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Texas Agriculture Archive

November 18, 2005

Attack on beef unfounded

By Mike Barnett
Editor

Unbelievable.

That was my reaction to a recent editorial entitled "How Do You Lose a Herd? With risk of mad cow, it's inexcusable" in The Dallas Morning News.

Following up on a front page story by News reporter Katie Fairbank about the first native-born case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), the opinion piece came to this startling conclusion: "If our sloppy management practices result in infected cattle tainting the food supply and causing beef eaters' brains to rot, the beef industry will learn in very short order precisely the cost of its penny-wise, pound foolish cost cutting on food safety."

Whoo, boy. That's kind of like me saying, "If the harvesting of trees to create newsprint devastates a natural resource, and then results in landfills overflowing and degrading our environment—causing ink to seep into our groundwater resulting in cancer eating away at the bodies of unintended victims—then The Dallas Morning News should think twice before printing another newspaper."

That kind of truth, that kind of thinking and that kind of sentiment is poppycock, and so is The Dallas Morning News editorial.

With the attitude of actually knowing what they were talking about, the newspaper also called for BSE testing of every head of livestock slaughtered in this country, and advocated a stringent tracking system to track cattle throughout.

Hello, Dallas Morning News editors! Sound science says that testing every cow is unnecessary. And hey, guys, did you ever hear of the industry-backed efforts in the works right now to create a national identification system?

I usually hold The Dallas Morning News and its opinion page editors in high regard, but this piece shows a staff turning a blind eye to what's real and succumbing to the "Chicken Little, the sky is falling" routine.

It reminds me of the slasher/horror movies, such as Halloween 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and infinitum. Just when you think the bad guy's slain, he pops up again and claims another victim. The victim, in this case, is the Texas and U.S. beef industries.

Of course, an opinion piece is opinion, and everyone is entitled to one. But trying to change attitudes based on bad and misleading data is irresponsible.

The public has generally accepted that beef is safe. One home-grown case of BSE has been found, despite the testing of hundreds of thousands of the most high risk cattle. The industry has acted responsibly to advocate scientifically-sound safeguards to ensure BSE doesn't enter the domestic food supply.

And consider this. How does this look to the Japanese, who until a couple of years ago imported more U.S. beef than any country on this planet? The Japanese continue to jump on any excuse to not reopen their markets to U.S. beef. What are they to think when one of the leading newspapers in the leading cattle state in the nation implies our beef is unsafe?

All is not lost, however. There are newspapers here in Texas that recognize the implications and true risk of BSE. The San Antonio Express-News recently ran an editorial advocating lifting the beef ban to Japan, citing science and free trade precepts as its justification. And consider these excerpts from the Amarillo Globe News:

"Mad cow disease, while a serious issue, sparked worldwide hysteria that does not correlate to the rarity of the disease in humans, or cows for that matter.

"Texas, the nation's leading beef producer (with the beefy Panhandle being a major reason), obviously has an interest in reopening the lucrative Japanese market.

"However, that is secondary to nations maintaining even- and realistic-trade policies that are based on facts rather than unfounded fear."

San Antonio gets it. Amarillo gets it. Too bad Dallas hasn't a clue.