Is It Ok To Eat The Meat Of A Sick Animeal

A dairy cow too sick or injured to walk lies on the ground at a meatpacking plant in Chino, Calif., in 2010.

A pig arrives at a slaughterhouse. She is and then sick, her body and then broken, that she cannot fifty-fifty stand up on her own. What happens to her?

If she were a cow, to protect public health and the animal's own welfare, USDA policy would require her to be euthanized and removed from the food chain.

But pigs do not accept the good fortune — if existence so ill or injured you can't stand is "good fortune" — to have been born cows; for no tenable reason, the rule for them is dissimilar. These animals, chosen "downers," may be suffering from "broken appendages, severed tendons or ligaments, nervus paralysis, fractured vertebral column," and more.

Still, the butchery is allowed to take her off the truck with a backhoe and to allow her suffer indefinitely, with the hope that she will regain enough feeble control to stand; workers are even allowed to induce standing with electrical shocks.

If she eventually stands, this sick or injured animal tin can be killed for human nutrient.

Past official terminology, such helpless farm animals are chosen "downers." It'southward an unintentionally ironic term for a sad and all-too-common problem. According to the pork manufacture, more than half a million pigs annually go far at slaughterhouses likewise sick or injured to walk.

First, USDA is required by the Federal Meat Inspection Act to ensure that adulterated meat does not enter the human being food supply— a requirement that is violated when animals are held for hours or even days in filthy pens.Science confirms what intuition would strongly indicate, that these pens are bacterial incubators.

The Humane Slaughter Human action is supposed to require that animals be treated with the least cruelty possible at slaughterhouses; but laws are only constructive when enforced. USDA does a horrible job of enforcing this one. Nothing makes this point more effectively than the agency's decision to allow slaughterhouses to drag injured animals effectually their parking lots with construction equipment.

The agency's permissiveness violates its humane slaughter mandate in at least five contained ways, from encouraging cruelty to downed animals straight, to discouraging better treatment of animals at farms and feedlots.

Indeed, industry-funded studies link downer pigs to overcrowding in ship, excessive waiting times at slaughter establishments, transported at freezing temperatures and inhumane treatment.

Additionally, documents my organization received through a Freedom of Information Act request bear witness that when the USDA conducted its ain assay of cruelty to disabled animals, the agency found that sick and injured pigs suffer far more criminal abuse than practise any other species.

When an injured pig arrives at the slaughterhouse with a broken leg or a severed spinal cavalcade, there is no justification for treating her differently from a cow who is suffering similarly. If the USDA wants to be taken seriously when information technology tells us that it cares virtually humane slaughter, the very to the lowest degree it can do is close this gasping loophole by banning the slaughter of all downed animals.

Bruce Friedrich is manager of advancement and policy for Subcontract Sanctuary.

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