BSE hasn’t gone away, so why has the EU lifted a ban on feeding animals to other animals?
The EU has just lifted a ban on feeding animals byproducts of animal-based food production that has been in place for nearly 30 years following the BSE crisis of the 1990s that led to people dying from vCJD. Are we really going to ignore the lessons of the past?
Considering how huge an impact the terrifying BSE crisis of the 1990s had not just on the UK public and our farming industry, but on France and other important export markets for British beef, there has been relatively little media coverage of the EU Council’s decision last month to drop a ban on feeding animals the byproducts of animal-based food production save for an article in the Guardian and farming press.
As if anyone needed reminding, the blame for BSE - or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - fell squarely on the shoulders of Britain’s farmers who prior to the crisis and subsequent bans were feeding their cattle meat-and-bone meal, essentially the ground-up remains of other ruminant animals including cows and sheep. Some of that meal is thought to have contained BSE or scrapie, a prion disease of sheep, with strong evidence to suggest that this forced cannibalisation amplified the spread of BSE throughout the UK leading to the human Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). BSE, scrapie and vCJD all fall within the category of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE).
You would be forgiven for finding the thought of forcing ruminants, as in herbivores, to not only be carnivorous but to actually cannibalise their own species, as appalling and completely unnatural, yet what is modern animal agriculture but an affront to so much that we would consider normal when we really think about it. Selective breeding has created dairy cows who produce so much milk per day that mastitis, an infection of the udders, is so common that there are actual legal limits on the number of somatic (pus) cells permitted in milk. Our desire to make chickens more profitable has resulted in hens that produce 20 times more eggs per year than their jungle fowl ancestors, and broiler chickens who grow so fast, so quickly, that they struggle to lift their own bodyweight.
And now we have the emergence of novel influenza viruses and subtypes such as bird flu and swine flu, with strains such as H5N8 a few mutations away from causing the next global pandemic and with far higher mortality than Covid-19. Not to mention the looming threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the part played by animal agriculture’s rampant use of antibiotics. Sadly, too few non-vegans are willing to acknowledge any of this if it means ditching their favourite foods, even willfully disregarding public health information.
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What more do we need to hear before we accept that these gruesome practices lead to nothing good for humans or the environment. Yet in all its wisdom, the EU has dropped a ban that was enacted directly because of BSE. Why? Because, according to Pig Progress, “processed animal proteins” (PAPs) fit the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy both of which encourage the use of food industry by-products the use of “sustainable and local ingredients.
Once again, initiatives aimed at helping farmers make money in the name of food security have eroded common decency and resulted in the lifting of a very sensible ban, the very minimum response to BSE. That being said, the ban on feeding PAP to cows, sheep and other ruminants remains in force, as does the ban on ‘intraspecies recycling’ - a nice way of saying cannibalism, and if animal agriculture is good at anything, it is coming up with euphemisms - all of which would have prevented BSE had they been in place 30 years ago. What will be allowed to happen from now on is the feeding of certain types of PAP to pigs and poultry.
In other words, waste products from chicken production such as their feathers and blood can now be used to make low protein feed for pigs. But just because this hasn’t yet been found to cause anything as horrible as BSE or another pandemic, it just begs the question of why we’re putting ourselves at risk of these for no good reason other than propping up a harmful industry that cannot even hope to provide food security for the world’s growing population, not to mention the impact all forms of animal agriculture are having on our climate and public health right now.
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According to industry press, the use of PAPs would also reduce farming’s reliance on imported soy for animal feed, a direct cause of deforestation in South America, for which, ironically, vegans and our consumption of soya milk have been unfairly blamed. While using PAPs may mean less soy protein is imported for animal feed, another solution altogether makes far more sense and would do wonders for the environment, animals and humans: stop raising animals and use the land instead to grow plants or rewild.
“A lot of farmers remember the time before the ban as a time with better-balanced diets due to the use of animal proteins,” Carine van Vuure, manager nutrition and regulatory affairs at Darling Ingredients and a member of the European Fat Processors and Renderers Association (EFPRA) member, told Pig Progress. “So, less feather pecking [and] improved health in general.”
The fact that Van Vuure remembers anything about the time before the ban with any positivity at all speaks volumes, and many other farm interest groups agree including Copa-Cogeca - which “represents over 22 million European farmers and their family members” - and the Association of Poultry Processors and Poultry Trade (AVEC). However, not all remember things so well.
France and Ireland were the only EU member countries to abstain from supporting the motion to lift the ban, the former being one of the countries most damning of the UK for causing BSE and then sending them infected beef. The UK is also no longer beholden to the EU’s decision, post-Brexit, and has confirmed that the ban on the use of PAPs in animal feed remains as it always has.
“The UK is committed to maintaining the highest animal welfare and biosecurity standards, and following our departure from the EU there is no legal obligation for us to implement any of these changes,” said a spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
“As an independent trading nation we have the option to review our own TSE legislation in the future and ensure that any changes made would maintain our high level of protection of human and animal health and food safety, on the basis of scientific evidence.”
Even though the EU says the risk of cross-contamination resulting from the use of PAPs appears to be slim, the last case of BSE in cows in the EU was in 2016 and the last case in the UK was in 2018. That’s not nearly as long ago as most people think. Add to that the worrying evidence that vCJD can lay dormant for more than 50 years with as many as one in 2,000 people possibly carrying the abnormal protein (prion) associated with the devastating and incurable disease.
The EU may have classified 24 of 27 member states as having a negligible risk of BSE, but if the studies published in The Lancet and British Medical Journal are anything to go by, we may be in the midst of a silent epidemic with the worst of BSE still to come.
It may be unfair or unscientific to say that allowing the use of PAPs now, in a way that would still have avoided the spread of BSE, by only letting farmers feed poultry to pigs and vice versa, is simply wrong, but the point we’re making is why risk it at all. So much about animal agriculture has been shown to cause so much harm and in so many different ways, so why go back just to keep it afloat?
It’s time we really did learn from the lessons of the past and put an end to unsustainable, harmful animal agriculture.
For more on the BSE crisis and other scandals linked to animal agriculture, watch Shady practices of the meat industry uncovered.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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