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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnimal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html?_r=0U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit
Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry
By MICHAEL MOSSJAN. 19, 2015
At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.
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Pigs are having many more piglets up to 14, instead of the usual eight but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.
Then there are the lambs. In an effort to develop easy care sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.
Researchers studied 36 kinds of animals, including dogs, chimpanzees, monkeys, rodents and elephants, to test for the presence of self-control.ScienceTake: Overriding Their Animal ImpulsesAPRIL 28, 2014
Last Mothers Day, at the height of the birthing season, two veterinarians struggled to sort through the weekends toll: 25 rag-doll bodies. Five, abandoned by overtaxed mothers, had empty stomachs. Six had signs of pneumonia. Five had been savaged by coyotes.
Its horrible, one veterinarian said, tossing the remains into a barrel to be dumped in a vast excavation called the dead pit.
These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce.
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Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry (Original Post)
G_j
Jan 2015
OP
Hari Seldon
(154 posts)1. Satan will be very busy
very busy indeed
undeterred
(34,658 posts)2. Animal welfare?
Has that ever been a concern in factory farming??