Wednesday, December 29, 2010

December 29,2010-12-29
I just was catching up on some reading over the holidays and came across an article in the B.C. Animal Sense magazine that talks about why the SPCA cannot prosecute against cruelty that is common place in the rearing of food animals. Canada’s codes of Practice for the Care and Handling of Farm Animals set out guidelines only and any practice that is considered “reasonable and generally accepted” is exempt from both Provincial and Federal animal cruelty laws.
So how is it that we would never allow a Zoo to keep animals in an enclosure that did not allow them to see out, be able to turn around and have to stand on concrete for the duration of its life, yet we allow literally millions of female pigs, known as sows, to live their entire lives like this to produce the food that we purchase.
What makes it wrong in the one circumstance and yet is not only considered OK but is encouraged and supported by the Government in the other instance.  One reason is that I think the majority of the public live in ignorance about how their food is actually manufactured. Certainly the farmers do not want the public to see how the animals are really kept. I have never yet seen a petting zoo that is supposed to be acting as an educational tool, actually show how animals are really raised on the average modern farm. Everything is all cute little lambs nursing from their moms and chickens pecking about on the ground.
 The sides of the delivery trucks in my area delivering milk and dairy products show a cow in a beautiful green pasture. None of this representation of farm life is anywhere near reality. Maybe a lawyer should consider suing the dairy industry for false advertising?
I am mystified as to how we rationalize the incredibly cruel farming methods for our food animals and then spend so much time and energy to prosecute people who are cruel to a single animal. Either animals suffer or they don’t you cannot have it both ways depending on who owns the animal and the purpose of the ownership.
The industry leaders will tell you it is necessary to treat the animals this way in order to produce cheap food to feed the masses and the poor. To me that is the same as my Mother telling me to clean my plate because there are hungry children in Africa. My leftovers could never impact the hungry in the other places of the world and cruelty cannot be justified just to produce cheaper food. If you are truly concerned about feeding the poor any well educated person knows that meat is not the answer as it consumes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of finished beef. Meat is not the answer to world hunger. Also the more I learn about factory farming the more I learn about how many animals are killed during the process from birth to slaughter. Each year in Canada 2 ½ to 3 MILLION animals arrive at the slaughter house dead! This means they cannot be used for human consumption and must go to the rendering plant. Also many animals are destroyed because they do not grow quickly enough. It is all about automation and fitting the profile of the desired finished product.It really has nothing to do with food it has everything to do with profit for the huge corporations that control this industry.
Anyway those are some of my thoughts today on the anti cruelty laws and how they are enforced.
If you want to learn more here is a link to Youtube about sow crates. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmQfZTSNwuc

Monday, December 6, 2010

Interesting additives!

Well I belong to a group that emails interesting news articles related to animals. I received this one a couple of days ago, but did not have time to read it till tonight. Wow, I had no idea that they( they being the top end of the corporate ladder who care nothing about the animal, enviroment or consumer) were making industry so dependent on the need for animal byproducts for even simple things.
I had no idea that plastic bags contained animal byproducts and that even the industry is concerned about it! Turns out that plastic bags may have the potential to pass on Mad Cow Disease! Read below to learn more.
P.S. No wonder animals eat plastic bags if they contain animal fat!
Here is the link as well
http://www.genengnews.com/gen-articles/animal-derived-agents-in-disposable-systems/1090/

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Tutorials : Aug 1 2005 (Vol. 25, No. 14)

Animal-Derived Agents in Disposable Systems

Growing Concern Over the Use of ADCs in Polymeric Materials

Polymeric materials have been widely used in bioprocessing for more than a decade. Disposable processing products manufactured from plastic materials include flexible tubing, sanitary fittings, cylindrical tanks, carboys, powder-handling bags, capsule filters, and flexible film-based containers used for storage and mixing of process fluids. Polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) are the most common polymers employed for surfaces that come into direct contact with solid or liquid process materials.
Although polymers are manufactured from petroleum feedstock, plastics manufacturers often use additives of animal origin to improve material properties and/or to aid in processing of raw polymers.
The principal animal-derived components (ADC) used today are various salts of stearic acid, a long-chain (C18) fatty acid. Derived from the rendering of beef fat (tallow), stearates comprise approximately 100200 ppm in typical raw polyethylene. When added to polymer formulations, calcium and aluminum stearate salts (among others) impart lubricity, preventing the polymer from sticking to metal surfaces during extrusion or mold release. These additives are often referred to as "slip" agents.
In addition to lubrication, stearates bind to and inactivate trace polymerization catalysts remaining in the polymer blend. Stearates applied directly to molds and extruders provide lubricity. Stearate additives have become part of the culture of polymer processing because they are inexpensive and work well.

Concern Over Prion Diseases

Recent outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE; "mad cow disease") and related human spongiform illnesses, generically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), have raised concern over the safety of ADCs. The trend toward serum-free media is largely due to concerns over TSEs. This group of diseases includes BSE, scrapie (which affects sheep), chronic wasting disease (deer and elk), and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD; humans).
Cases of BSE have been sporadic, with the majority limited to Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Significant isolated outbreaks have arisen in other European countries. In North America, five cases of BSE were confirmed between 2002 and 2004. Although the number of animals affected has been in the hundreds of thousands (98% from the U.K.), fewer than 150 cases of the human form of BSE, CJD, have been confirmed worldwide between 1995 and 2002.
BSE and CJD are caused by a prion, an infectious, abnormally shaped, self-replicating protein that is much smaller than viruses or bacteria. CJD is believed to arise from ingestion of tissues, primarily nerve and brain, from infected animals.
Despite a mostly successful effort at eradicating BSE in food animals and the small number of human cases of CJD worldwide, bioprocessors have expressed concern over the use of ADCs in the manufacture and processing of polymeric materials that come into direct contact with bioprocess fluids.
Their apprehension is due to the small size and difficulty in detecting prions, and the fact that most biotech products are injected. Safety standards for injectible drugs are significantly higher than for ingested therapeutics due to the potential for direct infection.
Recently, bioprocessors have developed orthogonal infectious agent removal and inactivation schemes, as add-ons to normal viral clearance, which purportedly remove prions. However, a growing number of biotech experts believe that the unpredictability of BSE/CJD outbreaks, and the seriousness of the human form of prion disease (100% fatal), represent an unnecessary risk.
In response to this perceived risk, many bioprocessors now request fluid-handling products that are free of materials of animal origin. Animal-free materials eliminate unnecessary risk as well as the need to trace materials of construction back to raw materials.
Interest in animal-derived product-free polymers is strongest in Europe, where BSE has been in the news for more than a decade. However, there has been a discernible increase in attention to ADC status from North American and Asian bioprocessors as well.
Increasingly, bioprocessors are asking suppliers to document that construction materials are either ADC-free or, if they employ stearates from animal sources, that the additives were prepared in accordance with standards that guarantee inactivation of any and all infectious agents, including prions.
Since they operate in the epicenter of BSE incidence, regulators in the European Union have a keen interest in the causes and prevention of TSEs. In 2004, the Official Journal of the European Union published a guidance on minimizing risk of transmitting animal spongiform encephalopathy agents through veterinary medicinal products. This document states:
"Tallow derivatives, such as glycerol and fatty acids, manufactured from tallow by rigorous processes, are thought unlikely to be infectioussuch materials manufactured under the conditions at least as rigorous as those given below shall be considered in compliance for this note for guidancetrans-esterification or hydrolysis at not less than 200C for not less than 20 minutes under pressure (glycerol, fatty acids, and fatty acid esters production)"
Generally, processes used to manufacture tallow-based derivatives exceed these specifications.
Increasingly, polymer manufacturers will document that their stearate additives meet or exceed EU standards for tallow-based products. Moreover, many suppliers source stearate additives exclusively from North American sources, which greatly reduces prion contamination risk.
Normally this would be enough to assure biopharmaceutical manufacturers that product-contact surface areas in disposable plastic components pose no risk. However, despite the FDA's recent emphasis on risk-based and science-based manufacturing, biotech remains a highly risk-averse industry. As a result, interest in ADC-free polymers is growing.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

Biotech's awareness of ADC additives in polymer processing is reminiscent of the industry's concern over leachables and extractables a decade ago, when disposable polymeric process products were just gaining market acceptance.
Interest in leachables/extractables began as a scientific curiosity but eventually grew into a set of regulations and practices, which today are generally recognized as prudent measures for protecting public health. Today, suppliers of plastic disposable components use only materials for which adherence to regulatory standards for leachables/extractables can readily be demonstrated.
Similarly, if concern over ADCs and prion diseases persists and grows, a product or material's ADC status may become an issue for biotechnology. It is not inconceivable that, at some point in the future, standards for ADCs formulated into product surface areas will evolve from today's acceptance of components that were processed according to reasonable standards, to zero tolerance.
Although substitutes for ADC-based polymer additives are not difficult to find, plastics containing these replacement additives are uncommon. Silicone oils can serve as lubricating agents, as can stearates derived from nonbovine animals, or even nonstearate-based plant-based long-chain fatty acids and waxes. In some situations polymer processors can eliminate slip agents altogether.
The major issue is sourcing and supply. Polymer resins are the prototypic commodity product. About 60 million tons of polyethylene are produced worldwide each year, according to a study by petroleum giant BP. Even specialty or niche PE markets have become commoditized, to the point where suspending production to switch to a new additive involves significant expense.
This added cost is probably not an issue for users motivated to use ADC-free materials. However, the issue is not so much cost as availability, which depends on market forces, principally polymer processors' perception of the value in continuing to produce and sell ADC-free base materials. Today, few PE or PP manufacturers offer ADC-free raw materials; this is unlikely to change soon.
In our experience, most bioprocessors prefer ACD-free materials. While the majority are satisfiedfor nowsimply to be apprised of a material's ADC status, some have already decided to source products produced from ADC-free polymers exclusively.
At the very least, bioprocessors' concerns have increased and the burden is on suppliers of plastic process equipment to demonstrate ADC status for all relevant ingredients.
From the perspective of plastic fabricators and vendors like TC Tech (Maple Plain, MN), establishing and certifying ADC-free status is preferable to demonstrating to each customer, through an exhaustive supply chain analysis, that animal-based ingredients were processed according to reasonable, accepted prion inactivation standards.
To this end, TC Tech has established a line of disposable fluid handling products that are certified to be free of materials of animal origin (Figures 1 and 2). In all cases, certified products carry written documentation from the raw material supplier and the molder/extruder stating that materials and production processes are free of animal-derived agents.

ADC-Free Material

At some point, if worldwide regulatory bodies adopt stricter controls over ADC-derived materials, manufacturers may be required to demonstrate ADC-free status. Or, in the absence of formal guidance, biotech firms may decide simply to switch to ADC-free materials as a prudent measure to reduce risk, validation, and paperwork.
As biotechnology adopts more disposable polyethylene and polypropylene products, there will be a growing need to source single-use containers, tubing, valves, and other equipment from vendors who have been ahead of the curve with respect to the ADC issue.
As with leachables/extractables, where FDA does not outright prohibit new materials, the burden will be on bioprocessors to demonstrate that their processes "do no harm." In our experience, a straightforward certification that components are ADC-free is simpler to achieve than re-inventing the proverbial wheel for each material.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

First Day of Respect

December 5,2010
Wow I have been wanting to do this forever it seems. I have so much I want to get off my chest and nowhere to vent it seems. However I do not want this to just be a forum to let steam off. My desire is that this will become a popular site where I can share information on topics that interest and concern me. I read a lot regarding humane issues and the environment and often am frustrated over the lack of knowledge in the general population. At least among my friends and customers. I hope to change that a little bit with this blog.
One of the main things that I am involved with right now is the Anti Slaughter movement. This year in Canada 125 Thousand Yes that is correct THOUSAND! horses will be/have been slaughtered this year. The slaughter industry is mainly fed by the race horse industry and the Quarter horse industry.Horses from every walk of life go to slaughter. Many people unknowingly send their horse to slaughter by putting it up for auction. Many of the buyers sitting in the audience at an auction are what are known as Kill Buyers. They attend the horse auctions and purchase any horse that they can if the price is right. They calculate the weight of the horse and what the price per pound is at the slaughter house and if there is a profit margin they will buy the horse. Right now at auction it is possible to buy a horse or young foal for as little as $25.00. These horses face a horrible death and often a horrible fate at the hands of the kill buyers while they wait to accumulate enough horses to make the trip to the slaughter house worth it if they do their own transporting or until they have enough to fill a truck going to the slaughter house. Often the horses will be forced into trailers that are over packed and have no room for the horses to move freely. They often endure long trips non stop with no water or food and in extremely cold weather. If you think that slaughter is done humanely think again.