Crusador Interviews Howard Lyman

August 5, 2006

It’s Not The Cows That Are Mad….It’s Our GOVERNMENT!

Former Cattle Rancher Howard Lyman, Also Known As The “Mad Cowboy”, Says He Believes Mad Cow Disease Will Make AIDS Look Like The Common Cold

CRUSADOR  Interviews The “Mad Cowboy”To Get The Plain Truth From The Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat

“Howard Lyman is fighting not only for our health, but our nation’s sanity as well.” --  Studs Terkel

When former cattle rancher Howard Lyman appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996 to share his insider view of the danger of Mad Cow Disease spreading to this country, his revelations about the beef industry prompted a group of Texas cattlemen to file a lawsuit charging Lyman and the talk show host with “food disparagement.” That wasn’t enough to silence Howard Lyman, and in this blockbuster interview, he tells the whole truth about the catastrophic consequences past and current ranching practices have had on our livestock and why we need to be very concerned about Mad Cow Disease in this country. Lyman is well aware of what goes into our livestock – high doses of pesticides, powerful growth hormones, the ground-up remains of other animals and blood from potentially infected animals. It was only when Lyman narrowly escaped paralysis from a spinal tumor that he began to question his vocation and the effect it was having on people and on the land he loved.

In a January 15th press release Lyman stated: “In 1990, when I first started talking about Mad Cow Disease, I never thought that the USDA would risk the entire cattle industry to protect the profits of a few corporations.  It seemed common sense that we had to quit feeding slaughterhouse waste to grass-eating animals.  It is crazy to continue a practice that is unnatural, dangerous and which consumers find abhorrent.  Every country dealing with the Mad Cow issue has learned that there are two things essential to restore consumer confidence. You have to quit feeding animals to your food animals and you must institute a widespread program of testing. When Mad Cow Disease destroyed the cattle industry in England it also caused the fall of the Tory Government. It was plain that lying to the consumers was a bad choice…On December 23rd the cow that spoiled Christmas was reported to the world. A Holstein dairy cow in the State of Washington proved what we professed could never happen here; Mad Cow was in the U.S. The USDA, FDA, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and a host of shocked meat flacks started to spew the preprogrammed party line that meat was safe and this was the only Mad Cow in the United States. Within a matter of hours our beef export market had disappeared.  Country after country did to us what we had done to Canada and other Mad Cow nations, they banned our beef exports.”

The media, desirous to hear what Lyman has to say, has literally inundated his office with phone calls since the announcement of Mad Cow Disease. In a powerful and original voice, Lyman tells CRUSADOR editor Greg Ciola that our livestock industry has repeated all the same mistakes that led to Mad Cow Disease in England while bringing frightful and lasting damage on our health and environment.  If the cattle industry is to survive in the U.S., we must start listening to our beef customers both foreign and domestic. We also must demand from Congress that proper oversight of the USDA is put in place, and that they have the necessary personnel, equipment and resources to police and enforce an industry that’s virtually ignored the government’s regulations at will. According to Lyman, many ranchers want to return to raising animals as nature intended. Hopefully these problems can be solved without filling the graveyard with our friends and destroying the family farms and ranches that helped build this nation.

Howard thanks for taking the time to do this interview.  Let me start by asking you to give us a little bit of a background on yourself so our readers understand who you are if they’re not familiar with you.  How did you get into ranching and why did you get out?

Well, I’m a fourth generation ex-farmer, rancher, feed lot operator from Montana. I spent better than 40 years of my life in animal production. I have a degree in Agriculture from Montana State University. At one time I had about 7,000 head of cattle, 12,000 acres of crop and 30 employees.  In 1979 I ended up paralyzed from the waist down.  I had a tumor on my spinal cord.  The doctor told me if it was on the inside of the cord I had less than one chance in a million I would ever walk again.  I had a 12-hour operation where they took the tumor out of the inside of the cord.  I walked out of the hospital with a one-in-a-million operation, but when I asked my doctor what caused the tumor he told me there were adolescent cells stimulated to grow probably by the chemicals we were using on the farm.  I was sure at that time that the chemicals we were using were causing problems.  I saw the soil die, the birds die, and the trees die.  I went and saw my banker and I said to him, “I need to borrow some money, I want to become an organic farmer.”  He laughed at me and said, “You want me to lend you money and you’re not going to spend it with my other customers – the chemical dealer, the pharmaceutical dealer, the fertilizer dealer?”  He said, “There’ll never be a day like that.”  So, in 1983, I sold my farm, paid my debts and I started working with other farmers not to make the same mistakes that I made.  Then in 1987 I got a call and was asked if I would you like to go to Washington, D.C. and work on Capitol Hill.  I thought, “What a deal, 535 members of Congress! I just absolutely knew they wanted to do what was right.”  So I went to Washington, D.C. and learned a thing called the Golden Rule – they that have the gold, make the rules.   After five years of working on Capitol Hill, I told my friends, “You know this game is rigged.  The deck is marked.  We’ll never win in Washington, D.C.”  And they laughed and said, “What are you going to do?”  And I said, “I’m going to go talk to the people.”  And they said, “You’re never going to get half of the people to do anything.”  I said, “We don’t need half. Eighty percent of the people are brain dead.  They’re part of the herd.  They are following nose to tail and when you follow nose to tail the only thing you ever see in front of you is the same thing.” So I started going out and lecturing to people.  I talked to them about educating themselves and making better choices.  I made the choice to quit eating meat.  At that time I weighed over 300 pounds.  My blood pressure was sky high.  My cholesterol was over 300.  I would sit down and have lunch and my nose would bleed.  So I became the world’s worst vegetarian – lettuce and dairy products.  For one year that was my diet.  I lost some weight, my blood pressure went down slightly, my cholesterol went down slightly and I thought,  “Wow, if I can do that being the world’s worst vegetarian, just think what I could do if I became a vegan.”  I lost 130-pounds, my blood pressure went from sky high to normal, and my cholesterol went from 300 to 135.  Not one person in 40 years of the longest ongoing heart study in the world, the Framingham Study, has ever had a heart attack that had a cholesterol reading below 150.  I think I saved my life by changing my diet.  So, that’s how I got started.

I guess your big launch into becoming one of the most well known experts worldwide was your book Mad Cowboy and also your interview on the Oprah Winfrey show and the controversy that came from that.  What year did you actually publish the book and what prompted you to write the book?

Well, I wrote the book prior to doing the Oprah Show and I was on the Oprah Show in 1996. I started speaking publicly on mad cow disease in 1990.  The first case of mad cow disease was discovered in England in 1986.  By 1990 it was an epidemic.  They killed over 4 ½ million head of cattle in an attempt to stop the crisis. I was invited by the Court in London to go over and testify in the McLibel trial where McDonald’s was suing people who handed out leaflets in front of their business.  While I was there the Minister of Agriculture stood in front of Parliament and said that he could no longer assure the English people that mad cow disease could not be transferred from cows to humans.  The National Cattleman’s Beef Association said it was the exploding powder keg heard around the world.  While I was in England I did 70 press interviews in nine days.  I actually ended up on BBC World Service Tonight in 200 countries.  When I came back to the U.S., Oprah Winfrey called me up and asked me if I would go on a show that she wanted to do which was called Dangerous Food: Could It Happen Here?  I went to Chicago and went on the show.  I told Oprah that we had 100,000 cows a year that were fine at night and dead in the morning and that we were rounding them up, grinding them up, turning them into feed and feeding them back to other cows along with road kill, deer, elk, possum and raccoons that were being scraped up from the highways.  We were also using euthanized pets – dogs and cats that were full of chemicals.  In the city of Los Angeles alone, 200 tons of dogs and cats a month are ground into food and fed back to our pets and farm animals.

How much of this food was being fed back to the cattle?

A lot of it! Most of it was being used as meat meal and some went back into pet food and some went back into cattle feed.  During the show Oprah looked at Dr. Gary Weber from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and she said, “Dr. Weber, are we feeding cows to cows?”  I’ll never forget it.  He said, “Well, you know, a limited amount of that’s going on.”  As near as I could tell, about 95% of the factory feed lots were feeding animals back to animals.  The next thing Oprah said got me sued.  She said, “That just stops me cold – I’ll never again eat a burger.”  Anyway, we taped the show for a couple of hours.  When we were done I went up to Oprah afterwards and I said, “Hey Oprah, give me ten minutes and I’ll get you off of chicken.”  She said, “No, only one animal a day.” I knew at that time thirteen states had food disparagement laws but with a food disparagement law you have to say something you know to be false about a perishable commodity. I didn’t say anything I thought to be false.  I thought I told the truth so I wasn’t worried about being sued and, sure enough, in 1996 a group of Cattlemen sued us.  My book was ready to be published and the judge in Amarillo, Texas invoked a gag order so I couldn’t publish the book.  It wasn’t until 1998 that we got into court and I published my book in 1998 after the Amarillo trial. We won in Amarillo but the Cattlemen appealed it to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  In over a year in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals they finally came with a unanimous panel decision that we were not liable – Oprah, Harpo Production and myself.  It was amazing.  In their opinion they said everything I said on the show was true and the truth was not actionable.  The Cattlemen asked for a rehearing.  It was denied.  Then they turned around and sued us in State Court and, not being from Texas, I had the right to take it to Federal Court.  I did.  They appealed that and six years after the show, the Judge finally ruled by throwing the case out with prejudice, which meant they couldn’t appeal it.  So, six years after the Oprah show we finally won.

In a round about way the lawsuit and the publicity from the Oprah show actually put you on the map.

Well, yeah.  About eight million people saw that show with Oprah.  By the time the trial was over about two hundred million people knew about it.  I think they shot themselves in the foot. The interesting thing is, my book is now in its tenth printing.  It is published in Polish, Japanese, Korean and I’m negotiating with the Chinese.  It’s one of those books that has legs and it’s still selling well.

From what I gathered from your book and now with the discovery of mad cow disease in the U.S., you knew this was going to happen way back when you saw what was taking place on the farms, with the feed lots, and in the rendering plants. You were able to predict this well in advance.  What can you tell us about mad cow disease in the United States beyond what we’re hearing from the government?  Do you really believe that this is a serious problem here in this country?

Oh, absolutely!  You know, we have a hundred million head of cattle in the U.S.  In the last thirteen years since I started talking about this issue publicly, we’ve tested 57,000 cattle out of a herd of a hundred million in the United States.  If we take Europe, they have less than 40% of the cattle that we have and they test more cattle in a day than we tested in thirteen years.  I believe that we, in this country, have had a policy of ‘don’t look, don’t find.’  The last thing in the world they ever wanted to do was find a case of mad cow disease.  I think that the one that they found in the State of Washington was absolutely, totally accidental and had they had the least clue that this animal might have been infected with BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), I don’t think they would have ever tested her.  The problem is a cow is an absolute herbivore.  They’re supposed to be fed on grass.  They were never intended to be a carnivore and they were never intended to be a cannibal.  Once they started feeding animals back to these herbivores, all of the sudden we ended up with these prions that eat holes in the brains.  

Why do they even put this rendered material in the feed?

It’s high in protein. 

Does it fatten the animals up quicker?

Oh sure! The fact of it is this rendered material is about 25% feces. We’re feeding manure back to the animals.  It’s not out of the question to collect chicken manure and feed that to the cattle in the feed lots. It gives a whole new meaning to ‘finger lickin’ good.’    

How big of a problem do you think we’ve really got on our hands with mad cow disease?

I think we have thousands of cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. One thing that concerns me more than anything is that if we look at the number of cases of Alzheimer’s in the United States now, the symptoms of CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease – the human form of mad cow disease) are much like the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. 

In 1945 we had a miniscule number of cases of Alzheimer’s. Today we have over four million.  The only studies that I know of where they actually took the men and people that died and took their brains out and analyzed them were the Pittsburgh Veteran’s Hospital study and the Yale Study.  They found that between 6% and 13% of them were misdiagnosed that really had CJD.  Let’s just say that you know there are 10% of the cases of dementia out there that are misdiagnosed from Alzheimer’s that really are CJD.  That means that we have an astronomical number of people that are misdiagnosed.  Now the government says that we should have one case of CJD for every million inhabitants.  We have 270 million people.  That means we’ve got 270 cases of sporadic CJD.  We have at least 50,000 misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s people that really have CJD.  Where did those other 49,000 come from?  We’re not requiring CJD to be a reportable disease. 

Years ago, about 50% of the people that died used to have autopsies.  Today, less than 10% of the people that die have autopsies.  The number of suspected CJD cases that are actually autopsied can almost be counted on one hand because the pathologists don’t want to touch them with a ten-foot pole.  And the CDC does not require demented diseases to be reported and we don’t have any data at all of any stature on what we have out there.  A spongiform disease has an incubation period of anywhere from five to forty years.  I think that we have the exact thing I said on the Oprah Show.  I think we have a disease that has the potential to make AIDS look like the common cold.  I said it then.  I believe it today.

Wow!  That’s pretty scary when you say that. Can the doctors tell from the tests that they run that you have CJD and they just don’t release the data because the government does not require them to?  How do they bury this so people don’t know they have CJD?

The only way you can tell is to autopsy the brain after they die.  The problem is pathologists do not want to perform an autopsy on a suspected CJD patient.  Now, I’m not telling you that all of these people out here that have Alzheimer’s have CJD.  Nothing could be further from the truth. However, remember that every study that I know of where they actually took demented patients and found out whether the diagnosis was correct, between 6% and 13% of them really had CJD when they were diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s.

So there’s no way to tell when you’re alive that you have CJD if you get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?

No.  The only thing that you can usually depend on by the time the symptoms show up is that CJD victims only live about six to eighteen months.  It’s a fairly quick death compared to Alzheimer’s.  They’re actually trying to develop a test.  I was over in Switzerland in the lab where they’re working day and night to try and find a live test, but to this point in time, the only thing they have in the late stages of a person dying of CJD is a new MRI machine that can see the holes in the brain.  Other than that, as far as I know, there’s no test. They’re working on some that are urine tests that are much like a pregnancy test but they haven’t got them perfected yet.  Can you imagine how interested people would be to learn whether or not they’re infected? If you take President Reagan, for example, how many years he’s had Alzheimer’s, he probably really does have Alzheimer’s, but you have to remember, he didn’t eat the meat they served in the White House.  He brought in his own from the ranch.

We’re told from the USDA that the real concern with cows that may have mad cow disease is that the only way it could be transmissible to humans would be to eat the brains or the meat that’s close to the spinal cord.

Well, they’d like you to believe that, but you know, you would agree with me that they say that there’s a concentration of the prions in nerve tissue.  Would you reach over and pinch your bisep right now?

Okay!

Do you feel it?

Absolutely!

It must mean you have nerve tissue there, right? They’ll tell you that you have nerve ganglia close to the bone. Did you know that mechanical recovery of meat being used in processed meat like sausage, pepperoni, and other meats like that comes from meat close to the bone? There’s no doubt there’s a greater concentration in the brain, in the spinal column, and the small intestine, but we’re also taking that and grinding it up and turning it into feed and feeding it back to other animals.  We’ve shown that infected cows have infected zoo animals and dogs and cats, even pigs, fish and chickens. I think we’ve got to be very careful about buying the company line that we don’t have to worry if we’re not eating brains and spinal column.  Nobody really knows how large a dose you have to have to become infected.

Plus, I’m assuming with what you’re saying that the prions do pass the blood brain barrier so they’d be found in soft tissue as well as nerve tissue and brains? 

Of course! If you go down tomorrow to donate blood to the Red Cross, the first question they’re going to ask you is if you spent any time in England and if you have, they won’t accept your blood.  We’re still feeding cow blood back to cows.

Still today, even after this huge scare?

Even today.

Yet they made this big hoopla right after finding mad cow disease that they were going to stop allowing the downer cows to be fed back to people.

That’s correct.  They basically did what we’ve been fighting for years to do by eliminating downer cattle from the slaughter system.  We have somewhere between 60-180,000 non-ambulatory animals that have been going to slaughter every year.  Three-quarters of them ended up in the human food system.  That’s probably one of the worst things we’ve ever done. They did some good by eliminating that, but you have to remember that two weeks before that, the Republicans in the House of Representatives defeated that after the Senate had already passed it.  It wasn’t until after the mad cow issue that they were willing to reverse it.  Unfortunately, our USDA and FDA along with the bureaucrats and the politicians are more beholden to the economic bottom line of a few corporations than they are on the safety of the consumer.

On that train of thought, if they were taking 100,000 or more downer cows and using them as food that was allowed to be fed to people, you know they aren’t going to lose that source of revenue so who are they going to feed that food to now?

That’s a good question. They showed over in Europe that a downer cow had 240 times more likelihood of being infected with mad cow disease than one that walked in. They haven’t even decided what they’re going to do with these downer cows.  Are they going to still grind them up and feed them back to other cows?  Are they going to feed them to pigs, chickens, or horses?  I don’t know what they’re going to do with them.  I don’t think they know.

What about the ruling in 1997 that they had to stop feeding the cattle something in their food– was it sheep that they had to stop feeding them or was it cows?

It was called a ruminant food ban.  You can’t feed sheep, cows or goats back to cows, sheep or goats.  They are ruminant animals.  It was basically a ruminant ban except you could still feed ruminant blood back to ruminants.

I gathered from your book that a lot of this was still taking place even after the ban went into effect and that the feed lots were not obeying those orders.

Well, in 1997 they passed the feed ban and in the year 2000 they found that 25% of the feed preparers were violating it.  Secretary Veneman recently said that 99.9% were now in compliance but GAO went and took a look at FDA’s oversight of that feed ban and they said that it was inaccurate to make any assessment out of what they were doing and that assuming compliance was totally out of line.

What can you tell us about what’s going on with pet food?  Are you finding a lot of the same things in foods being fed to our pets that you’re finding with cattle feed?

There are things in our pet food that if most people read the labels and understood what they were saying it would just shock them to death.  This is not about buying cheap food verses what’s expensive.  Almost universally when we see pet food that’s out there you’ll discover what I’m talking about.  How many people really understand that digest on a label is just fancy terminology for manure?  That’s in pet food.  You’ll also see things like bypass protein.  This is the key word for ground up animal.  If you’ve got ground up dogs and cats it can go into your pet food as bypass protein.  Anything that says meat meal, bone meal, or blood meal are all animal products that are being fed back to our animals.     

Let me touch on dairy cattle for a minute.  I know the big concern has been people eating meat from infected cows, but as you just pointed out, the prions could be anywhere in the body beyond just the spinal cord and the brain and it could even be in the blood, so what’s the possibility of the prions and the infection passing through to the dairy products?

Well, the only study I know of was with a woman in Japan that had CJD. She was pregnant.  They removed her child by Caesarian section and they tested the placenta, the umbilical cord, and the colostrum of her breast milk and they were all infected with prions.  Now, if a woman’s colostrums was infected when she had CJD, it tells me that there has got to be some migration there into the milk.

As far as the dairy is concerned then, if there’s a study that shows a woman with CJD can have prions in her colostrum, then there is some likelihood that prions can also be in the blood of a cow infected with mad cow disease, which means it could potentially pass through their udder and into their milk and colostrum? 
 
Well, it sure did the woman.

This would make this problem much worse and much more serious if it could be proven that there’s an issue with dairy as well.

You also have about 40% of all the hamburgers in the U.S. coming from dairy cows.

Actually the cow that was infected with mad cow disease was a dairy cow, correct?

That’s correct.  What’s interesting to note is that the average cow in the U.S. doesn’t live to be four years old.  It’s takes somewhere between three and seven years after they are infected with mad cow disease to show any of the symptoms. About the only old cows that you find are some of the dairy herds or the old beef herds.  That does not mean they’re not infected because they don’t show the symptoms.  If you don’t test them you don’t know.

How reliable do you think the testing methods are that the government is using?

I think the one that we’re using is less than accurate.  They didn’t find any infected animals in Germany when they were using the same equipment we currently are. When they went to the new rapid test they found that they had a number of infected cows in Germany and they found that there were a number of cows that were infected that were not showing any symptoms. I have very little faith in the test we’re using.

Beyond that test, are there any tests that can be done to detect the disease in meat that’s at the grocery store or in any other products?

I shouldn’t say there’s no way if you wanted to spend thousands of dollars.  They actually went out and took mechanically recovered meat, for example, and found that 35% of the samples had nerve tissue in it so when you take very sophisticated equipment you can tell things.  But anything that is usable, no.

How hard would it be for them to test every single animal that is killed?

Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing in Japan right now and they are doing it with a test they’re buying from the United States.  It would take about six hours. From the time they test the animal at night they could have the results in the morning.

To do that here with the number of cattle we kill though would put a major cog in the system I would imagine?

You would have to open up some of the laboratories that we’ve closed but if they can do it in France, Germany, England and Japan, do you think we couldn’t do it here?

What about this situation with Canada in this recent find of mad cow disease?

There is no Canadian herd or American herd.  There’s a North American herd.  If you or I want to go to Canada we’ve got to have a visa or a passport.  We have over 3 million head of cattle that have traveled from Canada to the United States in the last couple of years.  You and I, we’ve got to show up with a passport or visa.  Those cows come down, they kiss them on the nose and they’re in.  The thing about it is, the way they fed the cattle, the way we fed the cattle, were exactly the same.  They’ve got mad cow disease and we’ve got mad cow disease.

So you think maybe the Canadians are being set up as the scapegoat on this?

Oh sure they are. Absolutely.

I’ve read some stories that are saying to look for the U.S. to put all of the blame on Canada to cover up the real problem here.

Sure!

And what you’re saying is that it’s pervasive across both countries?

The herds are so integrated that if this cow had not been a dairy cow that they were keeping production records on, there’s no way in the world you would have known if the cow came from Canada or the United States.  We have no tracking system.  They’re actually going to start doing that, but that’s a little after the barn burns down.

I know there’s a lot of speculation on where mad cow disease even originated from, Howard.  What are your thoughts?  What’s your opinion?  Where do you think this disease came from?  Is it because of the rendering plants feeding the animals back to animals?

I think it’s fairly simple.   We find that one out of every million of every species has a prion disease, which is no big deal until you start becoming cannibals.  We found it in New Guinea when humans were eating other humans.  It got to the point where 40% of the women in the Kuru tribe were dying of kuru.  We see sheep with scrapies that were being ground up and fed back to cows. I think we just ended up with a disease that crossed the species barrier and the more we kept turning these animals into cannibals, the worse it got.

That’s been a fairly recent situation as far as feeding animals back to other animals, correct?

It began around the Second World War.  It was not very prevalent before that.

How big of a problem was the situation with downer cows prior to them feeding cattle back to other cattle?

You know, you’re always going to have cattle, for one reason or another, that are sick or have broken legs or are a non-ambulatory animal.  That’s a part of the business.  But what concerns me is there are about 100,000 cows a year in the United States that are fine at night and dead in the morning.  These are animals that did not appear sick and had no reason to believe that they were going to be dead in the morning. Most of those animals would be the ones that I would believe would be more likely to be infected and those were the ones we were collecting, grinding up and turning into cattle feed. 

Plus they take a lot of the parts they use from even the healthy cattle and those go to the rendering plants as well, correct? 

About 50%!

So they could be eating blood, bones, hoofs, hide, whatever?

Oh sure.  There is simply no such thing in America as an animal too ravaged by disease, too cancerous, or too putrid to be welcomed by the all-embracing arms of the renderer.

There’s a story that I pulled off your website. It says, “35% of AMR meet samples found to have unacceptable tissues.”

Yep.

“An agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture pointed out in its February report that 35% of samples from advanced meat and bone separation machinery had unaccepted nervous tissues.”

But we don’t need to worry, remember?  All you have to do is stay away from the brain and the spinal column.  Do you believe that?

No.  Not after I read all of the articles on your website and heard what you’ve said here.  Here’s another story that I got from your website.  “CJD screening may miss thousands of cases.  The Federal Government’s monitoring for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a fatal human brain illness, could be missing tens of thousands of victims, scientists and consumer advocates have told United Press International.”

It’s exactly what I’m telling you. I didn’t write those stories on the website.  I’ve cited every one of them and posted where they came from.  I’ve tried to be as scrupulously honest as possible because I believe that the facts are with us.  All we have to have is the people to understand what the facts are and they’ll find out they’re being lied to by the government.

There’s one last story to follow up with that may be even more frightening.  It comes from a 12/23/03 UPI story that says, “The United States Department of Agriculture insisted the beef supply is safe Tuesday after announcing the first documented case of mad cow disease in the United States, but for six months the agency repeatedly refused to release its tests for mad cow to United Press International.”

Isn’t that something?

“The USDA claims to have tested approximately 20,000 cows for the disease in 2002 and 2003 but has been unable to provide any documentation in support of this to UPI which first requested the information in July.”

Does that make you wonder?   

That’s some serious incriminating evidence!  This could have grave implications for the beef packing industry in this country.

I would tend to think so.  You know, the value of cattle since the 23rd of December has dropped 20%.  That’s a lot of money.

Do you feel that since you had these cattle ranchers down in Texas sue you for going on Oprah bringing these facts out, even though the case was dropped, that you are still going to be a target for other lawsuits because of the facts you’re bringing out?

Oh, no.  I think that the last thing in the world they’d ever want to do is get me in a courtroom again.

You would bury them, I guess, with everything you’re telling me here.

If I got sued and I got in a courtroom without a judge putting a gag order on, the industry would probably put out a contract on me.

You were a cattle rancher. I got from your book that you and most ranchers never followed a lot of the government regulations that were in place, but you conveniently broke the rules.

That’s absolutely true.

Do you still feel that regulation of these ranchers is pretty weak?

Of course it is.

So even though all of these guidelines and rules are in place, is the situation still the same as when you were a rancher?

It’s a charade. It’s just like the GAO study that they did of FDA.  They said to them, “You’re out here finding people that are violating the feed ban and you’re not even sending them a warning letter.”  What kind of oversight is that?  That’s like a guy that goes in and robs a bank and they say, “By golly, we got a good picture of him!  That’s Joe Jones.  You ought to go see whether we can sell him some stock options because he’s got some money now.”  It’s just ludicrous.

What about people that go out and hunt? Is there anything they need to be concerned about?

It would scare me to death because we have a disease in the U.S. that’s in about ten or twelve states right now that’s called chronic wasting disease.  For some reason it is like gasoline on a match.  It can be transferred from one animal to the other just by rubbing noses.  To give you some idea, in a herd of cows that are infected with mad cow disease about 5% of them can be infected.  If you have a herd of deer infected with chronic wasting disease, up to 50% of them will be infected.  The experts tell me that if 50% of them are infected they’re probably all infected. There’s been no work done yet that shows whether or not it can be transferred from deer to humans.

What about all of the growth hormones that they used to give the animals?  Are they still being used today or has this practice stopped?

They’re still using them. European scientists are convinced that it causes cancer.  Our scientists are convinced that they’re perfectly safe.  I guess if it were up to me I would want to err on the side of safety.  I sure don’t want to put them in my body.

You said in your book that they’re allowed to use growth hormones but they have to discontinue using them two or three weeks before slaughtering the animals.

That’s correct.

Is that still the case?

Yeah, but the thing about it is we only check about one out of every 250,000 animals that go to slaughter so the chances of you getting caught by not withdrawing them are pretty remote and if you do get caught, the worst thing that’s going to happen to you is they’re going to send you a letter. There are no teeth!

What kind of growth hormones and steroids are being used today?

Oh, there’s a whole raft of them that are being used and they swear up and down that the ones they’re using now are not as bad as the ones they had before but I think that the proper hormones we should be using are the ones that we get from our own bodies.  We shouldn’t end up with nine-year-old girls developing breasts.

What about the USDA’s proposal to use RFID (radio frequency identification) tags on animals to have a better control mechanism?

I think it’s a good idea to identify the animals. If we can put a chip in our pets so that we can identify who they are and we can do them with these animals, I think it’s a good idea.

Some people are concerned about the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian tentacles of this technology though.
 
Well, you’ve always got a balance that’s out there, but if you’re looking at this cow, for example, that we just had with mad cow, if we’d been able to identify where that cow came from, we could have prevented a lot of other animals coming from the same feed area.  We could test those animals.  I would support a record system on these cows.

What would you recommend to someone reading this story that’s on the fence about becoming a vegetarian?  Some people might think you have an agenda. What do you tell them?

The first thing I would say to them before doing anything would be to go out and educate yourself. Do some reading.  Go to my website www.madcowboy.com and arm yourself with the information needed to make the right decisions.  I don’t eat any animal products but I still have family that does.  Vegetarianism may not be for everybody but I’m trying to help people to make better choices.  Should we not have cleaner and better food than what’s out there?  If we can do it why shouldn’t we do it?  If you’re going to keep eating meat go organic.  The reason why most people are not successful that change their diet to vegetarian or vegan is that they don’t understand what they’re doing and how to do it.  There are more lousy vegetarian diets out there than you can shake a stick at.  How many people do you know that are vegetarian on chips and Twinkies that think they’re doing themselves a favor?  They need to educate themselves to understand what the issues are about.  Don’t commit yourself to being a vegetarian for the rest of your life.  I would suggest a 60-day period where you go without eating any animal products, including dairy. Don’t go and tell everybody that you’re a vegetarian.  Just change your diet and see how your body reacts.  Remember though, you have to cleanse your body and get rid of a lot of the garbage you’ve been storing.  If you do that for 60-days, you’ll find the most phenomenal changes in the amount of energy you have, the amount of sleep that you need, and how you feel.  That’s what I would recommend to someone.  

I know you’re just about out of time so let me conclude by asking you what you hope to accomplish with your work?

I want people to educate themselves and make good decisions for themselves.  I don’t think that we should be all empowering on decisions that people make but I think we should be giving them good information and quit lying to them.  I think that if the American consumer has the correct information, most of them will make the right decisions and that’s what I want to do.  I want to educate people and let them make their own decisions.

If anybody wanted to get a hold of you, what would be the best way to do that and also learn more about you and your organization? 

Have them visit my website at www.madcowboy.com  My phone number, fax number and email address are all there for people to reach me.  I personally answer all of my phone calls and emails. 

Well Howard, that covers just about everything I wanted to ask you today. 

Okay.  If you find there’s something you don’t have, call back.

Okay.  Sounds great.  I really appreciate your time and all the valuable information you’ve given us. Keep up the excellent work you’re doing.