Cloned cattle in the human food chain

[April]

Quote:There are few more familiar and pathetic spectacles than British bumbledom, caught red-handed in some grotesque piece of incompetence, burbling its denials of accountability. Now that the public has become aware that both milk and meat from cloned cows and their numerous offspring are apparently coursing freely through the human food chain, the stampede for alibis has begun among officialdom.

In the front line is the Food Standards Agency, set up 10 years ago in panic reaction to the provoked by the BSE scare. For 48 hours the FSA stoutly maintained that no milk or meat from cloned animals or their offspring had ever entered the food chain. This stance has now been modified (ie totally discredited), with Tim Smith, the FSA chief executive, admitting that the agency does not know how many cloned embryos have entered Britain and that a three-year-old bull derived from a cloned animal was slaughtered, sold and eaten last year.

Smith insisted the FSA had “no concerns” about the safety of milk or meat from animals derived from clones. On precisely what scientific evidence is that insouciant attitude based? Holstein UK, responsible for registering all pedigree cows and bulls on farms, has confirmed there are 97 calves in a Scottish herd derived from offspring of a cloned cow. Meat from Dundee Paratrooper, offspring of a cloned cow, entered the food chain last year. Almost hourly, the pool of clone derivatives is expanding. It is Liberty Hall in the British food chain.

Many of the FSA’s responsibilities are being transferred to Defra. It was the heroes from Defra who, in 2007, claimed to have detected irregularities between the EU “passports” of cattle and their eight-digit ear tags, in a herd of 567 cows, including pedigree Ayrshires and Holsteins, worth £500,000. Defra slaughtered this valuable herd of perfectly healthy cattle and refused to pay the farmer compensation.

Defra stated: “Inspectors found what they believed amounted to an unacceptable level of non-compliance with the regulations relating to the identification and tracing of cattle. This could have had serious implications for the protection of the human food chain and Defra considered itself under a duty to destroy the cattle.” So, there you have it: in tracing cattle and protecting the human food chain Defra is implacable. Yet Defra has just confirmed that, although millions of shots of bull semen are imported into the UK every year, it does not monitor whether they come from cloned animals or not.

In other words, Defra is unconcerned whether the hamburger your child is eating contains meat from Freddie Frankenstein II out of Daisy Five Legs; but it gets hugely upset and reaches for the humane killer if an EU form is wrongly filled in. Defra itself is cloned from MAFF, the government department whose gross incompetence during the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001 consigned more than 10 million sheep and cattle to the funeral pyres that spelled the end of British livestock farming as we had known it for centuries.

One thing that does not change is the drivel uttered by public jobsworths trying to shrug off responsibility for a crisis. Smith, the FSA chief executive, claimed that “whilst we have got a first-class cattle tracing scheme, what we don’t know is precisely how many embryos have been imported into the country”. Got that? Describing this situation as “inevitable” [why?], he went on to say: “It’s a bit like the police being there and us expecting no crime. However good the system is, it relies on the honesty of those people participating.” Sorry, Tim, but how many police forces operate on that premise? And how many Government agencies? The Inland Revenue, for example?

When the powers-that-be behave in an uncharacteristically relaxed way about something that is provoking public anxiety, it is a sure signal that it is part of a Brave New World development of which the ruling elite approves – such as GM crops – and in which there are large profits to be made (eg carbon trading). Cloned livestock, like human embryo experimentation and other “cutting-edge” technologies, belongs to the category of white-coated, progressive activity that finds favour with the governing consensus.

There may be no harm in consuming products derived from cloned animals; but the British public would prefer to wait for fully-matured scientific endorsement rather than have “Frankenstein foods” arbitrarily leaked into the human food chain. The public no longer derives reassurance from officialdom generating incontinent quantities of another bull by-product to obscure the issue.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/gerald...t-of-bull/

[hilly7]

Excellent find lady. Thank you.

I am glad we have our own to eat.

[April]

your welcome hilly.

We've cut back on meat this year actually. What we do purchase comes from an amish farm though.... and is kosher.

[hilly7]

We get our cheese and butter from Mennonites that own an Amish market. Our beef from here. We've 2 freezers this year full but we give it to two other houses too, daughter and mom. Our pork comes from a guy that raises his like we do, naturally. I'm lazy on hogs, lol.

[FastTadpole]

Ah the meaty side of the story. I suppose it needed it's own thread rather than be buried in the Amish milk thread. Thanks inheritor.

For smexy diagrams of cow zygotes and more specifics on the cloned moo juice for sale check this post.

Clone farm's milk is on sale: Food watchdog investigates after dairy farmer's astonishing admission
http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?t...#pid195756