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Anyone who pays even scant attention to where our food comes from is likely aware that some pretty unsavory things happen between the farm and your fork (see this month’s big story in Rolling Stone, for example). But some of these farming methods are more than just unappetizing: they could be deadly. One practice in particular could allow for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the gruesome and fatal neurodegenerative disorder more commonly known as mad cow disease.
The practice in question is feeding what’s known as “poultry litter” to farmed cattle. Poultry litter is the agriculture industry’s term for the detritus that gets scooped off the floors of chicken cages and broiler houses. It’s mainly a combination of feces, feathers, and uneaten chicken feed, but in addition, a typical sample of poultry litter might also contain antibiotics, heavy metals, disease-causing bacteria, and even bits of dead rodents, according to Consumers Union (the policy and action arm of the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports).
Aside from the fact that we’re feeding our cows chicken crap, this practice is worrisome because both the excrement and uneaten pellets of chicken chow found in poultry litter can contain beef protein, including ground-up meat and bone meal. Which means—if you can follow the gruesome flow chart here—that cows could be, indirectly, eating each other.
As the US Department of Agriculture has made quite clear, cows really, really shouldn’t be doing that. Meat and bone meal containing infected bovine protein, the USDA says, is the chief culprit behind the spread of mad cow disease. (The closely related illness in humans is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.)
The US Food and Drug Administration wisely banned the practice of feeding the remains of dead cows to living ones back in 1997. But the agency has never prohibited feeding those same remains to chickens and other poultry, nor does it currently prohibit feeding poultry litter to cattle. And so, thanks to this ghoulish quirk of our Rube Goldberg-like regulatory mechanism—call it the Feedlot Feedback Loop, or maybe the Feedlot Feedback Loophole—cows are still at risk of consuming the suspect bovine proteins that inspired the 1997 ban in the first place.
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Story: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/we-feed-cows-chicken-poop