Horse farmers lose PMU contracts

October 2, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BRANDON, Manitoba–Five hundred representatives of the 409
farms that produce pregnant mare’s urine for use by Wyeth Organics on
October 10, 2003 were notified in person at the Keystone Center in
Brandon that the PMU industry may be just about finished.
A third of them were told during the following
weekend–Thanksgiving weekend in Canada–that their services will no
longer be required. Leaving 30 seasonal jobs unfilled due to
plummeting demand for PMU products, Wyeth plans to buy only half as
much PMU as last year.
PMU sales fell after publication of a series of studies
during the past year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health which
documented that hormonal therapy harms menopausal women’s health more
than it helps. Sales had already contracted somewhat under boycott
pressure from animal rights groups. The boycotts began about five
months after ANIMAL PEOPLE in April 2003 exposed the close
confinement of the PMU-producing mares and the sale to slaughter of
most of their foals. The ANIMAL PEOPLE report was based on
investigative findings by Canadian Farm Animal Trust founder Tom
Hughes.

SARS spread from live markets, but when?

October 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BEIJING–Blood tests indicate that about 1% of the children
in 17 provinces of China were exposed to Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome before the outbreaks of 2002-2003 that hit 24 of the 31
provinces.
Evidently passing from animals sold in filthy live markets to
humans working in food preparation, and then spreading from human to
human, SARS eventually killed 916 people in 32 nations, with about
650 of the deaths occurring in mainland China and Hong Kong.
The blood study was conducted by the Beijing Military Zone
Air Force Logistics Sanitation Unit, using samples taken from
healthy children before SARS appeared.
In a parallel study, the Beijing Capitol Pediatrics Research
Institute found that among 77 children hospitalized for various
reasons in 2001, 42% had antibodies to SARS. Among 92 children
hospitalized during the SARS outbreak, 40% had the antibodies–but
none had SARS symptoms.
Both studies indicate that the coronavirus responsible for
SARS was already widely distributed among the human population–at
least among children–well before it turned deadly. The findings may
explain why relatively few children developed the deadly strain of
SARS, but confounds the mystery of how SARS originated, since
children are also less likely than adults to consume wildlife
products.

No happy endings likely in three-month sheep-at-sea saga

October 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

KUWAIT–The livestock ship Cormo Express was to sail back to
Australia on October 15 with 52,000 sheep who were refused entry into
Saudi Arabia on August 22 after some were found to have scabby mouth
disease.
The return voyage had been delayed for 24 hours by difficulty
in obtaining enough fodder to sustain the sheep en route to a planned
first stop for Australian veterinary inspection at the Cocos Islands,
also known as the Keeling Islands, about 1,500 miles west of
Australia proper.
Australian authorities had not yet decided what to do with
the sheep. More than 100 nations had reportedly refused them, even
as a gift that they were subsidized to take. Options included trying
to slaughter the sheep at sea, disposing of their remains via the
nine-story mincer used to dispose of animals who die individually in
transit; landing the sheep for slaughter on the Australian mainland,
probably at Albany; and repatriating the sheep alive to the Outback,
where they might still be killed and buried.

Top U.S. & British medical journals report–Hormone drugs from pregnant mare’s urine can cost lives & minds

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

LONDON–Sales of hormone supplements made from pregnant
mare’s urine, already down 65% in less than a year, may fall even
faster after the August 9 publication by the British Medical
Association journal The Lancet of new evidence that taking popular
combinations of estrogen and progestin appears to produce a 66%
greater risk of developing breast cancer within five years, and a
22% greater risk of dying from it.
Taking estrogen alone increased the risk of developing breast
cancer by 30%.
The data came from clinical observation of nearly one million
British women between the ages of 50 and 64, who were surveyed at
annual mammogram appointments beginning in 1996.
The $10 million study was directed by Valerie Beral, M.D.,
of Oxford University, with funding from the British government and
Cancer Research U.K., a private charity.
Beral and team estimated that taking estrogen/progestin
combination drugs could be linked to 15,000 more cases of breast
cancer during the past 10 years than would otherwise have occurred.
Taking estrogen alone could be associated with 5,000 additional cases.

WHO gets the point about factory farming

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

GENEVA–The World Health Organization on August 13, 2003
recommended that national governments should phase out the addition
of antibiotics to animal feed when the drugs are given to healthy
animals “for the sole purpose of growth promotion.”
“WHO’s recommendation does not require nations to act,”
explained Washington Post agriculture writer Marc Kaufman. “But this
will add to the movement to stop routine use of antibiotics on farms,
and to the kind of public pressure that recently led the McDonald’s
fast-food chain to tell suppliers to cut back on antibiotic growth
promoters.”
“We have believed for some time that giving animals low
dosages of antibiotics throughout their lives to make them grow
faster is a bad idea,” WHO antibiotic project leader Peter Braam
told Kaufman. “Now we have solid scientific data,” from a newly
completed five-year study of the results of a voluntary phase-out of
antibiotic growth promoters in Denmark, “that producers can
terminate this practice without negative effects for the animals,
and with good effects for humans.”

Farm Animals

AVMA dithers on farm animal welfare

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

DENVER–Distributing photographs of sows in gestation stalls,
Massachusetts delegate Peter Theran, VMD, on July 20, 2003 warned
the American Veterinary Medical Association House of Delegates that
if it continues to endorse the stalls, it might as well cease
pretending to advocate for animal welfare.
Theran, vice president of the Massachusetts SPCA hospital
division, urged support of a resolution submitted by Farm Sanctuary
asking the AVMA House of Delegates to withdraw a pro-gestation stall
position statement approved in 2002 at request of the American
Association of Swine Veterinarians.
Instead, the House of Delegates defeated that resolution,
then passed a resolution calling for more study of the issue.
Also, for the fifth consecutive year, the AVMA House of
Delegates rejected a resolution against starving laying hens to
induce a forced molt.
“Meanwhile, within the past three years, fast food giants
McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s, under pressure from animal
welfare advocates, have all banned forced molting through new
regulations for their egg suppliers. The practice is also banned in
Europe and the United Kingdom, and the Canadian Veterinary Medical
Association has taken a stand against it,” pointed out Association
of Veterinarians for Animal Rights representative Holly Cheever, DVM.

Cockfighters cleaned up on Newcastle clean-up

July 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2003:

SACRAMENTO–Cockfighters who spread Exotic Newcastle Disease
throughout Southern California and into Arizona between November 2002
and May 2003 by illegally transporting gamecocks between fighting
pits appear to have created a financial windfall for themselves,
according to documents obtained by Associated Press under the federal
Freedom of Information Act.
The USDA paid compensation of $22.3 million to poultry owners
whose infected or exposed flocks were killed as part of the
eradication effort. Most of the 3.7 million birds who were destroyed
were egg-laying hens, for whom the USDA paid $2.89 apiece,
according to Associated Press: $10.7 million.

To certify the product or the farm producer–that is the question for HFAC, AWI

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

HERNDON, Virginia–For a few hours on
May 22-23 Humane Farm Animal Care founder Adele
Douglass was on top of the world, among the top
three stories of the morning headlined by the
Associated Press.
“Rectangular labels reading ‘Certi-fied
Humane Raised & Handled’ should start appearing
in about a month on meat, poultry, dairy and
egg products,” AP reporter David Dishneau
explained.
“The program,” Dishneau continued,
“backed by 10 animal welfare groups, certifies
producers and processors who meet certain
standards for animal treatment. Participants are
charged modest royalty fees– 50¢ a pig, for
example–and pay for annual inspections at $400 a
day. ”

Blind “justice” can’t tell chickens from dead wood

May 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:

SAN DIEGO, California–Ward Poultry Farm owners Arie and
Bill Wilgen-burg, of Escondido, California, will not be charged
with cruelty for having employees toss more than 60,000 live hens
into wood chippers, the San Diego County district attorney’s office
announced on April 10, because the Wilgenburgs were told to chip the
chickens alive by a USDA-accredited veterinarian.
The veterinarian was neither working for the USDA nor
representing it, but was advising the Wilgenbergs about killing
their flocks, at two sites, to help halt the spread of the worst
outbreak of Newcastle disease since 12 million chickens and other
domestic birds were killed to control an outbreak in 1971.
San Diego County Animal Services Lieutenant Mary Kay Gagliardo later
told the Wilgenburgs to stop macerating the hens alive.
Live maceration would be prosecutable cruelty almost anywhere
if done to a pet. When done as a routine agricultural practice,
however, it is exempt from prosecution in most states, and is in
fact among the most common means used by egg ranchers to dispose of
unwanted male chicks and spent hens.

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