U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat IndustryThis is just one section I cut from the full article...........
By MICHAEL MOSSJAN. 19, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html
‘Rough Handling’
Months into his new job at the center in 1989, Dr. Keen said, he got a call from a fellow worker asking him to help with a “downed cow.”
“There was a young cow, a teenager, with as many as six bulls,” he recalled. “The bulls were being studied for their sexual libido, and normally you would do that by putting a single bull in with a cow for 15 minutes. But these bulls had been in there for hours mounting her.”
The cow’s head was locked in a cagelike device to keep her immobile, he said. “Her back legs were broken. Her body was just torn up.”
Dr. Keen wanted to euthanize the animal, but the scientist in charge could not be tracked down for permission. A few hours later, the cow died.
The episode was unusual in its violence, and current center officials said they were not aware of it. Yet Dr. Keen and co-workers recounted other instances they said attested to the same problem: a recurring failure to fully consider the pain that animals suffer during experiments, or in everyday life at the center. Some employees blamed inadequate training or budgets; others pointed to friction between scientists bent on their research and veterinarians, who take an oath to protect animals.
The center has about 30,000 animals, tended by about 44 scientists, 73 technicians and other support workers. The scientists, who do not have medical degrees, and their assistants euthanize and operate on livestock, sometimes doing two or more major surgical operations on the same animal.
Continue reading the main story Video
Play Video|3:04 Animal Welfare at a Research Center
Animal Welfare at a Research Center
Practices at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center are discussed by James Keen, who worked as a veterinarian and scientist at the center.
Video by Margaret Cheatham Williams on Publish Date January 19, 2015. Photo by Leslye Davis/The New York Times.
A year before Dr. Keen encountered the dying cow, Robert A. Downey, executive director of the Capital Humane Society, in Lincoln, Neb., alerted by the staff, complained to the center director. “Experimental surgery is being performed in some (not all) cases by untrained, unskilled and unsupervised staff,” Mr. Downey wrote. “This has resulted in the suffering of animals and in some cases the subsequent death of animals.”
During a visit, he said, he saw animals headed to surgery that fell from carts or were pushed to the floor by their handlers, while two other workers in the operating room ate doughnuts. The director responded that the center was reviewing its surgical procedures and recommending improvements in animal care.
John Klindt, a scientist who retired in 2008, defended his fellow researchers in an interview, saying they were mindful of animal health and comfort. “A vet has no business coming in and telling you how to do it,” he said. “Surgery is an art you get through practice.”
The center does not have the veterinarians to be present during experiments, even if it wanted them to. Twenty years ago, it employed six scientists with veterinary degrees, including Dr. Keen. Today it has none. One staff veterinarian, not a scientist and junior in status, advocates for animals, helped by a seasoned technician and veterinary teachers and students from the university.
Simply ensuring the animals’ day-to-day health can be a challenge. That veterinarian, Shuna A. Jones, wrote to scientists and managers in 2011 and 2012 with a variety of concerns, including barns so stuffed with pigs that workers could not clean them, resulting in spates of diarrhea and respiratory disease. “This is a scheduling nightmare,” wrote Dr. Jones, who declined to be interviewed. “We have pigs everywhere.”
The center is constructing new buildings for the pigs, and has started trials aimed at reducing the number of piglets crushed by mothers. But some employees say center officials have been hampered by a budget ($22.7 million in 2014) with limited money for basics like larger pens, shelters or basic care.
Continue reading the main story ‘Pigs Everywhere’ In April 2011, the center’s staff veterinarian, Shuna A. Jones, wrote to the director and others with many concerns about pigs. They included barns so overcrowded that they could not be cleaned, leading to outbreaks of illness.
Dr. Rupp, the former teaching program director, said he had fought to get cows more nutrients and shelters. Thirty to 40 have died on average each year of exposure to bad weather, records show — not including storms in which hundreds have perished, center scientists say.
Dr. Keen, who now works for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said he and his students were startled last March to come across an emaciated ewe, in plain view of center employees, unable to eat because of a jaw abscess that had likely been growing for months. The ewe eventually died, records show, becoming the 245th animal to succumb to an abscess since 1985.
Some trace such neglect to attitudes held over from the days when little mind was paid to the suffering of animals.
Visiting the center in the late 1980s, the renowned animal welfare expert Temple Grandin approached a herd of cows. They panicked. “When cattle run away, that’s indicative of rough handling, screaming and yelling,” said Ms. Grandin, who gave the center a report suggesting ways to treat cattle more humanely. Though one former employee recalled that some of those steps were taken, Ronda Jaeger, who helped manage the cattle herd, said her supervisor had a different reaction.
“He tore the papers up,” she said.
Accounts of harsh treatment have continued to appear in internal reports, but attempts to bring attention to it have not always fared well.
Roger Ellis, a scientist and veterinarian who now works for a cattle nutrition company, said that when he determined about 10 years ago that a sheep had died at least in part from neglect, a center official pressed him to “soften the diagnosis.” Dr. Ellis said that he refused, and that the center had an outside veterinarian change the death record.
Continue reading the main story Graphic Reinventing the Pig, and Causing Pain Several experiments on pigs at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska have caused injury, pain and premature death.
OPEN Graphic
An animal manager, Devin M. Gandy, complained in 2012 that swine were kept in pens so small, 4 feet by 4 feet, that they appeared to violate basic rules on animal care. He got an email reply from the experiment’s lead scientist saying the pigs had enough room, adding, “A lot of time has been wasted addressing a nonissue.”
Geoffrey Hirsch, a former technician, recalled helping with a routine procedure about 12 years ago to extract lung tissue from the carcass of a young pig. But efforts to euthanize the pig had failed, he said; it was still thrashing and gagging. Worse, Mr. Hirsch said, the scientist who had erred “seemed to be getting some kind of enjoyment out of this thing, talking and shouting at the animal, " ‘How do you like that, pig?’ Stuff like that. The whole process was shocking.” |
