Ohio Voters Approve Livestock Care Board

Quote: “This Board has been designed to do one thing and one thing only…ensure that animals receive proper care and that the food supply remains safe.“—————Please sir, explain this thing it is supposed to do to help small farmers, I would love to be entertained. This bill was slapped on the ballot in no time at all, with very little effort going into its creation. It was born, AND FUNDED (multi-million dollar campaign, small farmers can’t afford that), by big Ag. Big Ag is in the business of making money, not creating safe food or giving animals proper care. To them these animals are just a product, and the fastest and cheapest way to get them to market is through concentrated animal feeding operations. The board was created to stop any kind of legislation threatening their disgusting practices. Americans have this picturesque view of their food animals growing up on a small family farm, feeding in the pasture, their cows being milked buy individuals, etc. It is dead wrong. So many cows are raised on such pathetically small plots of land that they can barely move. They are knee deep in their own feces. These conditions breed bacteria. These cows are corn fed. Cows evolved to eat grass, not grain. They eat too much grain, develop acidosis, get sick then go to slaughter. The cows are milked by machines. They are part of a production line. Dairy cows are treated with rGBH, the effects of which have yet to be researched, and please don’t tell me that rGBH is harmless because you have no proof. General Electric once said PCBs were harmless, but they turned out to kill entire commercial fishing operations and sicken people worldwide.
  Now lets touch on antibiotics. The reason these antibiotics are affordable is because they increase the growth in animals, with the added benefit of helping fight disease. This is why it is economically sensible to treat animals on high density lots. These antibiotics make it into the food and into the waste, which is a huge worry to professionals worldwide because we may be breeding antibiotic-tolerant bacteria.
  Now to touch on your point about safe waste disposal, I was wondering if it is okay to occasionally spill huge amounts of waste into surface or groundwater? Well lets ask the 9 people in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada who died when a farmer spread waste onto his field BEFORE a rainstorm which then tainted the groundwater supply causing an E. coli outbreak (http://www.marlerclark.com/firm_news/view/outbreaks-of-e-coli-should-not-occur-in-municipal-water). Or as the thousands of others who have suffered from similar disasters. Or lets look at Grand Lake Saint Mary’s, where a combination of fertilizer treatments (to grow corn to feed these animals) and waste has caused eutrophication of the whole lake. Wow, what an ecologically sound practice! Lets look at the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where runoff has created huge algal blooms killing off millions of fish. Didn’t you take high school ecology, or do you have no understanding of the nitrogen cycle at all? The farms, the rivers, the lakes, the oceans, and your dinner plate are all connected.
  I don’t want to eat food that comes from this kind of destructive system, and I know that if the public knew about it they wouldn’t want to eat it either. There are less ecologically destructive ways to produce the same number of animals for us to consume.
  This concentrated type of livestock production is so new that there haven’t been policies in place to run this type of Ag system. With this new board self regulating itself, I don’t see any corrective measures being taken. How can you agree with that? How can you be OK with an industry self-regulating? Would you be OK with the oil industry being self-regulating?
  Oh yes, and for the CO treated meat, why not just sell fresh meat rather than artificially brightened old meat? You can’t even tell if it is rotten or not anymore. It isn’t to make the customers feel better, it is to deceive them, check it out: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021901101.html

Zoomtothemoon, do you not understand that the livestock care board doesn’t care about small livestock practices? It targets commercial agricultural feeding operations (CAFOs). Animal welfare aside, these huge feedlots create tremendous amounts of concentrated waste which have a habit of contaminating YOUR water supply. E. coli outbreaks are on the rise because of these practices, and the huge agribusinesses have the nerve to say that their new board will advance the safety of food? These confined animals are covered in their own feces and spread disease. They are all dying, only kept alive with antibiotics long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse. So have you, zoomtothemoon, ever actually been to or seen this type of operation? Can you imagine a cow belly deep in its own feces? That same cow being butchered while covered in fecal matter? That waste making it into your delicious hamburger, which is only safe because the meat has been bleached? Did you know that the only reason your beef is red when you buy it is because it is sprayed with carbon monoxide to retain its color? I feel bad that you have been so deceived by corporate agriculture.

Here is the skinny:
13 member board, 10 of whom are appointed by the Governor, i.e. whatever the current Governor says it what goes. The “experts” will mostly be from industry, so all of our food will be produced with only such regulations as benefit the corporate farm and agribusiness. I hope that everyone who voted for this is hospitalized with a food born illness; better yet, I hope those of us who voted against it do not die from the poisons and practices that industry will say are safe and effective.
We are going in the opposite direction of every other state that has taken action; while I love my state, it is full of a lot of easily duped fools who support anything a trusted party tells them to get behind. There is a reason sheep don’t vote, and that reason also applies to the masses who vote in favor of measures like this.

UGH!! You eat your pets?????? UGH!

What most people did understand was that HSUS is an animal rights group with their own agenda.
If we all became vegans they would wet their drawers in happiness.
They will be back next year for a bill more to their liking.
The Michigan bill is not as bad as California. The HSUS got their way on that one. It is a nightmare.