Though India was fortunate to escape the catastrophic consequences of mad cow disease two years ago, it is undeniably in the grip of an avian flu epidemic in Maharashtra and possibly Gujarat. We shall be lucky if the crisis does not spread to other parts of the country. As the meat industry sends meat to different parts of the country, besides exporting it, the economic dimensions of the crisis are obvious. Within the country, most states have banned the entry of poultry and poultry products from these two states. Several lakh birds have been culled and buried by meat inspectors and the menace is far from over, with dead birds reported from several countries and a worldwide alert sounded.
But the deeper dimension of the crisis is civilizational, and it would be a mistake to ignore this aspect and treat the subject as a mere health issue best left to meat inspectors. The crisis is the product of a soulless profit-driven ideology called globalization, which is unashamedly marketing inedible products to dumb animals and innocent human beings alike, with little transparency, much less accountability.
Unacceptable atrocities are being committed upon helpless living animals in the name of efficiency and productivity, the international standards of which are set by the Western world. A powerful propaganda machinery ensures the muzzling of other voices and cultural practices, and the entire international community finds itself hostage to horrendous diseases and consequences. Through all this misery, an agitated poultry farmer pointed out, Western multinationals make money – by selling medicines, vaccines, processed meat.
India’s must take a critical look at where the meat industry is erring, and take corrective measures in conformity with her culture and traditional sensitivities. The Vedic rishis told us that “you are what you eat.” Hence, the food we eat, and the manner in which it is prepared, has always been a matter of concern to civilized families.
Unfortunately, pressures of globalization have let us open ourselves to western influences in the false belief that they can teach us superior skills. The truth is that for several decades, all worldwide epidemics caused by meat and meat products are due to the West’s shameless disrespect for the integrity of non-human creatures, and deceit towards the human consumers of the products of the multi-billion dollar meat industry. This is a vicious industry with no sense of moral propriety, no notion of where to draw the line.
More than a decade ago, author Nick Fiddes noted that barely 10% of British slaughterhouses met European hygienic standards, and that inspectors routinely complained of inadequate sterilization and ruptured intestines that smeared the meat with faeces. The infections spread by such meat included salmonella, compylobacter, tapeworm, listeria, toxoplasmosis, and chlamydiosis (Meat, A Natural Symbol, Routledge, London, 1991).
Since dead birds have been found in Europe, and American journalists have written about the mad cow problem there two years ago, it is safe to assume that these problems are generic to contemporary Western animal husbandry. Indeed, the finger of suspicion in the Indian avian flu epidemic points to imported bird feed, which seems logical, as we shall see.
In his detailed study of the scandalous practices in UK, Fiddes notes that in 1988 there was a controversy over the levels of salmonella contamination in eggs and chickens. The media discovered that the epidemic was because the meat industry was feeding the carcasses of dead chickens to living chickens as a protein supplement, thus aggravating the infection. In other words, the progressive and secular producers of meat for human consumption had no compunctions in making unwitting carnivores out of herbivorous birds! What mattered was money – bird feed costs, and dead birds are free!
The fact that this could mutate the poor helpless birds into something grotesque for nature or mankind did not cross the minds of the meat industry. All that mattered was that the birds fattened faster; never mind if those eating them got cancer! Despite the public uproar, the situation did not change; the West has since surreptitiously proliferated these disgusting practices all over the world. I am quite sure that the processed “bird meal” imported by India – from whichever country – is responsible for the crisis in Maharashtra.
In 1985, a British television programme showed that sausages and other industrially processed meat contained parts of animals which are normally considered inedible (not eaten by humans and not sold by local butchers who deal in fresh meat). It is pertinent that the Indian meat industry feels that Government over-reaction to avian flu and excessive culling of birds was part of a multinational conspiracy to sell processed meat in India by giving the local industry a bad name.
What is pertinent here is that Western Governments have known for more than two decades that their meat industry indulges in unwholesome and unethical practices and makes cannibals out of birds and animals destined for the slaughterhouse, and deceitfully feeds human beings with animal parts that are normally not consumed at all. Thus, while these societies duplicitously screech about transparency, consumer rights, and of course, rant about human rights and child labour in underdeveloped nations, they will go any length to conceal the truth of their own business practices and continue to market the meat of herbivores-turned-carnivores.
Given the sheer spread of these practices, we should be prepared to cope with the sudden rise of a mutant strain that could wreck unexpected havoc on any society in the near future, because the Western meat industry remains to this day protected from public scrutiny by benign governments. The possibility of a mutant gene reproducing with wild birds is too horrible to even imagine, but the scale at which atrocities have been perpetuated upon dumb animals is too large to rule this out completely.
Third world countries should reconsider the whole issue of Western imports. Given the shoddy practices of the meat industry, what is the value of pharmaceuticals prepared from the tissues of carnivorous animals, namely, vaccines, surgical and prosthetic products, foods and food supplements? Is it possible that imported medicines or vaccines could cause a far greater health crisis? Since the possibility cannot be ruled out, it might be prudent to curtail imports of medicines derived from animals (in any form), while dealing with an epidemic.
It may be reiterated that the deadly mad cow disease, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), ‘jumped’ from sheep to cattle and then onto humans, because British cattle were fed the remains of sheep to increase productivity (i.e. artificially fattened). As some dead sheep probably suffered from scrapie, a ‘spongiform’ disease epidemic resulted. When mad cow hit America in 2002-3, officials tried to protect beef exports by arguing that meat from sick animals was not infections because the infection was restricted to nervous tissues which were “unlikely” to enter the food supply of people or of animals susceptible to the disease (trust Americans to be so “open”!)
Of course, no one was fooled, because BSE is linked to a rare, progressive and fatal degenerative brain disease in which a protein called prion turns the brain into a spongy mess. The prions are not destroyed by cooking and other conventional methods, and move easily from one animal species to another, and also to humans. Worse, prion-related disease can do untold damage to human beings because the protein can lie dormant for years. It is imperative that the Indian public be informed about these issues, and meat or feed-exporting nations be held accountable for their products and manufacturing processes at forums like WTO, as this fall within the ambit of agri-business.
Organiser, 12 March 2006