However, a number of serious injuries and deaths occur every year as a result of animal-related accidents. Killing Wolves Actually Leads to More Livestock Deaths On the surface, killing wolves that kill sheep and cattle seems like a way to control predation, but the data paints a not-so-simple picture 0752: Reptiles - This year E.g. Part of his hypothesis is based on allegations that human pharmaceuticals have been found in mutilated cattle, and on the necropsies that show cattle mutilations commonly involve areas of the animal that relate to “input, output and reproduction”. We also use an alternate specification with a binary measure of whether a county has one or more livestock plants. Unfortunately, we know of no such identifying variation. Zenodo. Among livestock plants in our sample, we have the dates of closures that occurred in 26 counties, or 10% of counties with plants. Biochemist Colm Kelleher,[41] who has investigated several purported mutilations first-hand, argues that the mutilations are most likely a clandestine U.S. government effort to track the spread of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and related diseases, such as scrapie. The lower sustained COVID-19 growth rate postclosure suggests that plant closures have some relationship with COVID-19 transmission, which, in turn, suggests some relationship between plant-level activity and community disease spread within the county. • About one-third of cattle operations had deaths in adult cattle. In addition, the positive relationship between COVID-19 transmission and production-line speed waivers issued to poultry plants, particularly those during the 2020 pandemic, is notable, given that these waivers are intended for plants with safe commercial production practices and microbial control.‡‡ This finding suggests a need for additional examination of this program. Meat processing - Meat processing - Livestock slaughter procedures: The slaughter of livestock involves three distinct stages: preslaughter handling, stunning, and slaughtering. ↵‡In our main analyses, we included category 4 and 5 pork and beef facilities and category 5 poultry facilities (which comprise 57% of total poultry plants); see Materials and Methods for a full discussion. In a second specification, we added the positivity rate (total cases divided by total tests) as a further control. In doing so, we selected the top quartile of growth rates among the 233 counties with livestock plants that did not have a plant shutdown. The police witnesses claim to have encountered several men in an unmarked U.S. Army helicopter in 1976 at a small community airport in Cache County. To support his hypothesis, Oliphant cites the Reston ebolavirus case in which plain clothes military officers, traveling in unmarked vehicles, entered a research facility in Reston, Virginia, to secretly retrieve and destroy animals that were contaminated with a highly infectious disease. It is also highly concentrated: The largest four companies in beef, pork, and poultry processing capture 55 to 85% of their respective markets (22⇓⇓⇓⇓–27). It is possible that a certain type of work similar to livestock processing—but not livestock processing itself—is driving the spread of COVID-19. The FBI was unable to identify any individuals responsible for the mutilations. Readers may disagree on whether our array of analyses has isolated a causal effect. Gray shaded bars reflect the estimated period when the effect of closing a plant would have been reflected in cases (1 to 3 wk after), given that incubation periods may last up to 14 d) (62). Preslaughter handling is a major concern to the livestock industry, especially the pork industry. We limited the analysis to the continental United States. Stats show that there were 804 livestock deaths recorded by the CFIA in 2006 in Saskatchewan; 493 cattle, 254 bison, 6 horses, 33 sheep, 13 cervids (white-tailed deer and elk), 3 pigs, and 2 goats. However, the speed with which growth rates rose and fell in shutdown counties suggests that some closure-related mechanism is likely at play. There are many more who suffer major injuries that require hospitalisation and significant time off work. [5] It’s not a totally unfounded hatred; certainly wolves do prey on livestock, but the statistics have never really indicated that wolves were a significant problem for ranchers. Image credit: Joyce Gross (University of California, Berkeley). Dean Trimboli T(1997), Dead Cows I've Known. Table SAINC5: Personal income by major component and industry. Livestock facilities and county-level COVID-19 incidence, IV. One potential explanation is that large plants simply entail more activity and employ more people. The freight index is from the Federal Highway Administration’s Freight Analysis Framework (78) using the variable AADTT12, the annual average daily truck traffic in 2012, which we sum across all listed highways in a given county. - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com Rep., US Department of Homeland Security, Washington, DC, 2020), COVID-19 among workers in meat and poultry processing facilities—19 states, April 2020, The transformation of US livestock agriculture scale, efficiency, and risks, Power, food and agriculture: Implications for farmers, consumers and communities, Competition in the US meatpacking industry, A review of causes for and consequences of economic concentration in the U.S. meatpacking industry, European Federation of Food Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions, “Putting meat on the bones: A report on the structure and dynamics of the European meat industry” (Tech. Coefficients are firm fixed-effect coefficients plotted from SI Appendix, Table S6. Dairy producers in New Mexico and Texas take a huge hit after Winter Storm Goliath wiped out more than 30,000 dairy cows. 'Kenyans consume more than 145 litres of milk per person annually increasing the risks associated with milk-related aflatoxins. Author contributions: C.A.T., C.B., and D.A. Increases in production-line speeds due to technological enhancements as well as policy changes have also been hypothesized to exacerbate COVID-19 transmission (5, 42). It was then expanded in September 2018 to allow all poultry plants the opportunity to apply for these waivers. The witnesses asserted that after this heated encounter, cattle mutilations in the region ceased for about five years. The selection of this instrument was motivated by meat processors’ need to minimize costs of transporting livestock supply when selecting the location of plants. 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