Think eating "organic" meat is okay? Think again

(NaturalNews) An undercover investigation into an organic slaughterhouse has challenged the assumption that ethically certified meat is any better than the regular kind.

The British animal welfare organization Animal Aid secretly planted cameras inside a slaughterhouse operated by Tom Lang, whose facility had been certified for the "humane slaughter" of organic animals by the Soil Association. The organization chose Lang's slaughterhouse precisely because it is certified to the highest standard available in the United Kingdom.

Forty hours of secret footage uncovered tightly packed animals being driven up to the facility, where they were chased into the factory by men beating them with sticks. Inside the facility, the animals are beaten once more to be herded into place. In one case, a man is seen punching, kicking and kneeing a pig, then striking it with a steel stunning tong at least 20 times, as the animal screams.

Striking animals is a violation of Soil Association rules and national slaughtering regulations.

Regulations also require that animals be killed or have their throats slit within 15 seconds of being stunned, yet the tape shows animals left for much longer. One sheep was hung upside down for at least 50 seconds, during which time it began to jerk and struggle before being stabbed.

After the release of the video, the Soil Association rescinded Lang's humane slaughter certification. The Meat Hygiene Service suspended three slaughterers, opened a criminal investigation and implemented an increase in random checks of the facility.

A Daily Mail article notes that such welfare violations are widespread, with 166 slaughterhouses throughout the United Kingdom being reprimanded and 33 being prosecuted on more than 450 different occasions in the past three years. These cases do not reflect practices occurring when inspectors are not around.

In some cases, inspectors are intimidated out of reporting violations, an anonymous source told the Mail.

'"If you become rigorous about enforcing the rules the slaughtermen become very aggressive," he said. "They tell you bluntly that if you're too keen, they will simply run over you with a truck or push you into a machine, but it would look like an accident."

Sources for this story include: www.dailymail.co.uk.

70 Percent of antibiotics used on animals slaughtered for food

(NaturalNews) Widespread antibiotic use in animal agriculture is drawing increasing fire as a primary cause of the growing prevalence of drug-resistant and ever more lethal superbugs.

"There is clear evidence of the human health consequences [from agricultural use of antibiotics, including] infections that would not have otherwise occurred, increased frequency of treatment failures (in some cases death) and increased severity of infections," the World Health Organization wrote in 2003.

Seventy percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are used promote growth or prevent infection in healthy farm animals -- in other words, animals that are not showing any signs of disease.

"The heavy reliance on routine antibiotic use is a byproduct of the way we raise animals for food: packed into dim and dirty enclosures where they live amid their own filth, eat food that they haven't evolved to digest, and are pretty much stacked atop one another," writes columnist Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.

The food industry claims that such antibiotic use is necessary to keep food prices low for consumers.

"That really is a strange defense," said U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter. "We keep animals in such deplorable conditions that they'll become sick as a dog if we don't dose them?"

The industry's argument is weak on financial grounds as well, Klein says. According to a study conducted by researchers at Tufts University, antibiotic resistant infections cost the U.S. health-care system $50 billion per year. In contrast, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ending non-therapeutic antibiotic use in farm animals would raise the cost of meat consumption by $5 to $10 per person per year.

"I'd pay that for a lower risk of super-staphylococcus," Klein writes.

Slaughter has introduced a bill, H.R. 1549, that would ban non-medical use of the most effective human antibiotics.

"The bill preserves the seven most effective classes of antibiotics for human use only," she said. "They can be used to treat sick animals, but they can't be used to simply raise animals."

Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com.