The Beef Over Downed Cows

by Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Annie Internicola, March 27, 2008

When February’s historically huge beef recall hit the news I was sitting in an airport. It seemed ironic, having just returned from a country where visitors fear food-borne microbes. But this recall wasn’t about E. coli, the usual culprit in beef recalls in the US. Instead, a video from a weeks-long undercover investigation by the Humane Society caught workers at the Hallmark/Westland meatpacking plant (slaughterhouse) abusing downed cows, or “nonambulatory” ones, as technical lingo calls animals that are too injured, sick, or weak to stand.

In the video, workers shove and roll the collapsed cows with a forklift, repeatedly jab them with a cattleprod, and spray water at high pressure up a crippled cow’s nose. The point was to get these “spent” dairy cows to enter the building of their own accord; otherwise a vet would have to clear them for slaughter.

Kenneth Peterson of the United States Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for meat inspection and safety, in an interview with PBS in late February, said what happened at Hallmark/Westland is “an aberration” and that “I have inspectors present in the plant that look for these very same kind of practices.” But it was the Humane Society, not the USDA inspectors, who blew the whistle. Nonetheless, Secretary for the Department of Agriculture, Ed Schafer, said in a press release, “We are confident in our inspection system and the food safety regulations that ensure the safety and wholesomeness of the food supply.”

Still, the USDA has indefinitely terminated Hallmark/Westland’s operations and recalled 143 million pounds of beef that came out of the plant over the last two years. Most of it has been eaten. Much of it went to public schools, supplied free from the federal government’s subsidy programs. Mike Robinson, Food Director for New Paltz school district, says he destroyed about a meal’s worth of ground beef, and a couple meals of burgers; several more meals’ worth from the Hallmark/Westland batch had already been consumed.

Down, but not out, of the foodstream
To be clear, the beef recall wasn’t prompted by animal abuse per se, but because the downed cattle were being slaughtered, processed, and shipped as food. It is illegal to process downer cows because of the likelihood that they will introduce pathogens into our food. (No legislation exists yet for other food animals.) The law banning downed cattle from food owes its beginnings to Farm Sanctuary, the country’s premier food animal watchdog organization born from the rescue of a downed sheep found on a pile of dead animals at a slaughterhouse.

“In 1999 we petitioned the USDA,” said Farm Sanctuary’s cofounder and CEO Gene Baur in a phone interview, “saying that downed animals are diseased and shouldn’t be in our food. It’s very simple. But the USDA’s response at that time was that downed animals are okay for food, and they countered our assertion that it would be a small economic burden [not to use downed animals] by saying it would in fact be a big economic burden.” That implies downed animals are used often enough to figure in a plant’s profits.