being used to supply meat to the federal school lunch program and that cows that had tested positive for mad cow disease at private laboratories were ruled negative by the USDA. See this 2002 survelience video made by KIRO-TV [Seattle].

It doesn’t surprise me that the government would hide this as long as possible. The beef industry has a very powerful lobby. Remember what happened to Oprah when she said naughty things about beef?

Obviously those cows were sick, and if you’re running a legitimate business, you don’t use them for food until you find out what’s wrong. You isolate them and have a vet check them.

Corporations don’t care, because the worst that can happen is a fine.

Throw a few CEOs and their boards in prison, and attitudes will change.

Exactly. My farmer granddad would almost certainly have scoffed at the notion that cloning was in any way necessary or desirable… and he kept up with (and used) the latest scientific advances in agriculture, when he thought they would help him produce a better crop or better livestock. In my personal experience, working farmers are seldom fools about such things.

You might think that a sprout-eater like me would shrug his shoulders about the matter. Not so. Even aside from my many friends and colleagues who are carnivores, those of us who consume milk products have a direct interest in the health of the herd. And while I do not personally consider humanely killing an animal for food to be abuse (humans are natural omnivores, and become vegetarians only by conscious choice), what I saw on those videos of Westland can bear no reasonable interpretation other than cruelty to those critters.

The way to avoid future occurrences of such incidents is simple: the USDA must be empowered and adequately funded to perform full and frequent inspections of virtually the entire meat supply process. In one of life’s ironies, this solution should also reduce cruelty to the animals themselves.

Consumers may not be able to avoid cloned food

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/02/18/MN2EUSFR0.DTL

If they have video, it means that someone has been trying to get something done for a while and decided to conduct the video taping to get some action.

A fine is the only thing that will happen to this company, whereas an individual would end up in jail.