Tuesday 3 June 2008

Feed The World - But Not Our Animals

Scientists everywhere agree that the practice of feeding ground-up animal remains to other animals has disastrous consequences, causing scrapie in sheep and BSE in cattle. It is banned as a practice in the UK and EU.

Not for much longer, if this guy has his way:
The EU ban on the use of animal remains to feed pigs and chickens should be lifted so that grain can be diverted to millions of starving people, one of Europe’s top food safety advisers has told The Times.

Patrick Wall, chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, questioned whether it was “morally or ethically correct” to feed grain to animals in the midst of a global food crisis.

He said that there was no scientific reason to maintain the ban.
So, it appears that the science that was once considered authoritative on the subject is now conveniently wrong, and can be disposed of:
The EU ban was imposed after the BSE crisis in Britain in 1996, when the disease was linked to livestock eating animal products. Professor Wall said that it was now safe to lift the ban.

The European Commission is considering a plan to allow pigs to be fed poultry trimmings and chickens to be given pig meat to save farmers from buying expensive grain and have asked for Professor Wall’s advice. He told The Times: “Soya meal and other grain prices are going through the roof. Is it morally and ethically correct to be destroying this food when people are starving? No one I know is worried about the science. There is only concern about consumer reaction.”

A spokesman for Defra said that it was awaiting formal advice from the European Food Standards Agency. “We would only support the proposal if we were satisfied that there was no risk to human health and that appropriate and effective testing had taken place to control the use of such proteins in pig and poultry feed,” it said.
Strangely, that doesn't seem to be the case with 'man made global warming', does it...?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Strangely, that doesn't seem to be the case with 'man made global warming', does it...?"

But you see the votes are in on AGW and it's been agreed by all scientists (apart from the patently deluded 32,000 scientists who have so far signed this) that the science is settled. It must be settled because the BBC's climate change experts (Harrabin, Shukman and others) have not mentioned the Manhattan Declaration - presumably to avoid embarrassing the signatories.

Anonymous said...

The worry is feeding mammals to mammals. I don't know that feeding mammals to chooks and vice-versa is a big worry.

Anonymous said...

Good old BBC...! :)

"The worry is feeding mammals to mammals."

Yes, that's true, after all, pigs and chickens are omnivorous, so there was never any point in scrapping the old system of feeding slops.

But they did, and now it's inconvenient, they want to pretend that the science has in some way 'changed'...