Photo Credit: Michael Zysman
August 9, 2013
|
“
A culture that views pigs as inanimate piles of protoplasmic
structure to be manipulated however cleverly the human mind can conceive
will view its citizens the same way -- and other cultures.” –Joe Salatin,
Restoring Health, Wealth and Respect to Food and Farming
We
associate food with at most, pleasure, at the very least, survival.
It’s not too different for animals. Lambs turned out on new grass move
“quickly over certain grasses to get to others – to nosh on clover and
mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way,” writes
Dan Barber in
A Chef Speaks Out. Wild pigs, capable of
seeking out the nutrients they need, “enjoy eating nuts, roots, fruits, mushrooms, bugs, rabbits, and, occasionally, dead animals.”
But
what happens when animals are confined in cramped, filthy environments
and force-fed monoculture diets of genetically modified corn and soy?
A
lot can happen. Calves are born too weak to walk, with enlarged joints
and limb deformities. Piglets experience rapidly deteriorating health, a
“failure to thrive” so severe that they start breaking down their own
tissues and organs – self-cannibalizing – to survive. Many animals
suffer from weak, brittle bones that easily fracture. Dairy cows develop
mastitis, a painful udder infection. Beef cattle develop liver
abscesses and an excruciating condition referred to as “twisted gut.”
It
all adds up to a lot of misery for animals unfortunate enough to be on
the receiving end of industrial agriculture’s Big GMO Experiment.
The
spotlight on animal rights in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operations) is typically focused on cramped spaces and blatantly
inhumane treatment. But some scientists, farmers and veterinarians are
talking about another form of animal abuse: stuffing animals with feed
grown from genetically engineered crops drenched in glyphosate, the key
ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp.
What they’ve uncovered should
give us all pause. Because the symptoms veterinarians and researchers
have observed in animals are not unlike many of the chronic, and
increasingly prevalent, health problems plaguing humans today. Digestive
disorders. Damaged organs. Infertility. Weak immune systems. Chronic
depression.
“We’ve got a real mess,” says Dr. Art Dunham, an Iowa
veterinarian who has treated farm animals for several decades. Dunham is
a staunch believer that GMO crops are wreaking havoc with the health of
animals and humans. His daughter, Leah Dunham, who tagged along with
her father on many a farm visit over the years, recently wrote
America’s Two-Headed Pig. Drawing on her father’s clinical notes, and the
work of scientists like
Dr. Don Huber, professor
emeritus in plant pathology at Purdue University, Leah Dunham outlines
some of the ways in which humans are adding to the suffering of farm
animals by feeding them a glyphosate-tainted, GMO diet.
Leah
Dunham would like to see the CAFO model drastically overhauled or
abandoned. Her father believes it’s more realistic to tackle the issue
of GMO feed without attacking CAFOs. But father and daughter agree that
the problems associated with today’s industrial agriculture model extend
beyond the health and well-being of animals. Leah Dunham wrote:
My
father has pored over thousands of research papers in attempts to
remedy the underlying causes of the illnesses described in this book.
His work has embodied a commitment to healthy lands, creatures, and
farms, as well as the hard work necessary to sustain them. After years
of listening to him talk about his attempts to solve reoccurring health
problems, I realized that most people don’t have a clue as to how modern
disease complexities affect farm animals. We both hope that this book
will help all medical professionals, farmers, and consumers better
address the true roots of various medical conditions, including nutrient
deficiencies, clostridial infections, diabetes, and Parkinsons disease.
Leah
Dunham says consumers are alarmed by news reports that focus on
outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. But most are unaware that industrial
GMO crops are “damaging our health in other, far more insidious ways –
among them, by damaging the health of animals raised for food.”
Here are a few examples, from
America’s Two-Headed Pig, of how Art and Leah Dunham believe genetically modified feeds, and particularly glyphosate, inflict suffering on farm animals.
Skeletal deformities
In
his many years of practice, Art Dunham hadn’t seen a single case of
manganese deficiency in the herds he treated. But that changed in about
2000, when he started seeing more and more calves being born with
skeletal deformities – a symptom of a manganese-deficient diet.
Initially skeptical, Dunham experimented by adding manganese to the
calves’ diets. Their health improved. His hunch was confirmed when lab
results on some of the dead calves’ livers revealed little or no
manganese.
Dunham was confused. A diet of corn, soybean meal and
hay should contain enough manganese for hogs, dairy and beef cattle. But
it started to make more sense when he came across a
study conducted
in 2007 by Dr. Huber. Huber found that by spraying manganese on
soybeans 10-14 days after the soybeans were sprayed with glyphosate,
farmers could increase crop yields. Why? Huber postulated that the
glyphosate caused some crops to become manganese-deficient because it
was binding to nutrients in the soil and plants. Crops sprayed with
glyphosate were less able to metabolize the nutrients needed for proper
plant function, which made the plants susceptible to disease.
Could
this be why calves fed manganese-deficient crops sprayed in glyphosate
showed their own symptoms of manganese deficiency, including enlarged
joints, deformed limbs and crippling weakness? The evidence was
convincing and the theory plausible, if unproven.
Failure to thrive
It’s
both disturbing and increasingly common in North America in recent
decades, according to Leah Dunham. About five to 10 days after normal,
healthy piglets are weaned off their mother’s milk, they become gaunt,
pale, anorexic. Their health goes south, rapidly. It’s called
“post-weaning failure to thrive syndrome” or PFTS. It causes piglets to
catabolize, or break down, their own tissues and organs, essentially
self-cannibalizing. Next comes emaciation. Then euthanasia.
Does a
virus cause PFTS? Studies suggest not, says Dunham. More likely, the
cause is diet-related, as the disease manifests when the piglets begin
eating food. The diet theory is supported by post-mortems showing that
the affected piglets have lesions in their stomachs and intestines.
Could
PFTS represent another case of something essential missing from the
piglets’ diets? Possibly. Liver analyses of hogs reveal “rock-bottom”
low levels of cobalt. In fact, out of 522 livers tested, none hit the
normal range for cobalt, established before GMO feed came on the market.
Perhaps not coincidentally, according to Dunham, researchers at Texas A
& M University have found that glyphosate ties up cobalt at 102-103
times more than it ties up manganese.
Twisted gut, ulcers and other digestive disorders
Nature
intended for cows to eat grass. But today, most cattle spend at least
the last six months of their lives in feedlots, where they’re fattened
up with a combination of grains, mostly corn, and industrial byproducts
including corn distiller, a product of the ethanol manufacturing
process. This mixture is supplemented with preemptive antibiotics and
growth hormones, to keep the stressed animals from getting sick while
making them grow larger, faster. It’s an unnatural diet that often leads
to digestive disorders. Factor in the glyphosate used to grow the GMO
corn, and you’ve got a recipe for a host of painful conditions, from
twisted gut to bloody diarrhea, ulcers, and bloat. All of which
contribute to a weak immune system, Dunham says.
A cow’s stomach
has four parts: the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. A twisted
gut, or medically speaking, a displaced abomasum, occurs when a cow’s
abomasum fills with gas, causing it to balloon up to the top of the
cow’s abdomen, where it can become twisted. Remedies can include surgery
or repositioning the abomasum by rolling the cow on its back.
That’s
bad enough. But sometimes trapped gas causes a cow’s stomach to bloat.
To relieve the animal’s pain and keep it “productive,” a veterinarian
will insert a hollow needle into the cow’s rumen to try to release the
gas. If the cow doesn’t recover enough to then start relieving the gas
on its own, it will be fitted with a permanent port, similar to what a
chemo patient has in order to receive regular doses of chemotherapy.
According
to Dunham, twisted gut and bloat are usually related to inadequate
nutrition, which leads to bacterial imbalances in the gut, which cause
gas. Not unlike humans, cattle host large quantities of bacteria which
they need in order to digest plants and grains and absorb available
nutrients from their food. Alter the bacterial content of the cow’s gut,
and the gut can become extra acidic, irritated and inflamed, says
Dunham.
Consumers know that CAFO cows are routinely fed preemptive
antibiotics, which alter the animals’ gut bacteria. But what many
people don’t realize, says Dunham, is that the animals are consuming far
more antibiotics than just those intentionally administered at the
feeding lots. In fact, many of the pesticides, including glyphosate
patented under the number #7771736, act not only as broad-spectrum
pesticides, but as broad-spectrum biocides. And these antibiotic
chemicals are applied to millions of acres of plants that end up in
animal feed, Dunham says. The result? Some of the animals’ gut bacteria
and parasitic organisms are no longer able to carry out important
metabolic processes, says Dunham.
Is it a stretch to say that
force-feeding animals GMO feed amounts to a form of torture? Damaged
livers. Too weak to walk. Needles jammed into stomachs. Failure to
thrive. All unnecessary suffering, all diet-related.
Leah Dunham stops short of using the word “torture,” but in her book, she argues that we can do better. She writes:
As
other food advocates have pointed out, we have learned how to
dissociate what we spend from the farmers and citizens our food dollars
affect. In doing so, we can avoid thinking about how our actions affect
actual creatures.
I suspect that one day future generations will
remember the last three decades as a ridiculous age in American
agriculture. This has been an age during which too many human beings
treated animals and children like guinea pigs, feeding them genetically
modified, chemically coated, antibiotic resistant experiments, despite
the overwhelming evidence that these foods are serious risk factors for
illness and disease. In today’s world of widely accessible research and
technological advances, the ability to produce abundant amounts of food
without threatening biodiversity and our basic biological rights should
be an expectation, not a goal.
And let’s not forget the basic
biological rights of the four-legged creatures unfortunate enough to be
part of industrial agriculture’s CAFO systems.
Katherine Paul is director of development and communications at the Organic Consumers Association.
