U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit - A New York Times investigation shows the experiments come at a horrific cost to animals. Thousands of pages of internal records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show a punishing drive to make livestock bigger, more prolific, more profitable — and creating harmful complications that require even more intensive experiments to solve. • The Center is built on the site of a World War II-era ammunition depot, a two-hour drive southwest of Omaha, and locked behind a security fence. It has become a destination for high-risk, potentially controversial research that other institutions will not do or are no longer allowed to do. Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed. These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce. “It’s horrible,” one veterinarian said, as he tossed animal remains into a barrel to be dumped in a vast excavation called the dead pit. As the decades have passed, the center has bucked another powerful trend: a gathering public concern for the well-being of animals that has penetrated even the meat industry, which is starting to embrace the demand for humanely raised products. The Animal Welfare Act — a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened — aimed to minimize that suffering, yet left a gaping exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture. #longread nyti.ms/1L00aPr
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 12:34:56 +0000
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