"Graham Davis" wrote in message
...
Jim Webster wrote:
"Gianna Stefani" wrote in message
...

"Howard Neil" wrote in message
...

For instance, in livestock farming UK farmers have to comply with
welfare standards (quite right too) and have to abide by identification
rules (every cow and bull has to have an individual passport so the
meat
on your table is traceable back to an individual animal. This ensures a
high quality product but the costs are massive. There are many
countries
in the world where animal welfare is virtually non existent (and where
BSE or poultry diseases, for instance, are rampant) and where the
farmers receive very large subsidies from their government. This allows
them to flood our market with sub standard food.

Sorry to intrude but you cannot get away with that one.
It is funny how I recall British farmers (and feed manufacturers)
happily
feeding ground up sheep to cattle (even though cattle are vegetarian but

who

cares as long as they get fat quickly) which started off the BSE thing
in
the first place.


First done by Germans before the American civil war, standard procedure
in
virtually all the world, actually compulsory in the UK during WW1 and
WW2
and still done in much of the Americas, the EU is about the only place
not
doing it and even here there are discussions about going back to it for
pigs
because it is both environmentally sensible recycling and pigs do eat
meat



The problem was due to a change in processing standards for bone-meal.
Producers of cattle-feed persuaded the government that the waste meat
products could be safely processed at lower temperatures. Oops!

This is one of the causes that was flagged but but is now discounted, what
happened was that the H&SE pointed out that it was safer to use lower rather
than high temperature. The same decision was taken pretty well every where
else in the world and no one else has had problems.


I believe bone-meal was used to supply essential calcium for dairy
cattle to replace that lost in milk production. Without this calcium the
cattle would suffer from milk fever which, oddly enough, displayed some
symptoms not unlike mad-cow disease.

Yes and no, calcium deficiency is something which strikes because, normally
at calving, the animal cannot metabolise calcium rapidly enough. Actually
adding calcium to the diet is counter productive as it makes the system
'lazy' and can even cause trouble. So low calcium diets are often fed in the
run up to calcium so that the animal is metabolising the mineral
efficiently, and then higher levels are fed after calving.
Calcium is cheap to add to a diet, you don't need the MBM for this.
Milk fever and BSE are very similar for symptoms, indeed talk to any older
vet and many of them will tell you of odd cases of milk fever that were
never cured back in the 40s and 50s which is one reason for assuming that
cows have always had their own low level TSE. There are mentions of 'Ox
scrapie' back in the 19th century


Not only cattle were fed on these products. Vegetables have been fed on
blood and bone-meal for many years.

of course, many centuries in fact. Indeed if you include ploughing in the
corn king, many millennia.

Jim Webster