Animal rights group attacks livestock system
Report cites overuse of antibiotics
Poultry waste fed to cattle, pigs pumped wit h g rowth- promoting antibiotics, and mounds of manure dumped in ditches.
These and other scenarios are used to take aim at the “largely hidden” costs of intensive livestock operations to public health, the environment and rural community development in a report to be published today by the Canadian office of the World Society for the Protection of Animals.
“Our industrial animal agriculture system is actually quite expensive. That’s the biggest myth we’re trying to bust with this report — that there are so many hidden costs. As an animal welfare group, we know that this food system causes the most animal suffering, but it has more far-reaching impacts than that,” Melissa Matlow, the group’s campaign manager for humane and sustainable agriculture, said in an interview.
The 163-page report — titled What’s on Your Plate: The Hidden Costs of Industrial Animal Agriculture in Canada — is the culmination of an 20-month project that began when the organization convened recognized experts in their fields and commissioned a multidisciplinary review of the effects of Canada’s industrial animal agriculture practices.
The team developed a set of policy recommendations, examined by external reviewers with expertise in Canadian food policy, resource management and environmental law. Thomas Axworthy of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., who served as a senior policy adviser to prime minister Pierre Trudeau, wrote the foreword to the report.
“Industrial agriculture has given us plentiful and cheap food, but at great cost. The value of the WSPA study is that these costs are described in detail so that Canadians can be better informed about the trade-offs in our agricultural policies,” Axworthy writes.
The number of farms in Canada has fallen 60 per cent over the past 50 years, while the overall farm size has increased by 141 per cent. A team led by George Khacha-tourians from the University of Saskatchewan’s department of food and bioproduct sciences links the size of these operations to their over-use of antibiotics.
The report calls for the phasing out of non-thera-
Industrial agriculture has given us plentiful and cheap food, but at great cost
THOMAS AXWORTHY
peutic antibiotics used for growth promotion and other agricultural antibiotics that are vital in human and veterinary medicine, including the new generation of antimicrobials used in poultry feed and drinks.
“A critical first step is for provincial governments to follow Quebec’s lead and require veterinary prescriptions for all antibiotics used in animal agriculture,” the report states.
And despite tougher regulations in place to ensure ruminant feed is safe for humans, animals and the environment, the University of Saskatchewan team also highlights that some livestock producers continue to feed poultry manure to livestock.
This can inadvertently result in the ingestion of ruminant meat and bone meal by cattle and contravene the Health of Animals regulations, they write.
“Although the practice has shown significant decline, some producers continue with the custom and risk prosecution,” the report states, citing a recent reminder sent out to producers by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that “poultry manure is not an approved feed ingredient in Canada.”
Irresponsible composting, storage or disposal of manure, a carrier of pathogens such as E. coli O157: H7, is also a significant problem, according to a University of Winnipeg biologist, Eva Pip, who wrote a chapter on pathogens and human health.
“You not only have the source from exposure to the waste, but this can be carried through all down the line from the slaughtering facility to the processing and ultimately at the consumer end, where the product is contaminated. Every year, we have numerous recalls of meat products and also produce where inadvertently vegetables have become contaminated because of these pathogens ending up in soil where the crop is going to be consumed raw,” Pip said in an interview.
The report, bolstered by a chapter on environmental impacts by geographer Tony Weis of the University of Western Ontario in London, recommends that all levels of government should regulate intensive livestock operations as they do other major polluting industrial operations — “subject to the same rules regarding waste treatment and pollutants and enforced by independent inspectors with the authority to issue stiff penalties for infractions.”
Federal and provincial governments should prohibit painful mutilations without anesthetic and phase out the most restrictive confinement systems, the report states. Ottawa also should update its labelling law to require that food be properly labelled according to origin and production methods.