AGRICULTURE
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:
Livestock show judge Lynn
Holley, 42, of Bowling Green, Ohio, was
indicted December 22 along with Dallas
Miller, 42, also of Bowling Green, and
Gregory Garmyn, 41, of Hicksville, for
allegedly trafficking in clenbuterol, a banned
steroid. The drug is illegally used as a growth
stimulant for veal calves and a performance
booster for both human and equine athletes.
Residues in meat can cause illness and even
death. Holley was caught when Ohio
Department of Agriculture investigators dis-
covered at slaughter that vegetable oil had
been injected into the rump of his son Mike’s
steer, named grand champion at last year’s
Wood County Fair. The oil enhanced the
steer’s appearance but violated pure food laws
and the rules of fair exhibition. Looking far-
ther, the ODA found that eight award-win-
ning animals in the junior livestock division
at the Ohio State Fair had been tampered
with––three by injections of vegetable oil,
two with clenbuterol treatments, and three
with both substances.
“We are continuing our investiga-
tion and hope to get indictments on other peo-
ple,” said ODA chief investigator Larry
Pontius. An ongoing federal probe and field
work by Humane Farming Association inves-
tigator Gail Eisenitz have recently disclosed
that the use of clenbuterol by vealers is far
more common than was suspected; see the
December 1994 edition of ANIMAL PEO-
PLE for details.
Kentucky is expected to go from
25th in the U.S. in poultry production to
ninth during the next two years, as former
tobacco farmers turn to chicken production.
Immense water pollution problems resulted
from blood, grease, and manure disposal
when the poultry industry similarly exploded
in Arkansas and Missouri.
The
European
Union
on
February 8 threatened to sue Germany i f
the German federal government doesn’t act to
overrule a boycott of British beef imposed by
the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid
possible human exposure to bovine spongi-
form encephalopathy. The EU ruled earlier
that British cattle born after 1992 are free of
the disease, an apparent mutation of the
sheep disease scrapie, which has devastated
the British cattle industry since 1986.
The Kirkscey Locker Plant, of
Rosebud, Texas, a former cattle slaughter-
house built in 1945, has been sold to Austin-
area emu ranchers Rocky DeMarco and Jack
Ledbetter, and converted to kill emus. While
at least two ostrich-slaughtering plants are
already in operation, the former Kirkscey
plant, now called the Emu Prime Processing
Plant, is the first to specialize in the smaller
ratites. With the speculative market for both
ostriches and emus crashing, the birds are
becoming available for slaughter in signifi-
cant numbers––but the market for their
remains is still largely hypothetical.
