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Richard Raymond discusses ways forward on animal handling
Story Date: 8/23/2012
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Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGPLACE, 8/22/12
Richard Raymond was the under secretary for food safety at USDA four years ago when a video portraying cows being abused at Hallmark/Westland led to the largest meat recall in history and shut down the plant.
Meatingplace interviewed Raymond (who also writes a blog for Meatingplace), about the similarities and difference between Hallmark/Westland and the video released this week that led USDA to shut down Central Valley Meat Co. for apparent incidents of animal abuse at its beef slaughter facility.
Unlike four years ago, USDA announced last night the agency has so far found no evidence that downer cattle entered the food chain and no beef has been recalled.
Meatingplace: How would you grade USDA’s response to the video at Central Valley Meat in terms of timeliness and thoroughness?
RAYMOND: I know Al Almanza and Dr. [Elisabeth] Hagen very well, and I’m sure they were as thorough as they had time to be before they took the initial action of suspending inspection. And I’m sure they continued to have an ongoing investigation to make sure there were no downer animals going into the food supply. I know they have asked the Inspector General to also do an independent investigation, and I know that takes some time, so they are not done yet.
Meatingplace: On the video, some of those cattle look like they are stumbling. How do they determine whether a cow is down and determine that downer cattle did not enter the food supply?
RAYMOND: My guess is, based on my experience during the Hallmark/Westland case, that they have already interviewed many of the workers out in the pens and probably have confirmed that those cattle on the video were stunned, euthanized, then sent to rendering plants rather than entering the food supply.
Meatingplace: What is different about the Central Valley meat video from the Hallmark/Westland video four years ago?
RAYMOND: The difference is that the Hallmark/Westland video showed downer cattle actually being dragged by machinery to the knock box. We had irrefutable proof that downer cattle entered the food supply.
We didn’t see that in the three-minute video [at Central Valley Meat made public yesterday]. And remember there was a three-hour video USDA had to study. I’m certain they saw no evidence of downer cattle entering the food supply because if it were on the tape, they would have had to do a recall.
Meatingplace: What do you think USDA needs to do next?
RAYMOND: They may have to change the level of presence of veterinarians and inspectors in the pens in these facilities that have a large amount of old, culled dairy cows. These cows are at a much higher risk of becoming downers to start with. Those animals are aged. They are not like a 26-month old steer that Cargill and other plants are monitoring. These are old, tired, spent animals that have not been milked in a couple of days and they are uncomfortable.
And evidently the anti-meat groups are going to focus on these facilities because they are more likely to find a tape that will be damaging to the meat industry and to agriculture in general.
Another possibility is to put in 24-hour monitoring videos, as some large plants are already doing, so they can watch them from their offices the next day and make sure nothing like this is happening in the pens. USDA could do that or they could ask the plants to voluntarily do that. Perhaps if you are going to provide meat to the school lunch program you are going to have to do something like that. That’s probably being discussed in Washington.
Meatingplace: And how about USDA inspectors’ role in these cases?
RAYMOND: The inspectors cannot be in the pens all the time. I pulled out the numbers and in 2007 — the year preceding Hallmark/Westland — the public health veterinarians rejected 0.5 percent of cows at that facility. The average for all slaughter facilities was 0.25 percent that year. So, one out of every 200 cows was deemed unfit to go through the slaughter process [at Hallmark/Westland]. That’s a lot of rejections. That tells me the public health vets were doing their job at Hallmark, they just were not in the pens 24/7.
Meatingplace: What do you think the next step should be for Central Valley Meat?
RAYMOND: I don’t know. Possibly they could put cameras in to assure USDA they are doing everything they can. Maybe employee education and maybe the plant ownership need to spend time in the pens. It’s their business. They have already lost a major customer and they might lose a federal contract.
Meatingplace: What do you think the industry needs to do now? Is there short-term damage control the industry should be doing?
RAYMOND: It’s pretty hard to do damage control when you have tapes. These guys aren’t helping the image of the industry. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video might be worth a million words. It’s there. It happened. I don’t know how you can deflect the damage that has already been done.
There are a few things the industry could do. They need to look for ways to prevent this from ever happening again. This happened twice now in four years and that is one time too many. The first time showed we had a problem, but evidently, the practice is still continuing. Plant ownership needs to take some responsibility, consider putting people or tape monitors in. They might want to do some under-cover surveillance on the pens.
There are ways to prevent this and someone needs to. The anti-meat advocates, I believe, are winning when they have damaging videotapes like this and the industry as a whole needs to give them less to report on.
For more stories, go to http://www.meatingplace.com/.
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