January 12, 2004 National Public Radio (NPR) Morning Edition

The US Department of Agriculture is working on rules to enforce its new ban on downer cows. These are sick or injured cows that until now have been used in the food supply. Support for the ban began building more than 17 years ago. During that time each chamber of Congress has voted to support it, yet the ban never became law until an outbreak of mad cow disease made it happen almost overnight. NPR's Allison Aubrey reports.

ALLISON AUBREY reporting:

In 1986, animal rights activist Gene Bauston set out to expose the practice of slaughtering downer cattle, cows too sick or lame to walk into the slaughterhouse. Bauston sneaked around stockyards, shooting photos of injured cows and then took his pictures to local media. But his earliest efforts in the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, backfired. News organizations were reluctant to criticize their hometown industry.

Mr. GENE BAUSTON (Founder, Farm Sanctuary): At first the local news reports would say things like 'Lancaster stockyards, a pillar of the community, is now being criticized by these vegetarians who live in a school bus on a tofu farm.' That was the kind of news reporting that you would hear, and it was true, but, you know, to spin it in those terms, you know, tended to marginalize what we were doing and what Farm Sanctuary was as an organization.

AUBREY: Farm Sanctuary, which Bauston founded. rescues downed animals from stockyards. It's a service, he says, that wouldn't be needed if sick animals were never sent to market in the first place. Frustrated at the local level, Bauston brought his message to Washington. He hoped to find lawmakers who'd support a ban on the use of downer meat but in the capital he ran up against the well-organized meat industry. Bauston found his arguments against animal cruelty didn't go far.

Mr. BAUSTON: It was in agribusiness's interest not to talk about this and unfortunately they've had some very friendly allies in Congress who have, you know, allowed them to get away with this.

AUBREY: In order to sell lawmakers on a ban, Bauston realized he needed more than just an animal rights message. He needed to make a connection to public health, something to suggest that sick animals make for bad meat and possibly sick people. Bauston found allies in the early '90s. Howard Lyman is a former rancher turned vegetarian who reached out to a group of US Department of Agriculture staffers who were open to the idea of a downer ban. Some had followed new scientific research that suggested downer cattle were prone to carry disease. Others had assessed the actual cost to farmers of taking downer animals out of production.

Mr. HOWARD LYMAN: Many of the program people in USDA looked at it and said it would not be an earth-shaking financial decision to eliminate those from the human food supply. But I guarantee you that when we got to the upper echelon people, the ones that were appointed, the ones they call the revolving door people, that came out of the industry, there was total opposition to doing anything about it.

AUBREY: In other words, Lyman says, the USDA's top decision-makers put the meat industry's profits ahead of publichealth concerns. This is unfair criticism, says Linda Dutweiler(ph). She's a former top-level veterinarian with the USDA's inspection service. She explains the ag department started watching downer cattle in the mid-'90s, but she says they never had good evidence to suggest that downers were vulnerable to mad cow, also known as BSE, until late 1999.

Dr. LINDA DUTWEILER (Former USDA Veterinarian): No one perceived or no one recognized that the downers may be a good population to do surveillance on. But when Switzerland in 1999 did a massive study on their downer cow population, and they found that there was a higher level of BSE, that reinforced, you know, surveillance in the downers.

AUBREY: By the time USDA increased surveillance of downers, mad cow in Europe and E.coli outbreaks and meat recalls in the US had made the public more wary of its food supply. Fast food chains like Wendy's and McDonald's moved to rid their meat supply of downed cattle and some of the nation's top meat processors announced they'd no longer accept downers. With so much attention, a congressional ban on downers in the food chain gained momentum. Farm Sanctuary's Gene Bauston.

Mr. BAUSTON: I think that members of Congress started to come to recognize that downed animals did present a risk to human health.

AUBREY: The activist worked with New York Congressman Gary Ackerman who sponsored the Downed Animal Protection Act but they immediately drew the opposition of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Cattleman Jay Truitt says his group was not just protecting its wallet. He says downer animals are not necessarily diseased and that taking them to market is the best way to find out if they are.

Mr. JAY TRUITT (Cattleman): You have to test and surveil the animals that are of the highest risk, which were these particular animals, which you need them to move through the system at some point in their life, especially if they're showing any of these signs of this disease, and have a licensed, trained veterinarian, actually, that understands what to look for and how to identify the disease so that we can identify whether or not the animal is safe.

AUBREY: That argument had swayed lawmakers in the past, but it was trumped by talk of disease. The House and Senate both passed the ban on downer cattle as part of the 2002 Farm Bill yet it still did not take effect. During closed-door House-Senate conference negotiations, a few lawmakers with strong ties to the cattle industry were able to strip the ban from the final version of the larger bill.

Mr. TRUITT: In public when there's an open discussion of these issues, legislators, even those very friendly to agribusiness, tend to be a little bit more sympathetic to these issues but unfortunately they have always acted differently in private.

AUBREY: The Senate passed the ban a second time last summer. But, again, it was stripped from the final legislation, then two days before Christmas, came this headline: 'Mad Cow Found In The US.' With that news, the US Department of Agriculture stepped in, using its regulatory authority to settle the issue that Congress had so far delayed.