Review of "Mad Sheep"
By Monica @ 5:26 PM   
In a recent search at my local library for readings on the history of agriculture in the United States, I came across a potentially interesting book entitled Mad Sheep, with the subtitle, “The true story behind the USDA’s war on a family farm.”
The cover and dramatic red lettering made me think that this book might be a typical leftist rant against corporate agriculture. Never judge a book by its cover, they say.
This book should be required reading of anyone wanting to know more about USDA and agricultural policy. It chronicles the extraordinary story of an entrepreneurial family of Vermont farmers that did years of research and sought to establish a new type of sheep farming industry in the United States. Their story is unforgettable. Unfortunately, its ending is far from happy. In the 1990s, two scientists named Larry and Linda Faillace returned to the United States from a research stint in Britain, in anticipation of starting an entirely new sheep farming industry that had not been carried out in the United States before. Typical American sheep only give 100 pounds of milk per year, while the breeds the Faillaces wanted to import averaged 10 times as much, thus for the first time promising a viable sheep milk and cheese industry in the United States. After several years of research and international travel, the Faillaces arranged, with the assistance and approval of the USDA, to import three different breeds of sheep into the United States – breeds that had never been raised in the US before. The genetics and feeding history of the sheep had been tirelessly researched over several years before arranging their importation into the US. As scientists, the Faillaces were educated about and had done research on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), and made every effort to minimize the risk of bringing these infectious diseases into the country. One of the breeds they chose had never had a single case of scrapie, a known TSE which is already endemic in the US. They also made significant effort to show, before importation, that the animals had never been fed meat or bonemeal of any species, which is the most widely believed cause of TSEs, though this was not a USDA concern at the time. After three years of research and work with the USDA, their chosen flock successfully completed USDA quarantine and were given an inspection that stated the animals were free of any infectious disease or exposure to infectious disease. Two years later in 1998, they were approached by a USDA bureaucrat, Detweiler, and asked to surrender their animals based on “new research that sheep could be susceptible to BSE.” BSE is a TSE, but BSE is mad cow disease, and no sheep in the world had ever naturally contracted BSE. Further, the Faillaces could document that their sheep had never been fed animal products. The USDA officials would not release any “scientific” information leading to their request, but under duress admitted to the Faillaces that their request to “depopulate” the farm was based not only on this secret scientific information, but on political pressure as well. Political pressure from whom? The USDA wouldn’t say, but Linda Faillace speculates: Was this retaliation for the EU not accepting US hormone-treated beef? Was someone in the sheep industry angry over our importation? Was the dairy industry feeling threatened? And what was the political pressure Detweiler referred to? The National Cattleman’s Beef Association? The pharmaceutical industries? The last thing drug companies in the United States would want was BSE, because bovine by-products are used in a wide variety of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products – everything from insulin to bovine placenta for estrogen and anti-wrinkle creams. And if a country finds BSE, they are no longer able to source their products form the native cattle population. (p. 70) The USDA could provide no proof that the Faillace’s sheep were infected with TSEs, and it was obvious to Detweiler after meeting the Faillaces that she wasn’t going to be able to pull the wool over their eyes on the science. These were not just a bunch of country bumpkins. They knew their stuff and they refused to surrender their animals, although they did agree to turn over any sheep that they decided to kill. Another farmer who had previously obtained sheep from the Faillaces also surrendered a few sheep to the USDA for testing, and these sheep were determined to have “a foreign TSE of unknown origin.” When the USDA revealed a portion of the test results of the Western blot (which is the least reliable test for TSEs), it was clear that the samples had undergone degradation and that there was an absence of negative controls and molecular weight markers – both necessary for at least preliminary proof that the sheep has a TSE. The data were a mess. Positive control lanes were negative, samples that were supposed to be negative tested positive, and one of the USDA’s own scientists who developed the test admitted privately to them that it was unvalidated and should not be used in court. When the Faillaces requested the original samples to do independent testing and carry out “gold standard” testing, namely immunohistochemistry and histopathology, they were told the samples had been inadvertently discarded. The laboratory director also lied under oath about testing the samples blindly. After the Faillaces filed for all of the testing information to be released from the USDA under the Freedom of Information Act, the USDA’s documents revealed four hundred negative test results from the Faillace animals and other animals originating from their farm. After four years, the USDA could still provide no evidence that there was anything wrong with the sheep, while repeatedly pressuring the Faillaces to turn over their herd. At this point, more TSE tests had been run on the Faillace herd of 125 sheep than the entire cattle herd of the United States, in a vain search for mad cow disease in sheep. The animals had been under quarantine for two years. Regardless of the feed records and negative test results, the USDA Secretary ordered the animals destroyed, a decision ultimately upheld by a judge in court. The Faillaces filed for an appeal, and although the federal appeals court expedited the hearing, the court admitted that it did not have the right to stop the USDA from seizing the animals should they decide to do so before the appeal date. After months of dealing with tapped phones and constant surveillance of their property, in late March 2001 only two weeks before the hearing in the appeals court on April 10, 2001, 27 armed federal agents and 13 USDA officials arrived at the Faillace farm, seized all their animals, and sent them to Iowa to be destroyed. The USDA also confiscated their sheep semen so that they would not be able to rebuild their herd by crossbreeding with American sheep. Despite a USDA promise to pay “fair market value” for the herd, and despite the Faillace’s estimate of a profit of $11.3 million had the herd not been quarantined and sales of lambs not restricted for nearly three years, the USDA paid the Faillaces a measly $250k for five years of hassle and lost income. After the Faillaces lost their sheep, the laboratory that had conducted the original Western blot tests was shut down due to negligence. A USDA-appointed panel concluded upon seeing the condition of the laboratory that the accuracy of the TSE work in the Faillace case had to be questioned. Unfortunately, it was too late. And even so, tests conducted on every single destroyed animal in the Faillace herd were negative by IHC and histopathology – the gold standard tests for determining whether an animal has a TSE. Nearly a decade of the Faillaces’ work had been destroyed – for nothing. The lack of conclusive proof of any TSE in the destroyed Faillace herd (it took the USDA over a year to release the test results, and they kept testing and re-testing in vain for a year in order to try to obtain positives) also didn’t convince the USDA not to enforce a five year quarantine that didn’t end until 2006. This quarantine prevented them from keeping hooved animals, and much of their farm equipment was ordered destroyed by incineration in an incinerator in Massuchusetts. When Larry Faillace followed the dump truck that was removing the materials from their farm for supposed incineration on USDA order, he found and documented with photographs that the materials actually went to a landfill in north Vermont. So much for the threat of mad cow disease in sheep --- it was a complete ruse the USDA was going through to maintain public confidence in their decisions. The Faillaces had had enough. They sued the USDA for fraud so that the quarantine would be lifted. Their case was not heard years later until three weeks before the quarantine ended. The judge ruled in favor of the USDA that the quarantine was legal. There you have it. The USDA carried out a war on various sheep farmers and other imported animals for five years under the fantasy that imported sheep (documented to have never been fed meat meal!) might transmit mad cow disease to cows or humans. In the meantime, the USDA allowed actual mad cow disease (BSE) to emerge in cattle the United States. A year after the first emergence of BSE in the US in 2003, the USDA ordered decreased testing of BSE to approximately one tenth of a percent of animals in 2004 – a 32% decrease in testing. (Wouldn’t the emergence of BSE in the United States logically call for more testing?) When a single case of BSE was also found in a dairy herd of 4000 cattle in Washington, the herd was quarantined for one month. Only 131 other animals were slaughtered and tested before the USDA proclaimed the BSE to be an “isolated case”, lifted this one month quarantine and milk sales were resumed. Contrast that with the Faillace experience. The Faillace farm underwent a five year quarantine following destruction of the animals, and their entire herd was destroyed with no evidence of a TSE at all, let alone that it could have spread to cows and caused mad cow disease. The mad cow coverup doesn’t stop there. The legal battle between the USDA and Creekstone Farms has gone on for three years now, as I’ve recently written, with the most recent court ruling in 2008 in favor of the USDA’s position to deny Creekstone Farms the right to test for mad cow disease. This story beggars belief, doesn’t it? Massive corruption in our government agencies and the courts, both of them obstructing justice and truth. But wait – it gets worse. In 1998, preliminary unpublished results from a study in Britain showed that sheep thought to have scrapie (a TSE that is already widespread in the United States) actually had BSE. Only a few scientists were privy to these results. Detwiler, the USDA bureaucrat who instigated of the quarantine of the Faillace’s farm in 1998 (probably partly as a result of this unpublished research), had been one of these few scientists. But in 2001, just months after the Faillace herd had been destroyed, an independent audit did DNA testing of the brain samples used in that study. 100% of the tissue was of cow origin. The supposed sheep brains being investigated for BSE (mad cow disease) were actually cow brains. File that story under the “duh” category. Mad Sheep is nothing short of stunning. It is required reading for anyone interested in the government violation of individual rights when it comes to agriculture. Most people do not think of the USDA as a corrupt agency in comparison to other government agencies. Unfortunately, an honest review of the facts indicate otherwise.
Labels: Farm Raids, Government Idiocy, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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3 Comments:
I used to work at an animal research laboratory, and we had to answer to a whole alphabet soup of government agencies. My experience was that the most arbitrary and obnoxious regulations (meaning they would keep you from doing your job if you followed them to the letter) were from the USDA.
Historically, the USDA has enforced the Animal Welfare Act regulations only for larger animals such as rabbits and dogs. Rats and mice, which comprise the vast majority of laboratory animals, are not included. A few years ago, some animal rights activists sued to get rodents included under the same regulations--which in my opinion was a ploy to make the research so burdensome that it couldn't get done.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in, and an explicit exclusion for rats and mice was added to the otherwise horrible 2002 farm bill. See here.
An incredible story!
In response, I have sent the following to my members of Congress:
"Having recently read about abuses by the USDA in the case of the Faillace family farm as documented in the book Mad Sheep, I am concerned that Congress has provided inadequate statutory rights to American citizens as protection from agency errors and simple ineffective meddlesomeness.
"This problem was exacerbated by the Supreme Court in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. [467 U.S. 837 (1984)], which has caused the courts to give undue deference to administrative agencies.
"I expect that the protection of American citizens could be achieved by Congress through statute empowering the doctrine of substantive due process to court review of agency actions.
"Expecting administrative agencies to demonstrate that their actions actually achieve their stated purpose when applied to individual cases would go far toward these protections and the re-establishment of public confidence in our bureaucracies.
"As the courts have abdicated their responsibility to protect our rights, I ask that the Congress act in defense of our liberties against an unchecked executive power."
Thank you both for your comments and insightful information. Jim, I'll definitely have to look up that court case. I'm not familiar with it. Thank you for providing your legislators with such an eloquent and informative statement.
The amount of deference of the courts to federal agencies as "experts" is exceedingly troubling. You are correct. This is very disruptive of the balance of power that the founders intended. What is the purpose of such a hearing if not to evaluate the objectivity of government findings? Why have a hearing at all if it simply to be accepted that a government agency can act as a dictator? I find it very disturbing that the courts could not stop the USDA actions to destroy the Faillace herd before their hearing.
The mad sheep at these rogue agencies need to be reigned in, I'd say.... :)
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