According to a USDA veterinarian, slaughterhouses have been butchering live, conscious pigs—and senior USDA staffers have attempted to cover up these reports:
The charges by Dean Wyatt, a supervisory veterinarian at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, detail instances in which he and other inspectors were overruled when citing slaughterhouses for violations such as shocking and butchering days-old calves that were too weak or sick to stand. He also describes being threatened with transfer or demotion after citing a plant for butchering conscious pigs, despite rules that they first be stunned and unconscious.
Let’s hope that that last phrase is misreported, and that the rules in fact require animals to be dead before butchering begins.
In any event, if Wyatt’s allegations are true, we need to view the USDA’s system of cruelty oversight as a farce until the staffers who participated in this coverup are fired and meaningful anti-cruelty measures are put in place. (Via Starkman.) Link.
