Why Are the Feds Abusing Research Animals?

Why Are the Feds

Abusing Research Animals?

—By Tom Philpott
| Wed Jan. 21, 2015 6:00 AM EST

The ace New York Times food/agriculture reporter Michael Moss has an excellent long piece on the US Meat Animal Research Center, a US Department of Agriculture-run institution that, Moss writes, has "one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit." As a result of its laser focus on that task, Moss shows, the center has routinely subjected animals to cruel conditions since its inception in 1964, unchecked by the Animal Welfare Act, which exempts farm animals used in research. The article is littered with images of calves born mangled, newborn lambs abandoned to die in the cold overnight, and piglets crushed by their mothers—all the routine result of federally funded experiments.

What strikes me is the cold, industrial vision of livestock farming embodied by the research center: animals as inert commodities to be manufactured as cheaply as possible, like microchips or screws. Physiology becomes a production process to be hacked for the convenience of producers. Cows only give birth to one calf at a time? Inefficient and unacceptable! Moss draws out the grotesque tale of a project designed to change that, spearheaded by the center's founding director, Keith E. Gregory. Back in 1981, Moss reports, Gregory published a paper comparing the cow's modest reproductive powers with those of the prolific catfish, which churns out "more than 1,000 times its weight in offspring."

Thus launched a long effort to make cows more catfishlike: Engineer them (using conventional breeding techniques) to birth twins, not one-offs. And it succeeded—sort of. By 2000, Moss reports, cows in the experiment were birthing twins 55 percent of the time vs. the normal rate of 3 percent. But…

Some 95 percent of the females born with male siblings had deformed vaginas. Many of the twins died during birth as their eight legs became tangled. Even calves born singly had trouble getting out: The mothers had been bred with such large wombs, to accommodate twins, that the calf could not get enough traction. And the breeding increasingly yielded triplets, with 12 legs to get tangled.

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/01/why-usda-abusing-animals-service-meat-industry