ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

OCTOBER 1999

RUTHLESS MEAT TRADE FLOGS HORMONES EAST AND WEST

SEOUL, BRUSSELS, LONDON, WASHINGTON D.C--An estimated 50 members of the Korean Animal Protection Society rallied against dog-eating and cat-eating on August 16 in front of Myoungdong Cathedral in central Seoul.

Sympathy rallies occurred in many other cities around the world, attracting media coverage in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and South Africa as well as Korea.

But the protests did not deter Grand National Party legislator Kim Hong Shin and 20 cosponsors from introducing a bill into the Korean Parliament that same day to repeal six unenforced prohibitions on dog-eating issued since 1978 by adding dogs to the list of livestock species regulated by the Korean Agriculture Department.

August 16 was the third of three traditional summer "dog-eating days" in Korea. Dog-eating is practiced by ethnic Chinese minorities and some indigenous peoples in many parts of Asia and Africa. The Korean style of dog-slaughter is especially violent, however, because of the common belief that dogs' meat tastes better and imparts more virility if saturated in adrenalin. Thus dogs are usually killed by slow hanging suffer bone-breaking beatings as they hang, and are dehaired by blowtorch, often still alive, in front of customers who watch to make sure the whole procedure is followed.

BELOW, SOME OF THE ANIMALS STILL WIDELY VICTIMIZED BY HUMAN MORAL BACKWARDNESS

Cats eaten in Korea--apparently not addressed by the Kim Hong Shin bill-- are typically boiled alive, after their bones are broken with a hammer, and are pureed into a "health drink" in front of customers.

The Philippines banned dog-eating in 1996, except inf religious rituals by designated indigenous tribes, but similar practices reportedly continue clandestinely, and are linked with the sporadic spread of rabies to humans. About 10,000 dogs and 350 humans die of rabies in the Philappines each year.

Recently explained Philippine public health veterinarian Aura Corpuz, as paraphrased by Claire Wallerstein of the Manchester (U.K.) Guardian, "In some rural areas it is believed that eating the raw organs of rabid dogs can protect against rabies," as a form of crude self-vaccination.

Such a belief may be the origin of summer dog-eating in Korea and elsewhere too, since rabies is endemic to all of Asia and is most evident in midsummer, when the most dogs and humans are at large.

The KAPS protests apparently brought hoaxster Joey Skaggs or an imitator "out of remission," as ANIMAL PEOPLE advised e-mail correspondents who were upset by an American University web site purportedly belonging to one "Dr. James Lee," identified as a "cultural economist."

No such person is listed on the American University faculty roster.

The site, an evident parody of the sites of libertarian think-tanks, argued that the U.S. canine surplus should be exported to Korea to be made into dog meat soup.

Economic-and-culture-based arguments for various other forms of animal use-and-abuse appear to have been copied from sites owned by representatives of sealers, whalers, and trappers.

Skaggs, of Greenwich Village, New York, pulled a similar hoax in May 1994, mailing a letter to 1,500 U.S. humane societies in which he offered, in broken but perfectly spelled English under a Korean-sounding pseudonymn, to buy dogs for export and eventual use in soup at 10¢ a pound. ANIMAL PEOPLE identified Skaggs and exposed the hoax within hours of becoming aware of it.

As Skaggs boasts at his own extensive web site, he is notorious for having pulled countless other hoaxes, including an alleged brothel for dogs that fooled WABC-TV in 1976 and resurfaced as late as the mid-1980s via broadcast reruns--to the frequent consternation of the American SPCA, which tried to find a basis for charging Skaggs with a crime equivalent to ringing in a false fire alarm.

(For current information on how to protest against dog-eating and cat-eating in Korea, contact the International Association for Korean Animals, POB 20600, Oakland, CA 94620; >> ikaps@email.msn.com<<.)

Impotence

Korean dog-meat merchants and consumers make no secret of their belief that dog meat stew heightens male sexual prowess. Most North Americans seem to hold essentially the same belief about eating beef.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich spent the summer challenging the notion by trying to place billboard advertisements showing PETA receptionist Melynda DuVal in a stars-and-stripes bikini, holding up a string of limp sausages with the message, "I threw a party but the cattlemen couldn't come. Eating meat can cause impotence."

The ads got a brief airing on the backs of trucks in Dallas, Texas. Reportedly refused space by more than 100 billboard firms in 13 states and two Canadian provinces, they appeared elsewhere only in news coverage, but provoked newspaper discussions of cholesterol build-up, heart disease, and related impotence from coast to coast.

Friedrich urged meat-eaters "to rustle up veggie burgers in the kitchen for a whopper in the bedroom."

But men interviewed by Kansas City Star reporter Dru Selfton at a local steakhouse suggested that they value the hormonal surge--or whatever else it is that they get from meat--more than virility itself.

"If I had to choose, I'd rather have the steak," said one. Added another, "I came here to get impotent."

Trade warriors

Hormones were also the hot-button issue for gray-suited trade warriors battling through the heat of the summer in Brussels, Dublin, Washington D.C., and Ottawa over beef import/export standards.

By mid-August, with U.S. trade sanctions in effect against French Roquefort cheese, Dijon mustard, foie gras, and truffles, the conflict hit the streets. In Millau, France, Farmers' Confederation leader Jose Bove was arrested on August 19 for leading a mob in wrecking materials and equipment at the construction site for a McDonald's restaurant. Two weeks leader, 50 demonstrators expressed solidarity with Bove by releasing fowl en masse in Deauville, Normandy, and at a McDonald's restaurant in Salon de Provence.

The hormone battle has raged since January 1989, when the European Union banned imports of beef, pork, and poultry raised with the use of synthetic hormones.

Ostensibly imposed to protect public health, the ban enabled the relatively small factory farms of northern Europe to hold their international markets, against growing competition from the mega-farms of the U.S. and Canada--and those of Ireland and some southern European nations, where farmers have often been caught in recent years using hormones on the sly. In April 1999, for instance, Spain arrested 53 people whose hormone distribution network served 18 provinces.

In May 1997, after years of delay, the World Trade Organization ruled on behalf of the U.S. and Canada that the EU import ban is a trade barrier, not a legitimate health protection standard, and should be repealed.

The EU contested the verdict, losing again before a WTO appellate panel in January 1998.

As the WTO-set deadline for repealing the import ban approached in May, the EU moved in the opposite direction, banning imports of all U.S. beef on purported suspicion that even "hormone-free" beef might have come from cattle who were treated with hormones at some point.

The EU Scientific Committee on Veterinary Measures followed up by releasing a report which claimed that one hormone commonly used by U.S. beef-growers, 17 beta-oestradiol "has to be considered as a complete carcinogen," while five others are allegedly suspect.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman called the EU arguments "unsubstantiated," but two months later, after the WTO authorized the U.S. and Canada to retaliate with trade sanctions, tossed the EU a concession by pledging that the U.S. would conduct longterm studies of the safety of genetically modified produce.

Genetically modified produce is a separate but closely related issue. Glickman specifically mentioned his determination to force the EU to accept imports of U.S. fodder corn and feed-grade soy beans.

The U.S. and Canada imposed retaliatory 100% tariffs against a range of agricultural products from France, Germany, Italy, and Denmark at the beginning of August.

By then, however, the dispute transcended trade. Public health was very definitely the issue by July, when experts including Tufts University School of Medicine researcher Carlos Sonnenschein, M.D., announced findings that the increased use of estrogens such as oestradiol in beef production coincides with girls reaching puberty 18 months younger on average than they did in 1900, and that early puberty coincides with heightened risk of breast cancer. The age of puberty is falling even faster in the U.S., dropping by two years just since 1960.

Breast cancer kills about 400,000 women per year, worldwide--and the number of new cases detected rose from 572,000 in 1980 to 900,000 in 1997.

Reported Canadian Press on July 31, "The Canadian government maintains the hormones [used in meat production] are safe, despite strong misgivings on the part of its own scientists at the Health Protection Branch. Four scientists with concerns have been ordered not to discuss the issue in public."

One of the scientists, Margaret Haydon, spoke out anyway, identifying an agricultural hormone called Revalor-H as causing early puberty, enlarged prostates, and impaired immune systems in calves.

Hormones and milk

Even in 1989, when the dispute among the EU, the U.S., and Canada started, hormones in meat were not a new concern. About 90% of all U.S. and Canadian livestock are treated with hormones of various sorts, and have been for most of three decades. But rising public concern about the possible effects of hormones ingested with animal products were heightened in the late 1980s by the introduction of a new class of hormonal drugs: synthetic bovine growth hormones (BGH), designed to increase the volume of per-cow milk production.

Anxiety over BGH has diminished in the U.S., and in many of the 28 other nations which have approved it, but not in Canada, nor in the EU, including especially Britain.

Health Canada in January 1999 ruled against authorizing BGH use, after nine years of review, on grounds that it "presents an unacceptable threat to the safety of dairy cows," acting director Joel Weiner stated.

Health Canada human health committee chair Stuart McLeod of McMaster University said BGH appeared to pose no significant risks to humans who use milk products, but in March 1999 the Canadian Senate Agriculture Committee rejected that conclusion.

"Fact: there is no chronic health data on BGH," Senate Agriculture Committee chair Eugene Whelan said. "It is impossible to prove what effects it will have on humans."

An EU moratorium on BGH use is to expire at the end of 1999, but is likely to be renewed.

The United Nations Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets international food standards, in July 1999 failed to reach agreement on a permissible maximum residue level for BGH.

Suspicion of BGH meanwhile rose in Britain when the London Observer disclosed in June 1999 that the former Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher had in the late 1980s authorized Monsanto, Eli Lilly Industries, and Cyanamic to conduct secret trials at 39 farms which resulted in milk produced with the use of BGH entering the general milk supply--totally unknown to consumers.

New BSE shocks

The British livestock industry is in no condition or mood to accept new economic shocks, whether from food scares or technological change. A long anticipated end to the EU embargo on British meat imposed in March 1996 to prevent the spread of bovine spongiform encepalopathy (BSE, also called "mad cow disease") appeared to be at hand on August 1, 1999--but fell through.

The EU did conditionally agree to accept cattle for slaughter, if born after August 1996, and if slaughtered completely apart from European-born cattle. But the latter requirement in effect required the operation of special slaughterhouses just for British cattle, which could make British meat prohibitively expensive. Even at that, France and Germany announced they would not comply with the EU decision
pending further review.

August 1996 was when Britain belatedly banned feeding recycled offal to cattle, responding to scientific suspicion that BSE infected cattle via feed supplements made from the remains of sheep afflicted with scrapie, or from other afflicted cattle.

Consuming infected cattle is in turn believed to be the cause of the invariably fatal brain deterioration in humans called new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

BSE has raged in Britain for at least 15 years, and 40 of the first 43 known nv-CJD fatalities have been British or are known to have eaten British beef. But even slaughtering all 3.5 million bovines in Britain who were alive in 1996 and attempting to destroy the remains in such a manner that no disease-carrying prion particle survives has not fully contained either BSE or nv-CJD. BSE cases have now been identified in most nations of Europe; nv-CJD victims have died in three other nations and are reportedly ill in several others.

British media seemed to enjoy the discomfort that swept France in June 1999 when French health inspectors seized more than 100,000 bottles of cheap Rhone Valley red wine which had been "purified" through the use of powdered cattle blood to attract suspended particles remaining after the "vinification" process. The EU banned the obsolescent blood-based process in November 1997, to reduce the risk of human exposure to BSE.

But any sardonic joy derived from contemplating French misery was short-lived. On August 22 London Observer public affairs editor Antony Barnett revealed that, "Potentially lethal waste infected with BSE from secret dumps of the remains of slauightered cattle is escaping into the environment. The Observer has learned," Barnett wrote, "that the Environment Agency is conducting an inquiry into the
storage of 50,000 metric tons of rendered cattle carcasses in former aircraft hangars in Lincolnshire," almost within sight of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher's birthplace.

The site in question is just one of 13 where an estimated 400,000 metric tons of remains from cattle slaughtered to control BSE await incineration at the only incinerator in Britain capable of burning them at a hot enough temperature to destroy prions.

The risk that deadly BSE prions might re-enter British herds via rats, birds, airborne dust, or polluted water brought with it the likelihood that the chance to sell meat abroad might be indefinitely delayed.

Fewer veggies

Even as BSE killed British meat exports, a series of bacterial poisoning outbreaks resulting in human deaths cut into British domestic meat consumption during the past several years. By early 1999, however, stricter butcher shop regulations and more policing supposedly had the contamination problem in hand.

The livestock industry took particular courage from the annual food habits survey conducted by the vegetarian food supplier Realeat, published in April. Male vegetarians, Realeat found, had dropped from 4.1% of the British public in 1997 to 3.2%--the pre-BSE level. The percentage of Britishers reducing red meat consumption fell from 46% to 45%. The number of female vegetarians rose from 6.5% to 6.7%, the lowest rate of increase since the surveys began in 1984. Overall, there were 190,000 fewer British vegetarians than the year before.

But the bottom line, pointed out Realeat representative Graham Keen, was that even though there were fewer vegetarians, less meat was eaten for the 15th consecutive year.

One vegetarian of particular concern to livestock producers was Welsh agriculture secretary Christine Gwyther, 39, appointed in May 1999 over the vehement opposition of the Welsh Union of Farmers.

In August 1999 the British government discontinued subsidies paid to dairy farmers for raising bull calves to beef-slaughtering age. The subsidies were meant to partially compensate dairy farmers for loss of the opportunity to sell bull calves to Dutch and Belgian vealers. Some of the dairy farmers responded by abandoning at least 61 calves at locations including the private sanctuary owned by television writer and
animal advocate Carla Lane, who took in 40, and the Stepley Grange Wildlife Hospital operated by Royal SPCA, which received 13. Two calves were offered to Gwyther when she attended the Pembrokeshire County Fair, but were killed and fed to the fox hounds of the Pembrokeshire Hunt when she refused them.

The end of the subsidies is expected to accelerate the ongoing contraction of the British dairy industry. BGH, if ever approved, would expedite the process.

The AR view

Mere predictions of how BGH might affect the dairy industry were enough to scare thousands of North American small producers into selling their cows and land--and many of them were "big" by British and continental European standards.

A decade later, the predictions are fulfilled. The USDA and Food and Drug Administration approved BGH for general use in 1994, but the impact was already becoming evident even then. Since the approval process approached completion in 1991, the number of U.S. dairy farms is down 24% and the number of cows who produce the U.S. milk supply is down 10%.

From an animal welfare perspective, this means a substantive reduction in the dairy constellation of what the late Coalition for Non-Violent Food founder Henry Spira termed "the universe of suffering."

But the global animal protection community was far from agreed in 1989, as now, that the advent of BGH is a plus.

On the contrary, most animal protection groups felt they could scarcely take any position other than hardline opposition to BGH--and by extension, to all other agricultural use of pharmaceuticals, other than to relieve immediate animal suffering, as well as to any genetic modification of animals, for any purpose.

Most obviously, accepting BGH and related technologies, including other drugs and genetic engineering, put at risk many of the alliances used over the years to fight both factory farming and vivisection.

Indeed, as Peter Singer and Jim Mason emphasized in their 1980 book Animal Factories, the most successful argument opponents of factory farming had, until the recent rise of public outrage over manure polluting air and waterways, was that keeping so many animals in such close confinement required farmers to use veterinary drugs on an unprecedented scale. As Singer, Mason, and other factory farm critics pointed out, citing examples such as the use of the hormone DES to stimulate beef growth in the 1960s, drugs administered to livestock often eventually have an adverse effect upon human health. By 1970, for instance, DES ingestion was linked to the development of uterine cancer.

Historically, in the developed nations, ethical vegetarians have associated themselves with the far larger number of vegetarians who forgo meat chiefly for health reasons. Health-oriented vegetarians are typically more concerned with avoiding unwanted hormones and other chemicals than with avoiding harm to animals.

Ethical vegetarians are also heavily dependent upon health food stores and restaurants, not only for meals but also as local cultural centers, where veggies can meet each other, promote related causes, and enjoy meatless social events.

The health food industry, early in the BGH fight, sought support from the animal rights movement--and mostly got it, plus help in fighting proposed federal restrictions on the sale of "alternative" medicines and food supplements, often sold with the claim that they have not been tested on animals.

Also influencing the predominant animal rights movement position on BGH is that many of the then upstart animal rights groups spent most of the 1970s and 1980s courting the much older and richer antivivisection societies, seeking operating capital and access to donors. The animal rights movement eventually tapped into antivivisectionist support by building on the same two popular premises: that vivisection is cruel, and that animal research is invalid as a model for seeking cures for human ailments.

While the former premise is of chief concern to people who care about animals, the latter premise appeals to donors who may not be deeply moved by the animal issues, but mistrust technology and/or the medical establishment. Representing up to 45% of some AV organizations' donor base, according to membership surveys, these donors range from religious fundamentalists who deny evolution to deep ecologists.

For animal rights groups to embrace new technologies, even those which might eventually reduce animal suffering, is to run a severe risk of alienating hard-won AV support.

Cause links

Nor was that the only alliance at risk. The animal rights movement was preoccupied in 1989 with establishing green credentials so as to be included in the 20th annual Earth Day celebration the next year. Most of the Big Seven environmental groups had already committed themselves against biotech in general and BGH in specific. Some feared that biotech would bring Frankenstein scenarios, in which human-created species ravaged nature; some argued that technologies putting small dairy farms out of business would destroy green space and encourage urban sprawl.

The National Wildlife Federation was in the midst of delaying the introduction of Raboral, the oral rabies vaccination for wild or feral animals, on the pretext that distributing the killed rabies virus embedded in it might set a dangerous precedent for releasing live bio-engineered organisms. The National Wildlife Federation is the national umbrella for 48 state hunting clubs, and the NWF position conveniently supported the interest of coonhunters and trappers in maintaining a pretext for killing animals in the name of rabies prevention, instead of vaccinating them.

Also as of 1989, the global animal rights and animal welfare communities had lobbied the European Union successfully to win concessions against the Canadian offshore seal hunt, and sensed opportunities for new gains against animal testing, cruelties in livestock transportation, cruel forms of entertainment, and wild-caught fur imports--a victory won, on paper, in 1991 but lost in 1997.

EU support for other animal concerns should not be put at risk, leading lobbyists argued, by failing to strongly back the EU position on hormone-treated meat.

In India, the philosophical home of animal rights theory, there was and remains a further complication. While vegetarians in the rest of the world tend to be advocates of radical change, at least in diet, vegetarians in India represent a 3,000-year-old majority tradition, rooted in the teachings of Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the religion of approximately 90% of India's billion people.

Hindu teaching, reinforced by Ghandian economic theory, celebrates cattle as the source of most real wealth: the more cows India has, the better. Any technology reducing the number of cattle is accordingly opposed, right along with cow slaughter.

The Animal Welfare Board of India thus adopted an anti-biotechnology resolution in 1997 as an addition to existing pro-cow and anti-cruelty policies--M.C.