Oil Leak Threatens Yellowstone River

This week an official decision will go out regarding the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.? The news this weekend demonstrates the dangers involved in supporting this project.

In Glendive, Montana, A pipeline transporting crude from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to a hub in Guernsey, Wyoming, capable of transporting 42,000 barrels per day, started leaking on Saturday.? The leak bled between 300 and 1,200 barrels of oil during the hour from breach to detection near Glendive, Montana.? The cause of the leak is uncertain, as is the amount of oil that reached the Yellowstone River.

Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry

In Tuesday’s NY Times article, I was horrified to learn about the latest experiments on animals. At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.

There are, however, some complications.

Pigs are having many more piglets ? up to 14, instead of the usual eight ? but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.

These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce.

Since Congress founded it 50 years ago to consolidate the United States Department of Agriculture?s research on farm animals, the center has worked to make lamb chops bigger, pork loins less fatty, steaks easier to chew. It has fought the spread of disease, fostered food safety and helped American ranchers compete in a global marketplace.

It is widely accepted that experimentation on animals, and its benefits for people, will entail some distress and death. The Animal Welfare Act ? a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened ? aimed to minimize that suffering, yet left a gaping exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture.

Continue reading more about the unnecessary deaths.