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From: U.S.Hog <[log in to unmask]>
To: U.S.Hog <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 4:48 AM
Subject: Part 2, Joby Warrick, 'They Die Piece by Piece'
(washingtonpost.com)

Part 2

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60798-2001Apr9.html

Modern Meat: A Brutal Harvest
'They Die Piece by Piece'
In Overtaxed Plants, Humane Treatment of Cattle Is Often a Battle Lost

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 10, 2001; Page A01

Second of two articles

PASCO, Wash.

It takes 25 minutes to turn a live steer into steak at the modern
slaughterhouse where Ramon Moreno works. For 20 years, his post was
"second-legger," a job that entails cutting hocks off carcasses as they
whirl past at a rate of 309 an hour.

The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often
they weren't.

"They blink. They make noises," he said softly. "The head moves, the eyes
are wide and looking around."

Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his
station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail
cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. "They die," said Moreno, "piece
by piece."

Under a 23-year-old federal law, slaughtered cattle and hogs first must be
"stunned" -- rendered insensible to pain -- with a blow to the head or an
electric shock. But at overtaxed plants, the law is sometimes broken, with
cruel consequences for animals as well as workers. Enforcement records,
interviews, videos and worker affidavits describe repeated violations of the
Humane Slaughter Act at dozens of slaughterhouses, ranging from the
smallest, custom butcheries to modern, automated establishments such as the
sprawling IBP Inc. plant here where Moreno works.

"In plants all over the United States, this happens on a daily basis," said
Lester Friedlander, a veterinarian and formerly chief government inspector
at a Pennsylvania hamburger plant. "I've seen it happen. And I've talked to
other veterinarians. They feel it's out of control."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees the treatment of animals in meat
plants, but enforcement of the law varies dramatically. While a few plants
have been forced to halt production for a few hours because of alleged
animal cruelty, such sanctions are rare.

For example, the government took no action against a Texas beef company that
was cited 22 times in 1998 for violations that included chopping hooves off
live cattle. In another case, agency supervisorsfailed to take action on
multiple complaints of animal cruelty at a Florida beef plant and fired an
animal health technician for reporting the problems to the Humane Society.
The dismissal letter sent to the technician, Tim Walker, said his dislosure
had "irreparably damaged" the agency's relations with the packing plant.

"I complained to everyone -- I said, 'Lookit, they're skinning live cows in
there,' " Walker said. "Always it was the same answer: 'We know it's true.
But there's nothing we can do about it.' "

In the past three years, a new meat inspection systemthat shifted
responsibility to industry has made it harder to catch and report cruelty
problems, some federal inspectors say. Under the new system, implemented in
1998, the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter violations
its inspectors find each year.

Some inspectors are so frustrated they're asking outsiders for help: The
inspectors' union last spring urged Washington state authorities to crack
down on alleged animal abuse at the IBP plant in Pasco. In a statement, IBP
said problems described by workers in its Washington state plant "do not
accurately represent the way we operate our plants. We take the issue of
proper livestock handling very seriously."

But the union complained that new government policies and faster production
speeds at the plant had "significantly hampered our ability to ensure
compliance." Several animal welfare groups joined in the petition.

"Privatization of meat inspection has meant a quiet death to the already
meager enforcement of the Humane Slaughter Act," said Gail Eisnitz of the
Humane Farming Association, a group that advocates better treatment of farm
animals. "USDA isn't simply relinquishing its humane-slaughter oversight to
the meat industry, but is -- without the knowledge and consent of Congress
-- abandoning this function altogether."

The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service, which is responsible for meat
inspection, says it has not relaxed its oversight. In January, the agency
ordered a review of 100 slaughterhouses. An FSIS memo reminded its 7,600
inspectors they had an "obligation to ensure compliance" with
humane-handling laws.

The review comes as pressure grows on both industry and regulators to
improve conditions for the 155 million cattle, hogs, horses and sheep
slaughtered each year. McDonald's and Burger King have been subject to
boycotts by animal rights groups protesting mistreatment of livestock.

As a result, two years ago McDonald's began requiring suppliers to abide by
the American Meat Institute's Good Management Practices for Animal Handling
and Stunning. The company also began conducting annual audits of meat
plants. Last week, Burger King announced it would require suppliers to
follow the meat institute's standards.

"Burger King Corp. takes the issues of food safety and animal welfare very
seriously, and we expect our suppliers to comply," the company said in a
statement.

Industry groups acknowledge that sloppy killing has tangible consequences
for consumers as well as company profits. Fear and pain cause animals to
produce hormones that damage meat and cost companies tens of millions of
dollars a year in discarded product, according to industry estimates.

Industry officials say they also recognize an ethical imperative to treat
animals with compassion. Science is blurring the distinction between the
mental processes of humans and lower animals -- discovering, for example,
that even the lowly rat may dream. Americans thus are becoming more
sensitive to the suffering of food animals, even as they consume increasing
numbers of them.

"Handling animals humanely," said American Meat Institute President J.
Patrick Boyle, "is just the right thing to do."

Clearly, not all plants have gotten the message.

A Post computer analysis of government enforcement records found 527
violations of humane-handling regulations from 1996 to 1997, the last years
for which complete records were available. The offenses range from
overcrowded stockyards to incidents in which live animals were cut, skinned
or scalded.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Post obtained enforcement
documents from 28 plants that had high numbers of offenses or had drawn
penalties for violating humane-handling laws. The Post also interviewed
dozens of current and former federal meat inspectors and slaughterhouse
workers. A reporter reviewed affidavits and secret video recordings made
inside two plants.

Among the findings:

 One Texas plant, Supreme Beef Packers in Ladonia, had 22 violations in six
months. During one inspection, federal officials found nine live cattle
dangling from an overhead chain. But managers at the plant, which announced
last fall it was ceasing operations, resisted USDA warnings, saying its
practices were no different than others in the industry. "Other plants are
not subject to such extensive scrutiny of their stunning activities," the
plant complained in a 1997 letter to the USDA.

 Government inspectors halted production for a day at the Calhoun Packing
Co. beef plant in Palestine, Tex., after inspectors saw cattle being
improperly stunned. "They were still conscious and had good reflexes," B.V.
Swamy, a veterinarian and senior USDA official at the plant, wrote. The
shift supervisor "allowed the cattle to be hung anyway." IBP, which owned
the plant at the time, contested the findings but "took steps to resolve the
situation," including installing video equipment and increasing training, a
spokesman said. IBP has since sold the plant.

 At the Farmers Livestock Cooperative processing plant in Hawaii, inspectors
documented 14 humane-slaughter violations in as many months. Records from
1997 and 1998 describe hogs that were walking and squealing after being
stunned as many as four times. In a memo to USDA, the company said it fired
the stunner and increased monitoring of the slaughter process.

 At an Excel Corp. beef plant in Fort Morgan, Colo., production was halted
for a day in 1998 after workers allegedly cut off the leg of a live cow
whose limbs had become wedged in a piece of machinery. In imposing the
sanction, U.S. inspectors cited a string of violations in the previous two
years, including the cutting and skinning of live cattle. The company,
responding to one such charge, contended that it was normal for animals to
blink and arch their backs after being stunned, and such "muscular reaction"
can occur up to six hours after death. "None of these reactions indicate the
animal is still alive," the company wrote to USDA.

 Hogs, unlike cattle, are dunked in tanks of hot water after they are
stunned to soften the hides for skinning. As a result, a botched slaughter
condemns some hogs to being scalded and drowned. Secret videotape from an
Iowa pork plant shows hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered
into the water.

USDA documents and interviews with inspectors and plant workers attributed
many of the problems to poor training, faulty or poorly maintained equipment
or excessive production speeds. Those problems were identified five years
ago in an industry-wide audit by Temple Grandin, an assistant professor with
Colorado State University's animal sciences department and one of the
nation's leading experts on slaughter practices.

In the early 1990s, Grandin developed the first objective standards for
treatment of animals in slaughterhouses, which were adopted by the American
Meat Institute, the industry's largest trade group. Her initial, USDA-funded
survey in 1996 was one of the first attempts to grade slaughter plants.

One finding was a high failure rate among beef plants that use stunning
devices known as "captive-bolt" guns. Of the plants surveyed, only 36
percent earned a rating of "acceptable" or better, meaning cattle were
knocked unconscious with a single blow at least 95 percent of the time.

Grandin now conducts annual surveys as a consultant for the American Meat
Institute and McDonald's Corp. She maintains that the past four years have
brought dramatic improvements -- mostly because of pressure from McDonald's,
which sends a team of meat industry auditors into dozens of plants each year
to observe slaughter practices.

Based on the data collected by McDonald's auditors, the portion of beef
plants scoring "acceptable" or better climbed to 90 percent in 1999. Some
workers and inspectors are skeptical of the McDonald's numbers, and Grandin
said the industry's performance dropped slightly last year after auditors
stopped giving notice of some inspections.

Grandin said high production speeds can trigger problems when people and
equipment are pushed beyond their capacity. From a typical kill rate of 50
cattle an hour in the early 1900s, production speeds rose dramatically in
the 1980s. They now approach 400 per hour in the newest plants.

"It's like the 'I Love Lucy' episode in the chocolate factory," she said.
"You can speed up a job and speed up a job, and after a while you get to a
point where performance doesn't simply decline -- it crashes."

When that happens, it's not only animals that suffer. Industry trade groups
acknowledge that improperly stunned animals contribute to worker injuries in
an industry that already has the nation's highest rate of job-related
injuries and illnesses -- about 27 percent a year. At some plants, "dead"
animals have inflicted so many broken limbs and teeth that workers wear
chest pads and hockey masks.

"The live cows cause a lot of injuries," said Martin Fuentes, an IBP worker
whose arm was kicked and shattered by a dying cow. "The line is never
stopped simply because an animal is alive."

A 'Brutal' Harvest

At IBP's Pasco complex, the making of the American hamburger starts in a
noisy, blood-spattered chamber shielded from view by a stainless steel wall.
Here, live cattle emerge from a narrow chute to be dispatched in a process
known as "knocking" or "stunning." On most days the chamber is manned by a
pair of Mexican immigrants who speak little English and earn about $9 an
hour for killing up to 2,050 head per shift.

The tool of choice is the captive-bolt gun, which fires a retractable metal
rod into the steer's forehead. An effective stunning requires a precision
shot, which workers must deliver hundreds of times daily to balky,
frightened animals that frequently weigh 1,000 pounds or more. Within 12
seconds of entering the chamber, the fallen steer is shackled to a moving
chain to be bled and butchered by other workers in a fast-moving production
line.

The hitch, IBP workers say, is that some "stunned" cattle wake up.

"If you put a knife into the cow, it's going to make a noise: It says,
'Moo!' " said Moreno, the former second-legger, who began working in the
stockyard last year. "They move the head and the eyes and the leg like the
cow wants to walk."

After a blow to the head, an unconscious animal may kick or twitch by
reflex. But a videotape, made secretly by IBP workers and reviewed by
veterinarians for The Post, depicts cattle that clearly are alive and
conscious after being stunned.

Some cattle, dangling by a leg from the plant's overhead chain, twist and
arch their backs as though trying to right themselves. Close-ups show
blinking reflexes, an unmistakable sign of a conscious brain, according to
guidelines approved by the American Meat Institute.

The video, parts of which were aired by Seattle television station KING last
spring, shows injured cattle being trampled. In one graphic scene, workers
give a steer electric shocks by jamming a battery-powered prod into its
mouth.

More than 20 workers signed affidavits alleging that the violations shown on
tape are commonplace and that supervisors are aware of them. The sworn
statements and videos were prepared with help from the Humane Farming
Association. Some workers had taken part in a 1999 strike over what they
said were excessive plant production speeds.

"I've seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process
alive," IBP veteran Fuentes, the worker who was injured while working on
live cattle, said in an affidavit. "The cows can get seven minutes down the
line and still be alive. I've been in the side-puller where they're still
alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there."

IBP, the nation's top beef processor, denounced as an "appalling aberration"
the problems captured on the tape. It suggested the events may have been
staged by "activists trying to raise money and promote their agenda. . . .

"Like many other people, we were very upset over the hidden camera video,"
the company said. "We do not in any way condone some of the livestock
handling that was shown."

After the video surfaced, IBP increased worker training and installed
cameras in the slaughter area. The company also questioned workers and
offered a reward for information leading to identification of those
responsible for the video. One worker said IBP pressured him to sign a
statement denying that he had seen live cattle on the line.

"I knew that what I wrote wasn't true," said the worker, who did not want to
be identified for fear of losing his job. "Cows still go alive every day.
When cows go alive, it's because they don't give me time to kill them."

Independent assessments of the workers' claims have been inconclusive.
Washington state officials launched a probe in May that included an
unannounced plant inspection. The investigators say they were detained
outside the facility for an hour while their identities were checked. They
saw no acts of animal cruelty once permitted inside.

Grandin, the Colorado State professor, also inspected IBP's plant, at the
company's request; that inspection was announced. Although she observed no
live cattle being butchered, she concluded that the plant's older-style
equipment was "overloaded." Grandin reviewed parts of the workers' videotape
and said there was no mistaking what she saw.

"There were fully alive beef on that rail," Grandin said.

Inconsistent Enforcement

Preventing this kind of suffering is officially a top priority for the
USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service. By law, a humane-slaughter violation
is among a handful of offenses that can result in an immediate halt in
production -- and cost a meatpacker hundreds or even thousands of dollars
per idle minute.

In reality, many inspectors describe humane slaughter as a blind spot:
Inspectors' regular duties rarely take them to the chambers where stunning
occurs. Inconsistencies in enforcement, training and record-keeping hamper
the agency's ability to identify problems.

The meat inspectors' union, in its petition last spring to Washington
state's attorney general, contended that federal agents are "often prevented
from carrying out" the mandate against animal cruelty. Among the obstacles
inspectors face are "dramatic increases in production speeds, lack of
support from supervisors in plants and district offices . . . new inspection
policies which significantly reduce our enforcement authority, and little to
no access to the areas of the plants where animals are killed," stated the
petition by the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals.

Barbara Masters, the agency's director of slaughter operations, told meat
industry executives in February she didn't know if the number of violations
was up or down, though she believed most plants were complying with the law.
"We encourage the district offices to monitor trends," she said. "The fact
that we haven't heard anything suggests there are no trends."

But some inspectors see little evidence the agency is interested in hearing
about problems. Under the new inspection system, the USDA stopped tracking
the number of violations and dropped all mentions of humane slaughter from
its list of rotating tasks for inspectors.

The agency says it expects its watchdogs to enforce the law anyway. Many
inspectors still do, though some occasionally wonder if it's worth the
trouble.

"It always ends up in argument: Instead of re-stunning the animal, you spend
20 minutes just talking about it," said Colorado meat inspector Gary Dahl,
sharing his private views. "Yes, the animal will be dead in a few minutes
anyway. But why not let him die with dignity?"

The Washington Post Company

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