continued...

It’s 30 years late, but Congress should now pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would ban industrial farms from using seven classes of antibiotics that are important to human health unless animals or herds are ill, or pharmaceutical companies can prove the drugs’ use in livestock does not harm human health.

The pharmaceutical industry and agribusiness face the difficult challenge of developing antimicrobials that work specifically against animal infections without undermining the fight against bacteria that cause disease in humans. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer to protect those at risk of increasing antibiotic resistance.

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Gus: I believe we've not heard the end on this subject...

A battle is under way in the British countryside to fight off plans for massive factory farms that would house thousands of animals in industrialised units without access to traditional grazing or foraging.

Plans for three large-scale units in England have encountered fierce resistance from campaigners who say they would cause extra noise, smell and disruption and cause more stress and disease for animals.

Animal welfare organisations fear the proposals are signs that a new intensive system of agriculture could soon replace the UK's patchwork of small livestock farms.

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see toon at top.

If you are engaged in an act of cruelty, there is an easy, effective way to silence your critics and snatch some space to carry on. Tell us all that your religion requires you to do it, and you are "offended" by any critical response. Erect an electric wire fence around your nastiest actions and call it "respect".

There's a good example of this religious modus operandi playing out on a dinner table near you – and this week, we found out it is becoming more and more common. In Britain, it is a crime to kill a conscious cow or sheep or chicken for meat by slashing its throat without numbing it first. The reasons are obvious. If you don't numb an animal, it screams as you hack through its skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and major nerve trunks, and then it remains conscious as it slowly drowns in its own blood – a process that can take up to six minutes. So we insist that an animal is stunned before its throat is slashed, to ensure it is deeply unconscious. There isn't much humanity in our factory farming system, but this is – at least – a tiny sliver of it, at the end.

But there is a loophole in the law. You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it "halal", and if you are Jewish you call it "kosher". Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".

Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal."

This has been proven by science to be false. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) is the Government's senior panel of independent scientific experts on this area, and their investigation found that "the prevailing scientific consensus that slaughter without pre-stunning causes very significant pain and distress". The FAWC chairwoman, Dr Judy MacArthur Clark, explains: "To say [the animal] doesn't suffer is quite ridiculous."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-religious-excuse-for-barbarity-2137927.html

Scientists working on a new generation of genetically modified crops have sent an open letter to anti-GM protesters pleading with them not to destroy “years of work” by attacking their research plots.

The activist group, Take the Flour Back, has pledged to carry out a “decontamination” at a test site in Hertfordshire, where agricultural researchers are growing the world’s first genetically modified wheat that can repel insect pests by emitting a repellent-smelling substance.

Appealing to the protesters as fellow “environmentalists”, scientists from Rothamsted Research led by Professor John Pickett called on the group to “reconsider before it is too late”.

“Our research is trying to shed light on questions about the safety and usefulness of new varieties of the staple food crops on which all of us depend,” the scientists write. “(…)We do not see how preventing the acquisition of knowledge is a defensible position in an age of reason.”

The pheromone exuded by the new strain of “whiffy” wheat is naturally produced by “frightened” aphids as a warning signal to deter other aphids. However, activists claim that the wheat contains an artificial gene “most similar to a cow” and that open air trials represent an “imminent contamination threat to the local environment and the UK wheat industry”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/scientists-send-open-letter-to-antigm-protesters-pleading-with-them-not-to-destroy-years-of-work-7704223.html

Australian imports of ivermectin increase tenfold, prompting warning from TGA

 

The drug, used to deworm livestock, has been touted among rightwing media as a Covid treatment, prompting the US FDA to tweet ‘You are not a cow’

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/30/australian-imports-of-ivermectin-increase-10-fold-prompting-warning-from-tga

 

Read from top.

 

assange

By Bernd Debusmann Jr BBC News, Washington 

Approximately 18,000 cows were killed in a blast at a Texas dairy farm earlier this week, according to local authorities. 

The explosion, at South Fork Dairy near the town of Dimmitt, also left one person in critical condition. 

Authorities believe that machinery in the facility may have ignited methane gas. 

Nearly three million farm animals died in fires across the US between 2018 and 2021. 

 

Castro County Sheriff's Office said they had received a report of a fire at the farm at about 19:21 on Monday (01:21 GMT Tuesday). 

Photos posted by the Sheriff's Office show a huge plume of black smoke rising from the ground. 

 

When police and emergency personnel arrived at the scene, they found one person trapped who had to be rescued and flown to hospital in critical condition. 

While the exact figure of cows that were killed by fire and smoke remains unknown, the Sheriff's Office told the BBC that an "estimated 18,000 head of cattle" had been lost. 

• 'Farms are going to need different kinds of robots' 

Speaking to local news outlet KFDA, Sheriff Sal Rivera said that most of the cattle had been lost after the blaze spread to an area in which cows were held before being taken to a milking area and then into a holding pen.

"There's some that survived," he was quoted as saying. "There's some that are probably injured to the point where they'll have to be destroyed." 

Mr Rivera told KFDA that investigators believed the fire might have started with a machine referred to as a "honey badger", which he described as "vacuum that sucks the manure and water out". 

"Possibly [it] got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded," he said. 

 

In a statement sent to the BBC, the Washington DC-based Animal Welfare Institute said that - if confirmed - a death toll of 18,000 cows would be "by far" the deadliest barn fire involving cattle since it began keeping statistics in 2013. 

"We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt common sense fire safety measures," said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI's farm animal program. "It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive."

According to the AWI, nearly 6.5m farm animals have been killed in barn fires since 2013, of which about 6m were chickens and about 7,300 were cows. 

Between 2018 and 2021, nearly 3 million farm animals died in fire, with 1.76m chickens dying in the six largest fires over that time period. 

 READ MORE:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65258108  READ FROM TOP.   SEE ALSO:  

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