Canada May Step Up Its Livestock Controls

The cow was obviously sick. It was stumbling. It was “still alive,” farmer Marwyn Peaster said. “It was just not getting up anymore.” Still, the animal that started Canada’s “mad cow” disease crisis was loaded on a truck and taken to a slaughterhouse in Alberta province.

There, an inspector, suspecting pneumonia, flagged the cow and sent it off for rendering as animal feed. Though stumbling and other characteristics of a “downed” cow can be hallmarks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, only a small proportion of such cows are tested for BSE in Canada, a senior Canadian food inspection official said Thursday.

Last year, in fact, this country tested only about 3,300 of an estimated 55,000 cattle that were too sick or incapacitated to walk. An unknown number of such “downer,” or nonambulatory, cows that show no overt signs of BSE -- which is not always apparent on visual inspection -- are forwarded through slaughterhouses to the human food supply, especially at less regulated provincial slaughterhouses, regulators say.

Tens of thousands, like Peaster’s cow, are rendered into feed for chickens, pigs and horses, which are not thought to be susceptible to BSE. And no one knows, the mad cow investigation here is making increasingly clear, how much chicken feed is inadvertently fed back to cattle.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency this week ordered the slaughter of an estimated 60 cows from three British Columbia farms that had received feed manufactured from the BSE-infected cow, after investigators said they “could not conclusively rule out” the accidental distribution of the contaminated feed to cows on the farms.

All told, 10 Canadian feed mills received parts of the infected cow, and some of it was processed into dry dog food and chicken feed, authorities say.

Now, the cattle industry in Canada is losing an estimated $11 million a day under a ban on Canadian beef imports by the U.S. and six other nations. And so, in an effort to restore buyers’ confidence, Canadian authorities say they will consider ramping up their BSE inspections, putting in place more exhaustive livestock tracking systems and reevaluating the use of potentially contaminated animal proteins in livestock feed.

“We are collectively committed to learning and improving our approaches to keep Canada’s food and animal system at the forefront of the world,” Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief told reporters Thursday.

With North America increasingly vigilant against the kind of mad cow crisis that devastated the British cattle industry in the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. already has tripled its BSE inspections over the last two years and is considering stricter measures to protect against the possibility of BSE in “downer” cows.

In Canada, by contrast, inspectors order BSE testing on only a fraction of cattle rejected for human consumption, Carolyn Inch, national manager of disease control for the food inspection agency, said Thursday. But, she added, “we’re going to try and change that and sample them all. It will take time, but not that much time, I think.”

Canada, like the U.S., immediately tests all cows that show classic symptoms of a nervous system disease like BSE: staggering, rolling eyes, vibrating head. But Peaster’s cow had none of those symptoms, and agriculture experts have long believed that if BSE is present in North American herds, it could well be present in a cow that doesn’t exhibit classic symptoms but is merely lying down, thin and listless -- much like Peaster’s cow and thousands of others that show up at slaughterhouses each year.

Many large supermarket chains and fast food outlets have policies against buying beef from such incapacitated cows, but agriculture experts say an unknown number make it into the food supply in Canada and the U.S. through secondary outlets.

“You’ve got dairymen out there, they don’t have to worry about cleaning up their downers. They take them to the slaughterhouse, and though less and less slaughter plants want them -- your big plants just don’t accept downers anymore -- you’ve got smaller plants that are getting to be a niche market of downers,” said Temple Grandin, associate professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

“They sell to Joe’s taco stands, Joe’s Bar and Grill. They sell to the rubbish niche. There will always be certain restaurants that’ll buy that stuff,” Grandin said.

There is strong evidence that eating products contaminated with the agent that causes BSE may cause humans to develop a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a disorder that can lead to paralysis and death.

In Canada, about 2% of cattle are slaughtered in abattoirs that are not federally licensed, do not export meat and are not required to have federal meat inspectors on hand. A cow like Peaster’s might have cleared such a facility, British Columbia’s health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, said in an interview.

“They tend to be smaller. They can range anywhere from a lean-to where a farmer goes to take a couple cows to be slaughtered for his winter food supply to a larger place that supplies several butcher shops,” he said.

Although there are health inspections, Kendall said, the meat product “really depends on the nature of the plant. If you don’t have a vet inspecting the animals, there’s always a chance that a sick animal will go in, because the person who stands to lose if the animal doesn’t go through is the person who makes the decision on whether it goes through or not.”

Dr. Gerald Ollis, chief veterinarian in Alberta, where the diseased cow was identified, said a large number of nonambulatory cows can be considered healthy for human consumption: for example, cattle with broken legs, dairy cows that no longer produce milk or cows that are too old to become pregnant. He said stringent inspections by veterinarians before and after slaughter are capable of detecting any dangerous disease.

If an inspector suspects BSE, the head is sent for testing and the carcass is not permitted to be rendered for feed production, he said.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Assn. has guidelines for the humane treatment of nonambulatory cattle and generally recommends that they be dispatched on farms, not sent to slaughterhouses.

Canadian officials say they will also consider a change in regulations that allow the use of cattle and other ruminant remains in the manufacture of chicken and swine feed. BSE contaminants, known as prions, are not destroyed even in the extremely high heat of the rendering process, and because most cases of BSE are thought to be attributable to the presence of prions in animal feed, Britain has banned all mammal protein in livestock feed.

The U.S. and Canada have less stringent regulations in place, allowing cattle material in feed but only if it’s clearly marked for chicken and livestock.

The problem, analysts say, is enforcing the restrictions.

“What if somebody’s a contract grower for one of the big chicken companies and he’s raising a calf in his backyard? He helps himself to some of the chicken feed,” Grandin said.

Downer cows are also an issue in feed production, since about 44% of the 1 million cattle that die before slaughter on farms each year are sent for rendering.

Bradford Duplisea, an independent researcher for the Canadian Health Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, says elk and deer potentially contaminated with chronic wasting disease, which is similar to BSE, also are used to produce chicken feed.

“The point is these rendering plants are basically a black hole. There’s no regulators at all,” Duplisea said.

In addition, some cattle material, such as blood and gelatin, continues to go into cattle feed, he said.

“Right now, we’re testing only a small percentage of our cattle herd. And they’re only testing cows that are really sick. Remember that animals that have mad cow don’t usually show it for five years, and yet they’re usually slaughtered at 30 months,” Duplisea said. “The fact is, if you test enough animals in Canada and the United States, you’re going to find mad cow disease.”