Where's the Beef?

by Dayla Hepting

Just a few comments on the Mad Cow issue. President Bush made it his job over the New Year Holiday to announce proudly that he was eating beef for dinner. No doubt a crown rib roast, not a chicken fried steak. Probably came from organically fed steers, prime quality expensive beef. Most likely raised on his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

They do not grind up the waste off the floor after slaughter, the spinal cord, the intestines, the asshole, the penis, the brain matter and all the rest and disguise it in molasses and alfalfa to fool the cow into eating it. Bush can afford to act cocky knowing that his cows were not fed their mother's dead organs. No pesticides, no constant course of antibiotics, no hormones. Just good clean meat raised in a healthy clean environment. You won't find that in the meat counter of your Super Wal-Mart.

I am a disfunctional vegetarian. I can't justify eating meat. There is no excuse for it. I don't even like the smell of it cooking. But there are days when I want a big juicy charbroiled cheeseburger with onion rings and a coke. I don't feel guilty. I don't think about it at all. I just do it. After all I have to eat someday, don't I? I can't live on granola bars forever. Sometimes I just have to eat real food.

Right now the beef people are freaking out. The Atkins diet had them on a roll. No more salad! No more grapefruit! Atkins says if you eat big piles of sausage and pounds of meat you will be thin. Bread is the bad guy. Carbs, you know. No bread. No cake, no muffins, no oatmeal, no pie. Just big chunks of red meat. And it works. So the beef kings were finally back where they belonged. Raking in the big bucks in spite of Oprah.

The beef boys are in denial. One cow! One friggin' cow! Forget about it people! Stand up and be a man like your president. You have a right to eat your meat. Not only that, an actual obligation. Americans are cowboys. Remember? Cow is the operative word. "Cow-boys. We eat cows and nobody is going to stop us!"

We all know it is not just one cow. I want to know what happened to the old industry standards? How does a four to eight (there is a dispute about her age) year old milk cow end up as prime beef in a grocery store? At one time milk cows were not considered for the commercial meat market. How is it that a very sick milk cow was put into the food chain? At one time sick cows were not considered as food for human consumption. Now they say they are making a new rule — if a cow can't walk it can't be sold for food. And who will decide what cow can't walk?

Then we come to the heart of the issue. The beef boys don't want to talk about it. The average consumer knows nothing about cows so it doesn't occur to them. Cows do not eat meat. They are not omnivores like humans or bears or wolves. They eat plants. Mostly grass and grains. Because of the way their digestive system is set up, they are much more tolerant of contamination than a horse, for example. They have multiple stomachs to process more efficiently than most grass-eating animals.

Being in the horse business I knew that cow people routinely feed cows poor quality hay. Cows can handle moldy hay. A horse cannot. So cow people can get by on the cheap, feeding hay that cannot be sold for horses. I often thought that moldy hay might be tolerable to them but I could not see how it could be good for them. Certainly if you gave them a choice they would choose good clean alfalfa over dusty moldy hay. Mold is toxic. Cow people always brag that a cow can eat anything. Apparently they took that to the end point and decided they could save some money and feed cows dead cows. You just had to trick the cow into thinking it was just ground up alfalfa and pour a whole lot of sugar into it. The cow never knew the difference.

I can guarantee you that if you put a big pile of cow brains in front of that cow and offered them no grain or hay they would die of starvation. They would never eat it no matter how hungry they got. They would not recognize it as food.

Mad Cow is not the problem. Mad Men is the problem. The minute that they discovered the source of the problem — which no one denies is the feeding of meat byproducts to cows — that should have stopped it right there. The fact that it ever happened to begin with should have been a big scandal.

Are there people in America who believe cows eat meat out in the pasture? They come on a dead calf and they figure that is a nice mid-day snack? If you fed a horse that meat-contaminated feed they give to cows you would have a dead horse in 24 hours. They don't have the long stomach a cow has to process out the toxins. Meat is toxic to cows and horses.

So it was all about greed. If cows could eat moldy hay why couldn't they eat the debris of their own kind if you made them think it was just processed grass? Why waste all that blood and crap on the floor?

But then came Mad Cow. Then came the knowledge that feeding cows meat caused it. Right then it should have ended. It had nothing to do with England. It had to do with bad feeding practices. But it didn't stop. And it continues to this day. In spite of that American cow. No regulation is awaiting approval in Congress to ban the feeding of meat products to cows. Why not?

I think the beef industry must be as omnipotent as the Detroit car industry was in the early 60s. The car people should have seen the Volkswagen as a wake up call. They didn't. All the alarms should have gone off. But they didn't. The VW Bug was the complete opposite of the future cars they had dreamed up. It was tiny, uncomfortable, under-powered and ugly. They never lost a night's sleep over it. And millions and millions of bugs were imported. Hitler got his revenge with the "people's car." But it was not the Bug that brought the American automobile industry to its knees. It was arrogance.

And that is what will bring the beef barons down. It does not cross their minds that they need to ban the feeding of meat to cows immediately.

As much as I love animals I would say that any cow that was fed meat products in the past should no longer be considered for sale to consumers. You can't tell people it is "probably safe." It is either safe or it is not safe. You shouldn't have to wonder if it is safe to eat your dinner.

But that won't happen. The beef people apparently do not intend to change their feeding programs at all. They just want you to play Russian roulette at your dinner table. So more cows will become infected and eventually people will become infected and eventually the beef boys will face some expensive lawsuits before they decide it might be better to pay a few cents more for their feed.