Mad Cow Disease Revisited by Thomas Ogren

I have an MS degree in Agriculture and in one of my poultry classes in college we visited a huge egg ranch. The foreman there explained to us that if you examined the chicken manure you'd find that as much as 25% of the feed had gone through the chickens undigested and was still there in the manure. With this in mind they had started taking chicken manure, steaming it and then drying it, and were now mixing the chickens' own manure back into the chicken feed. By doing this they supposedly were saving some 20% on feed costs!

But then think of what this actually meant: they were feeding the hens their own manure. Also, in these highly confined cages hens would often die and the owners would just pull a dead hen from the cage and toss it into the manure under the cages. Thus, when they "re-processed" all that manure, there were plenty of chicken carcasses in it too. This would mean that they were now feeding chickens to chickens.

In mad cow disease we now know that prions are not killed by heat treatment. Feeding manure back to animals may make some sense from a purely monetary point of view, but from a larger, humanistic, holistic way of looking at things, it seems to be nothing but a recipe for disaster. It would seem that there needs to be more control exercised on what can be fed to not just cattle, but to all domestic farm animals. Our own health is at risk here, and in a sense of fair play, this practice seems to be more than a little insulting to the animals themselves.

Tom Ogren

Author of Allergy-free Gardening, and of, Safe Sex in the Garden www.allergyfreegardening.com

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BIO:

Thomas Ogren is the author of Allergy-Free Gardening, Ten Speed Press. Tom does consulting work on plants and allergies for the USDA, county asthma coalitions, and the Canadian and American Lung Associations. He has appeared on HGTV and The Discovery Channel. His book, Safe Sex in the Garden, was published in 2003. In 2004 Time Warner Books published his latest book: What the Experts May NOT Tell You About: Growing the Perfect Lawn. His website: www.allergyfree-gardening.com

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