Health - Dead dogs and cats were fed to US beef for hamburger until 1997

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Read this only if you want to give up anything with ground beef in it.

ET

Book reveals horrors of hamburgers By Philip Delves Broughton in New York

THE grisliest description of fast food ever published is proving a major hit with Americans desperate to know what lurks inside their hamburgers, while raising the hackles of the fast food industry.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser offers a deeply disturbing account of the fast food industry. Since 1993, he claims, half a million children in America have been made ill by the E coli bug.

If their parents knew what was really in the minced meat found in thousands of hamburgers, tacos and pizza toppings, he argues, they would never take their children to another fast food restaurant again.

Feeding dead cats and dogs to cattle was legal in the US until 1997 when the government banned the practice because of fears over mad cow disease. Dead horses and pigs, however, are still routinely ground into cattle feed.

One quarter of America's minced beef, writes Schlosser, is made from worn-out dairy cattle, likely to be riddled with disease and the meat containing antibiotic residues. The book has been called unduly alarmist by the American Meat Institute, which represents packers and processors and "unfortunate" by the National Council of Chain Restaurants.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001

Answers

I can only imagine the health implications of not being able to recycle all of our pet and livestock carcasses. I'm sure it made sense at the time.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001

Animal shelters I'm familiar with have incinerators for their dead animals, although I have known of some who buried them in landfills. Using them for cattle feed is news to me--ugh! It's been known for a while that cats, at least, can contract BSE and that just such feed is how the problem got started in the UK.

In Britain, incinerators are routinely used to dispose of domestic animals and probably farm aninals too, although at the moment they're doing open-pit burning of farm animals because of the overwhelming numbers of animals ordered destroyed due to foot and mouth disease.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001


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