Why Are the Feds Abusing Research Animals?

Do I look like a catfish to you? <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-147941570/stock-photo-cows-grazing-on-a-green-meadow-at-sunny-day.html?src=dt_last_search-8">Dudarev Mikhail</a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The ace New York Times food/agriculture reporter Michael Moss has an excellent long piece on the US Meat Animal Research Center, a US Department of Agriculture-run institution that, Moss writes, has “one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit.” As a result of its laser focus on that task, Moss shows, the center has routinely subjected animals to cruel conditions since its inception in 1964, unchecked by the Animal Welfare Act, which exempts farm animals used in research. The article is littered with images of calves born mangled, newborn lambs abandoned to die in the cold overnight, and piglets crushed by their mothers—all the routine result of federally funded experiments.

What strikes me is the cold, industrial vision of livestock farming embodied by the research center: animals as inert commodities to be manufactured as cheaply as possible, like microchips or screws. Physiology becomes a production process to be hacked for the convenience of producers. Cows only give birth to one calf at a time? Inefficient and unacceptable! Moss draws out the grotesque tale of a project designed to change that, spearheaded by the center’s founding director, Keith E. Gregory. Back in 1981, Moss reports, Gregory published a paper comparing the cow’s modest reproductive powers with those of the prolific catfish, which churns out “more than 1,000 times its weight in offspring.”

Thus launched a long effort to make cows more catfishlike: Engineer them (using conventional breeding techniques) to birth twins, not one-offs. And it succeeded—sort of. By 2000, Moss reports, cows in the experiment were birthing twins 55 percent of the time vs. the normal rate of 3 percent. But…

Some 95 percent of the females born with male siblings had deformed vaginas. Many of the twins died during birth as their eight legs became tangled. Even calves born singly had trouble getting out: The mothers had been bred with such large wombs, to accommodate twins, that the calf could not get enough traction. And the breeding increasingly yielded triplets, with 12 legs to get tangled.

As a result, he writes, “16.5 percent of twins and triplets were dying, a rate more than four times that of single calves.”

Still, the center thought it had handed the beef industry a great gift—at a beef conference, center officials “acknowledged the high death rates, yet argued that the math still worked in ranchers’ favor,” because, “the combined weight of surviving twin cows was nearly 50 percent more, on average, than for conventional cows.”

Instead of trying to turn cows into catfishesque baby-making machines, USDA could figure out best practices for diversified livestock ag.

Ironically, the idea of cows tweaked to birth twin calves creeped out Big Beef, an industry not normally known for turning squeamish in pursuit of profit. The idea never caught on among cattle ranchers, and the program petered out in 2013. “The surviving cows were sold, though the center is still trying with little success to sell the bulls’ semen,” Moss writes. Your tax dollars at work! The piece teases out similarly vexed efforts to jack up pigs’ birth output. One initiative that did succeed, according to Moss, was a program to breed pigs to be much leaner—creating flavor-challenged pork and sows that are “so low in fat that one in five females cannot reproduce,” Moss writes.

Now, a lot of people will read Moss’ exposé and conclude that the US Meat Animal Research Center must be defunded and closed. But publicly financed ag research is vital to maintaining a resilient, plentiful food supply in era of climate chaos and ecological crisis in farm country. Federal ag research funding has been flat in recent years, and a rising tide of agribusiness cash has played an increasingly dominant role in setting the research agenda, especially in the meat field.

But there’s no reason that federal livestock research should exist purely to boost the profits of the big meat packers, which rely on highly specialized farms called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that stuff thousands animals tightly together. It has been well established that diversified farms, ones that produce meat as well as crops, are more ecologically sound (PDF) than specialized ones.

But now that diversified farms have largely been driven out of business over the past several decades, few farmers (or the bankers they rely on for financing) are willing to take the risk of, say, periodically rotating beef cows into fields now dominated by corn and soybeans, even though such a system would likely sequester carbon and rebuild depleted soil. And that’s where the US Meat Animal Research Center could come in. Instead of spending years and untold resources trying to turn cows into catfishesque baby-making machines, they could do on-the-ground research to figure out best practices for diversified livestock ag. Don’t slaughter federal livestock research; nurture it so that it grows into something that benefits the public—while also respecting animal welfare.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate