Mad Cow Disease in America

The biggest animal-related story of the New Year is the discovery of a single Mad Cow-infected calf in late December and steps the U.S. government is taking to reduce both the public health and economic threat that this poses.

Although Mad Cow Disease doesn’t appear to be the sort of plague that animal rights activists once claimed it would be (I once attended a talk by Howard Lyman where he claimed the disease would rival AIDS) it is a serious public health threat and the precautions taken so far are more than warranted.

Of course some folks both inside and outside of the animal rights movement do not appear to have any problem substituting their ignorance where the facts do not quite fit the case.

Time Magazine writer Margaret Carlson decided to exaggerate to the number of cases of vCJD (the human form of Mad Cow Disease) in Great Britain. During an appearance on CNN ‘s Capitol Gang, Carlson said (emphasis added),

But the United States has a lot of information that Britain didn’t have when they had their outbreak of mad cow disease and the government kept saying, Don’t worry about it, and thousands of people contracted the disease. And while the system of branding and numbers and all that isn’t what it should be, it’s a lot better than it used to be, better than it is in Britain. And the testing is so much better. So it might be contained, and then there’ll be very little political fallout.

In fact, from 1996 through 2001, there were only 111 “probable cases” of vCJD. The total number of cases is likely to be less than 500 — and this in the country where people probably consumed more Mad Cow-tainted beef than any other.

The reality is that although fears of a widespread human outbreak might have been warranted in the mid-1990s, by the end of the decade it was clear that transmission of the disease between cows and human beings through the consumption of tainted meat was actually quite difficult.

But don’t tell that to former USDA veterinarian Lester Friedlander who had one of the more idiotic statements about Mad Cow Disease. Friedlander has rightly campaigned for years for a ban on downer animals — a ban which the Bush administration put in place after the announcement of the discovery of the Mad Cow-infected calf. Friedlander was widely quoted in news stories about the Mad Cow calf, but showed his ignorance in responding to USDA Secretary Ann Veneman’s statement that, “I plan to serve beef for my Christmas dinner and we remain confident in the
safety of our food supply.” According to a Go Vegan Texas!, Freidlander’s response was,

She might as well kiss her ass goodbye, then.

What an ignorant statement. That would be like claiming that people should stop eating vegetables due to Hepatitis A outbreaks (which are a much bigger threat to human health than Mad Cow disease).

Animal rights groups are already trying to parlay the discovery of the Mad Cow-infected calf to push their campaigns for Americans to go vegetarian. Those are about as likely to succeed as past such campaigns have. In Great Britain there was an initial upsurge in vegetarianism which was later reversed when it became clear that the risk to human health was relatively small, especially after government-mandated changes in animal agriculture. In the United States, the odds of anyone actually contracting vCJD are so low that it’s doubtful there will even be any temporary upsurge in vegetarianism.

Source:

Special Two-Hour Report on Mad Cow Disease. Press Release, Go Vegan Texas!, December 29, 2003.

MoveOn.Org’s Bush=Hitler Ad

There’s been a lot of hype lately about the role of the Internet in this and future elections. MoveOn.Org shows the major downside of the Internet — namely that independent political sites gain audience by being on the extremes which is going to be embarassing to candidates who associate with them.

The Republican National Committee, for example, is smartly doing all it can to make a big deal out of the Bush=Hitler ad that was posted to the MoveOn.Org web site and then later pulled. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a case of just some random idiot posting the ad, but rather an editorial decision by someone with MoveOn.Org to post the ad and then later remove it. This is part of MoveOn.Org’s ad contest which is backed up by serious money (including matching funds from George Soros).

The RNC wants all of Democratic candidates for president to renounce the ad. Certainly some Democratic presidential candidates have been more closely associated with MoveOn.Org than others. For example, Howard Dean’s organization actively campaigned to win MoveOn.Org’s endorsement, and called the publicity stunt an example of the best sort of participatory democracy,

We want to thank everyone who helped make this victory possible. To the volunteers and Dean supporters across the country, thanks for all of your work. To the 139,360 who supported me, thanks for casting the first votes to take our country back. You have demonstrated that you really do have the power.

This primary was participatory democracy at its finest. This week’s vote was not about money-other campaigns devoted far more resources to this primary than ours did-and it was not about special interest groups buying access to government. This primary, the first online primary of the modern age, was about individual Americans influencing the process directly. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans researched this race, voted, and told their friends to vote.

You have to wonder if Dean’s going to appreciate being asked about every inane thing that MoveOn.Org comes up with. But his endorsement of MoveOn.Org makes that all-but-inevitable.

Ultimately, Democrats and their supporters seem to have learned nothing at all from the Republican mistakes of the Clinton years. Republicans then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by turning legitimate criticism of the Clinton administration into an irrational, all-consuming hatred of the President which made them look like extremists. The best commentary I’ve heard about Dean yet is that he is not a repeat of McGovern, but rather the second coming of Newt Gingrich.

Margaret Carlson’s Ignorant Statement on Mad Cow Disease

Happened to be flipping through channels this Saturday to see Margaret Carlson display her complete ignorance about Mad Cow disease on CNN’s The Capitol Gang talking about Mad Cow Disease. From the transcript (emphasis added),

But the United States has a lot of information that Britain didn’t have when they had their outbreak of mad cow disease and the government kept saying, Don’t worry about it, and thousands of people contracted the disease. And while the system of branding and numbers and all that isn’t what it should be, it’s a lot better than it used to be, better than it is in Britain. And the testing is so much better. So it might be contained, and then there’ll be very little political fallout.

In fact, from 1996 through 2001, there were only 111 “probable cases” of vCJD — the human form of Mad Cow disease — in Great Britain. The total number of people who will eventually die from vCJD in the United Kingdom is likely to be somewhere between 200-400.

The “thousands of people contracted the disease” claim is sheer nonsense — i.e. vintage Margaret Carlson.

Update: One minor thing I want to point out — it is conceivable that thousands of people were exposed to Mad Cow diesase but will never contract a life-threatening case of the disease. Why? Because a leading hypothesis is that in most people the incubation period for the disease is several times longer than human life span. So there are people alive today who might die from vCJD if they live to be 250 but otherwise will never even know they have been exposed to the disease. But that is quite a bit different from Carlson’s claim that thousands of Britons “contracted” the disease.

Source:

CJD deaths ‘may have peaked’. The BBC, November 23, 2001.

Some 2003 Web Site Statistics

Even though my professional duties put a bit of a crimp on my blogging in 2003 (working 70 hour weeks for months at a time will do that to you), it was still a pretty good year:

Total Page Views: 5,831,925

Total New Posts: 23,361

I’ve also been reading quite a bit about people starting to see the value in categorizing their posts. My theory is if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it to excess:

Total New Categories in 2003: 518

Total # of Categories: 1,643

Each of those categories, of course, has an automatically generated RSS feed. Not too shabby.

North Dakota Denies PETA Claim about Anti-PETA Protest

At the end of July 2003, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals took its Holocaust On Your Plate campaign to grounds of the state capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota. Unlike other PETA appearances, however, there was an organized anti-PETA demonstration there to greet the PETA display.

A group of ranchers and farmers showed up to taunt the PETA activists. One individual, for example, offered a hamburger to PETA Holocaust On Your Plate point-man Matthew Prescott.

The protest by the farmers and ranchers was organized by farmer Marty Beard, 34, who told the Associated Press that he thought PETA’s comparison of farming to the Holocaust was ridiculous.

Beyond the taunting, however, Prescott claimed that the farmers damaged the Holocaust On Your Plate display. Prescott told the Associated Press that the display had been sliced several times with a knife, doing about $1,000 in damages to the display.

This led PETA lawyer Matthew Penzer to fire off a letter in August to Col. James Hughes, superintendent of the North Dakota Highway Patrol, demanding an investigation of the incident.

IÂ’m writing to address a recent incident that is disturbing to PETA, not only because of the incident itself, but because of the casual and irresponsible way it was apparently handled by state police officers at the scene. On July 31, a PETA representative was at the North Dakota Capitol Grounds to conduct a demonstration, for which he had a lawful permit. It is reported that the highway patrol knew of the heightened need for peace-keeping efforts at the event, because the facilities director of the Capitol Grounds notified your department approximately 60 days in advance in order to prevent potential trouble while the demo was being staged. The event, which addressed the abuses of animals on factory farms, did, in fact, draw the ire of a large beef industry-supporting “mob.” Yet, despite the fact that the gathering crowd did not have a permit to stage a counter-demonstration (or to light the open-flame grills that they had brought with them), and despite the fact that the facilities director was reportedly concerned that he had never seen a situation as “lively” as this at the Grounds, I am informed that the officers on hand neither stopped the crowdÂ’s actions nor took appropriate action to calm the increasingly agitated atmosphere. Even when the unruly men encircled our representative and hurled epithets at him — one angry member of the mob even threatened his life — the officers did not disperse or control them.

Fortunately, our representative escaped physical harm, however, PETAÂ’s property did not. The display that was used as part of the demonstration was slashed — presumably with a knife — causing more than $500 damage. Yet, despite this property damage, despite the threats of physical harm to our representative, despite the facilities rules and state laws that were violated by the hostile protestors, my understanding is that not a single arrest was made, nor even a single statement taken or police report filed. It is unclear whether the Capitol Grounds surveillance camera tapes were even reviewed to appropriately investigate the criminal conduct that occurred.

We are disheartened and concerned that the police officers, who had a responsibility to protect not only the public, but the basic freedoms this country is founded upon, apparently willfully disregarded the responsibilities of their positions and, in doing so, jeopardized the safety of our representative and our property. We hope and expect that you find such failure to act as inexcusable and intolerable as we do and that you will immediately launch an investigation into the criminal conduct that occurred at the demonstration and the conduct of the officers involved.

We believe that, had the officers at the scene properly executed their duties, the danger to PETAÂ’s representative and the damage to our property would have been avoided. We now expect an appropriate investigation and resolution of this matter by your office. Please contact me upon receipt of this letter so that we can address this matter quickly and amicably and without the need for further action. Thank you.

That letter was apparently referred on to North Dakota’s risk management agency for further investigation. Johanna Zschomler, director of North Dakota’s risk management agency, responded in a letter to Penzer that there was no evidence that police had acted as PETA described.

As far as the claims that the farmers and ranchers damaged the Holocaust display, the Associated Press reported that,

Zschomler said in her letter that surveillance videotape did not back up those claims. She said PETA could file a claim, but that “our findings would probably be a denial.”

Imagine that. Hard to believe PETA might distort and exaggerate events, isn’t it?

Sources:

State denies PETA claims of damage during protest. Associated Press, September 11, 2003.

Animal rights group gets hostile reception. Associated Press, July 31, 2003.

Fund for Animals Says National Hunting and Fishing Day is "Beginning of the End"

In September, The Fund for Animals issued a press release claiming that this year’s National Hunting and Fishing Day was "the beginning of the end" for hunting and fishing in the United States. The Fund cited a number of statistics, but left out a rather crucial one.

The Fund noted that the number of people who hunt and the number of animals killed by hunters continues to decline,

. . . According to the U[nited] S[tates] F[ish and] W[ildlife] S[ervice], in 1985 there were 16.7 million hunters in the U.S, while in 2001 there were only 13 million, a decline of 22% over fifteen years. Since 1989, the number of animals killed every year by hunters has fallen by 42 percent. This led Heidi Prescott, national director of The Fund for Animals, to comment that, "These are long-term trends, not just a blip in the numbers, and we’re delighted to see that more and more people are trading their guns for cameras."

The USFWS results showed the largest declines in "small game" (22%) and "other animal" hunting (31%). According to Norm Phelps, a program coordinator at The Fund and author of the report Body Count: The Death Toll in America’s War on Wildlife, "The decline is taking place primarily among hunters of small game. Since they kill many more animals than big game hunters, we can expect the total number of hunting victims to decline as well."

In the press release, The Fund president Michael Markarian engages in a little wishful thinking that the Fish and Wildlife Service will stop catering to hunters and fisherman,

Hunters now make up only 4.6% of the population, compared to the 31% who are wildlife watchers. It’s time for the Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife watchers. It’s time for the Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife agencies to start paying attention to their own numbers and stop catering to a tiny special interest group. Wildlife belongs to everyone, not just the few people who hunt.

But while the numbers of hunters continues to decline — in large part due to the lack of interest in urban dwellers like myself whose idea of hunting is trying to make it safely out of the local supermarket on a Saturday afternoon — there does not appear to be any concomitant desire among non-hunters to restrict hunting.

A May 2003 Gallup poll, for example, found 76 percent of respondents opposed to a ban on hunting. Even among those who told Gallup that they supported animals having the "same rights" as human beings, fully 55 percent opposed a total ban on hunting.

Sources:

The Fund for Animals Celebrates National Hunting and Fishing Day as the Beginning of the End. Press Release, Fund for Animals, September 25, 2003.

Public Lukewarm on Animal Rights. David W. Moore, Gallup Poll Organization, May 21, 2003.