"In 1990, when I first started talking about mad cow disease, I never thought that the USDA would risk the entire cattle industry to protect the profits of a few corporations.  It seemed common sense that we had to quit feeding slaughter house waste to grass-eating animals.  It is crazy to continue a practice that is unnatural, dangerous and which consumers find abhorrent.  Every country dealing with the mad cow issue has learned that there are two things essential to restore consumer confidence.  You have to quit feeding animals to your food animals and you must institute a wide spread program of testing.  When mad cow disease destroyed the cattle industry in England it also caused the fall of the Tory Government.  It was plain that lying to the consumers was a bad choice.

North America acted like we were not part of the world and we could continue to deal with the pending disaster with press releases and loud pronouncements.
 
In 2003 the bottom fell out for Canada when they confirmed their first home-grown case of mad cow.  They tried to assure a nervous importing community that there was only one mad cow in their herd, but no one believed them.  Cattle prices dropped like a rock.

The United States treated our northern neighbor like an ugly step sister and we banned their cattle and meat even though we were their biggest customer.  Millions of animals both live and dead, had crossed the border in both directions, but we claimed that Canada had the problem and we were as pure as the driven snow.

The US cattle industry jumped at the chance to take over the Canadian export markets and we saw record prices for our cattle.  We filled our feedlots with the most expensive cattle in our history and continued to use the same practices that caused mad cow in Canada.  It is not hard to see we were rushing down the same track as England and Canada and could expect to suffer from the same train wreck.

On December 23rd the cow-that-spoiled-Christmas was reported to the world.  A Holstein dairy cow in the State of Washington proved what we professed could never happen here - mad cow was in the US.

The USDA, FDA, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, and a host of shocked meat flacks started to spew the preprogrammed party line that meat was safe and this was the only mad cow in the United States.  Within a matter of hours our beef export market had disappeared.  Country after country did to us what we had done to Canada and other mad cow nations, they banned our beef exports.

Cattle markets in the US disappeared and the future markets went limit down without a single buyer.  Containers of US meat on ships around the world could not be landed at the dock and sold.  The entire cattle industry was changed over night because of the appearance of one mad cow.

The USDA has instituted some limited response to the disaster such as banning the slaughter of downer animals from the human food system.  This was a response that was long overdue. A downer bill was defeated just before Christmas in the House of Representatives by the Republican leadership as a present to the big corporations who felt it was infringing on their profit potential.  When this action came to light after the mad cow was discovered it was just too hot an issue and USDA banned downers from the human food chain as a bone to satisfy unsettled consumers.

The solution to the problem of mad cow disease is fairly straightforward. First quit feeding slaughter house waste to our food animals and second test the slaughtered animals for the disease.  Currrently, we have over 100 million head of cattle in the US and in the last thirteen years we have only tested 57,000 animals for mad cow disease.  France has 11 million cattle in their herd and they test 66,000 each week.  I believe in the US we have had a "don't look, don't find" policy and up until the 23rd of December, it worked.

If the cattle industry is to survive in the US we must start listening to our customers both foreign and domestic.  They are saying loud and clear the product is not as safe as it should be and until it is, they do not want to be called customers.

I'm a vegan and eat no animal products so for me there is no direct problem but I have family and friends that continue to eat beef. Their future is a great concern to me.  I have many friends in the cattle business and I know they are willing to correct the problem and they want to return to raising animals as nature intended.  I pray we solve this issue without filling the graveyard with our friends and destroying the family farms and ranches that helped build this nation.  Treat this issue as if your life depended on it because it just may."

--- Howard Lyman, 01/10/04