Man Who Killed the Mad Cow Has Questions of His Own NYT 2/3/04

[Guest guest]

The ways of the Lord are indeed mysterious. I predict that this cow

slaughterer creates more vegetarians in the next week than any of us on this

conference.

 

Note his comment about the "magic burger." Hope he becomes a vegetarian, too,

and improves his spiritual life.

 

ys

hkdd

 

***************************

New York Times February 3, 2004

 

Man Who Killed the Mad Cow Has Questions of His Own

 

 

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

 

 

Shooting a cow turned Dave Louthan into a crusader.

 

On Dec. 9, at Vern's Moses Lake Meats in Moses Lake, Wash.,

Mr. Louthan killed the only mad cow found in the United

States.

 

Two weeks later, he says, he was dismissed after four years

as Vern's slaughterer when he talked to the television

crews outside and told them he was sure the cow, ground

into hamburger, had already been eaten. The plant's owners

did not return calls seeking comment.

 

"I got a big mouth," he said in a telephone interview.

 

 

Since then, it has gotten bigger. Using borrowed computers

- he has none of his own, only "a microwave and a TV that

gets four channels" - he started writing to newspapers, and

is to testify today before the Washington State

Legislature.

 

Contrary to reports from the federal Department of

Agriculture, he asserts that the cow he killed was not too

sick to walk. And it was caught not by routine

surveillance, he says, but by "a fluke": he killed it

outdoors because he feared it would trample other cows

lying prostrate in its trailer, and the plant's testing

program called for sampling cows killed outside only.

 

"Mad cows aren't downers," he said. "They're up and they're

crazy." The Agriculture Department disputes his account.

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, a food safety official, faxed copies

of the Dec. 9 inspector's report saying the cow was

"sternal," or down on its chest.

 

Mr. Louthan said he believed the government changed the

report on Dec. 23, during the panic at Vern's when a

positive test was found. The "smoking gun," he said, is

that it is the only one on the page marked "unable to get

temp" while other cows' temperatures were recorded. It is

easy, he said, to get a rectal temperature from a downed

cow but hard from a jumpy one.

 

Dr. Petersen said that he had no indication the records

were altered and that the veterinarian had told him the

animal was lying so close to the trailer wall that a

thermometer could not be used.

 

In his new role as bloody-handed industry critic, Mr.

Louthan argues that too few cattle are tested for mad cow

to say with certainty that beef is safe. "One mad cow is a

scare, but two is an epidemic," he said. "They absolutely,

positively don't want to find another."

 

Ed Curlett, a department spokesman, said about 83 a month

were tested at Vern's from October to December. (The

testing began only in October, when the government starting

paying $10 a brain sample.)

 

The department has not changed last year's plans to test

40,000 cows nationwide this year, out of 30 million

slaughtered. Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American

Meat Institute, which represents slaughterhouses, called

that "plenty sufficient from a statistical standpoint."

 

Mr. Louthan, who lives across the street from Vern's, said

that the slaughtering was "still going like crazy" but that

an inspector in the plant told him no more mad cow testing

was being done.

 

Dr. Petersen said he did not know if Vern's was testing.

 

 

On Jan. 4, an angry Mr. Louthan started sending e-mail

messages to all the inspectors on the department's Web

site, asking, "Are you just going to sit there with your

hands in your pockets?" and accusing Agriculture Secretary

Ann M. Veneman of lying when she said American beef was

safe.

 

Since then, he said, green department cars have parked

outside his house "trying to scare me."

 

He gave the name and number of one agent who he said had

told him to get in the car and ordered him to stop sending

e-mail. The agent refused to speak to a reporter, but a

spokesman said Mr. Louthan had asked that they talk in the

agent's car and the agent did not intimidate, harass or

argue with him.

 

Mr. Louthan is no animal-rights champion. His good-old-boy

braggadocio and Texas drawl make him sound like a

parking-lot matador with a knocking gun - a tube with a

blank pistol cartridge that drives a bolt into the brain.

Killing is "really fun," and beats deboning, which he calls

"girls' work."

 

"I'm fast, I'm efficient, and I know how to get in through

their flight zones," he said, meaning the way nervous cows

turn to flee.

 

At Vern's, he killed about 20 old dairy cows a day and

buffaloes on Thursdays, along with the odd ostrich, emu and

alpaca.

 

The now famous cow, he said, was a white Holstein from the

Sunny Dene Ranch in Mabton, Wash.

 

She was "a good walker," he said. As the driver poked her

with a cattle prod, her eyes were "all white, bugging out."

 

 

"She wouldn't come down that step," he went on, "and I knew

she was fixing to double back in and trample the downers,

and that's a mess," so he killed her there.

 

Mr. Louthan was also the plant's carcass splitter, and he

has a warning about that too.

 

With a 400-pound band saw, he said, splitters cleave the

spinal column from neck to tail as hot-water jets blast fat

and bone dust off the saw. The slurry, with spinal cord in

it, "runs all over the beef," he said. The carcasses are

then hosed with hot water and sprayed with vinegar.

 

Bucky Gwartney, director of research for the National

Cattlemen's Beef Association, confirmed that most American

slaughterhouses do the same. Since the Dec. 31 ruling that

all cows older than 30 months must have their brains and

spinal cords removed, "processors are actively looking at

changes," he said.

 

Mr. Louthan said the agent who ordered him to be quiet

suggested that he was akin to "an urban terrorist" for

spreading alarm about beef.

 

"I'm not," Mr. Louthan said. "I just want to enjoy my

cheeseburger like anybody else. I don't want to think: Is

this the magic burger that's going to kill me?"

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/health/03COW.html?ex=1076954901&ei=1&en=b8a07

8ed9f04ba63

 

 

 

 

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