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WHAT I LEARNED AT A DODGE CITY MEATPACKING PLANT

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/meatpacking-plant-dodge-city/619011/

About beef, about myself, about AmericaBy Michael HoltzJULY/AUGUST 2021 ISSUESHARE

This article was published online on June 14, 2021.https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=atlantic&articleID=pulling-count-holtz

On the morning of may 25, 2019, a food-safety inspector at a Cargill meatpacking plant in Dodge City, Kansas, came across a disturbing sight. In an area of the plant called the stack, a Hereford steer had, after being shot in the forehead with a bolt gun, regained consciousness. Or maybe he had never lost it. Either way, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The steer was hanging upside down by a steel chain shackled to one of his rear legs. He was showing what is known in the euphemistic language of the American beef industry as “signs of sensibility.” His breathing was “rhythmic.” His eyes were open and moving. And he was trying to right himself, which the animals commonly do by arching their back. The only sign he wasn’t exhibiting was “vocalization.”

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The inspector, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told employees in the stack to stop the moving overhead chain to which the cattle were attached and “reknock” the steer. But when one of them pulled the trigger on a handheld bolt gun, it misfired. Someone brought over another gun to finish the job. “The animal was then stunned adequately,” the inspector wrote in a memorandum describing the incident, noting that “the timeframe from observing the apparent egregious action to the final euthanizing stun was approximately 2 to 3 minutes.”

Three days after the incident occurred, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, citing the plant’s history of compliance, put the plant on notice for its “failure to prevent inhumane handling and slaughter of livestock.” FSIS ordered the plant to create an action plan to ensure that such an incident didn’t happen again. On June 4, the agency approved a plan submitted by the plant’s manager and said in a letter to him that it would defer a decision about punishment. The chain could keep moving, and with it the slaughtering of up to 5,800 cows a day.

The first time I stepped foot in the stack was late last October, after I had been working at the plant for more than four months. To find it, I arrived early one day and worked my way backwards down the chain. It was surreal to see the slaughter process in reverse, to witness step-by-step what it would take to reassemble a cow: shove its organs back into its body cavities; reattach its head to its neck; pull its hide back over its flesh; draw blood back into its veins.

During my visits to the kill floor, I saw a severed hoof lying inside a metal sink in the skinning room, and puddles of bright-red blood dotting the red-brick floor. One time, a woman in a yellow synthetic-rubber apron was trimming away flesh from skinless, decapitated heads. A USDA inspector working next to her was doing something similar. I asked him what he was cutting. “Lymph nodes,” he said. I found out later that he was performing a routine check for diseases and contamination.

On my last trip to the stack, I tried to be inconspicuous. I stood against the back wall and watched as two men standing on a raised platform cut vertical incisions down the throat of each passing cow. As far as I could tell, all of the animals were unconscious, though a few of them involuntarily kicked their legs. I watched until a supervisor came over and asked what I was doing. I told him I wanted to see what this part of the plant was like. “You need to leave,” he said. “You can’t be here without a face shield.” I apologized and told him that I would get going. I couldn’t have stayed for much longer anyway; my shift was about to start.

Getting a job at the Cargill plant was surprisingly easy. The online application for “general production” was six pages long. It took less than 15 minutes to fill out. At no point was I required to submit a résumé, let alone references. The most substantial part of the application was a 14-question form that asked things like:

“Do you have experience working with knives to cut meat (this does not include working in a grocery store or deli)?”

No.

“How many years have you worked in a beef production plant (example: slaughter or fabrication, not a grocery store or deli)?”

No experience.

“How many years have you worked in a production or plant environment (example: assembly line or manufacturing work)?”

Zero.

Four hours and 20 minutes after hitting “Submit,” I received an email confirmation for a phone interview the next day, May 19, 2020. The interview lasted three minutes. When the woman conducting it asked me for the name of my last employer, I told her that it was the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the publisher of The Christian Science Monitor. I had worked at the Monitor from 2014 to 2018. For the last two of those four years, I was its Beijing correspondent. I had quit to study Chinese and freelance.

“And what did you do there?” the woman asked about my time at the Church.

“Communications,” I said.

The woman asked a couple of follow-up questions about when I quit and why. During the interview, the only question that gave me pause was the final one.

“Do you have any issues or concerns working in our environment?” she asked.

After hesitating for a moment, I replied, “No, I don’t.”

With that, the woman said that I was “eligible for a verbal, conditional job offer.” She told me about the six positions for which the plant was hiring. All were for the second shift, which at the time was running from 3:45 in the afternoon to between 12:30 and 1 o’clock in the morning. Three of the jobs were in harvesting, the side of the plant more commonly known as the kill floor, and three were in fabrication, where the meat is prepared for distribution to stores and restaurants.

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I quickly decided that I wanted a job in fab. Temperatures on the kill floor can approach 100 degrees in the summer, and, as the woman on the phone explained, “the smell is stronger because of the humidity.” Then there were the jobs themselves, jobs like removing hides and “dropping tongues.” After you remove the tongue, the woman said, “you do have to hang it on a hook.” Her description of fab, on the other hand, made it sound less medieval and more like an industrial-scale butcher shop. A small army of assembly-line workers saw, cut, trim, and package all of the meat from the cows. The temperature on the fab floor ranges from 32 to 36 degrees. But, the woman told me, you work so hard that “you don’t feel the cold once you’re in there.”On the evening before I left for Dodge City, my mom and I went to my sister and brother-in-law’s house for a steak dinner. “It might be the last one you ever have,” my sister said.

We went over the job openings. Chuck cap puller was immediately out because it involved walking and cutting at the same time. The next to go was brisket bone for the simple reason that having to remove something called brisket fingers from in between joints sounded unappealing. That left chuck final trim. That job, as the woman described it, consisted entirely of trimming pieces of chuck “to whatever spec it is that they’re running.” How hard could that be? I thought to myself. I told the woman that I would take it. “Perfect,” she said, and went on to tell me my starting pay ($16.20 an hour) and the conditions of my job offer.

A couple of weeks later, after a background check, a drug screening, and a physical exam, I got a call about my start date: June 8, the following Monday. The drive to Dodge City from Topeka, where I had been living with my mom since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic, takes about four hours. I decided that I would leave on Sunday.

On the evening before I left, my mom and I went to my sister and brother-in-law’s house for a steak dinner. “It might be the last one you ever have,” my sister said when she called to invite us over. My brother-in-law grilled two 22-ounce rib eyes for him and me and a 24-ounce sirloin for my mom and sister to split. I helped my sister cook the side dishes: mashed potatoes and green beans sautéed in butter and bacon grease. The quintessential home-cooked meal for a middle-class family in Kansas.

The steak was as good as any I’ve had. It’s hard to describe it without sounding like an Applebee’s commercial: charred crust, juicy and tender meat. I tried to eat slowly so that I could savor every bite. But soon I was caught up in conversation, and I finished eating without thinking about it. In a state where cows outnumber people two to one, where more than 5 billion pounds of beef are produced annually, and where many families—including mine, when my three sisters and I were younger—fill their deep freezer once a year with a side of beef, it’s easy to take a steak dinner for granted.

The cargill plant is on the southeastern outskirts of Dodge City, just down the road from a slightly larger meatpacking plant owned by National Beef. The two facilities sit at opposite ends of what is surely the most noxious two-mile stretch of road in southwestern Kansas. Situated close by is a wastewater-treatment plant and a feedlot. On many days last summer, I found the stench of lactic acid, hydrogen sulfide, manure, and death to be nauseating. The oppressive heat only made it worse.

The High Plains of southwestern Kansas are home to four major meatpacking plants: the two in Dodge City, plus one in Liberal (National Beef) and another near Garden City (Tyson Foods). That Dodge City became home to two meatpacking plants is a fitting coda to the town’s early history. Founded in 1872 along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, Dodge City was originally an outpost for buffalo hunters. After the herds that once roamed the Great Plains were decimated—to say nothing of what happened to the Native Americans who’d once lived there—the city turned to the cattle trade.

Practically overnight, Dodge City became, in the words of a prominent local businessman, “the greatest cattle market in the world.” This was the era of lawmen like Wyatt Earp and gunfighters like Doc Holliday, of gambling and shoot-outs and barroom brawls. To say that Dodge City is proud of its Wild West heritage would be an understatement, and nowhere is that heritage more celebrated—some might say mythologized—than at the Boot Hill Museum. Located at 500 West Wyatt Earp Boulevard, near Gunsmoke Street and the Gunfighters Wax Museum, the Boot Hill Museum is anchored by a full-scale replica of the once-famous Front Street. Visitors can enjoy a sarsaparilla at the Long Branch Saloon or shop for handmade soap and homemade fudge at the Rath & Co. General Store. Entry to the museum is free for Ford County residents, a deal that I took advantage of many times last summer after I moved into a one-bedroom apartment near the local VFW.

Yet for all its dime-novel-worthy stories, Dodge City’s Wild West era was short-lived. In 1885, under growing pressure from local ranchers, the Kansas legislature banned Texas cattle from the state, bringing an abrupt end to the cattle drives that had fueled the town’s boom years. For the next seven decades, Dodge City remained a quiet farming community. Then, in 1961, a company called Hyplains Dressed Beef opened the first meatpacking plant in town (the same one now operated by National Beef). In 1980, a subsidiary of Cargill opened its plant down the road. The beef industry had returned to Dodge City.

Workers handling meat along an illustrated conveyor belt
Illustration by Mark Harris; images by USDA Photo / Alamy; ItalianFoodProduction / Getty

With a combined workforce of more than 12,800 people, the four meatpacking plants are among the largest employers in southwestern Kansas, and all of them rely on immigrants to help staff their production lines. “The packers followed the maxim of ‘Build it and they will come,’ ” Donald Stull, an anthropologist who has studied the meatpacking industry for more than 30 years, told me. “And that’s basically what happened.”https://3246d20dbaf1d2e398ae640359a84593.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

According to Stull, the boom started in the early 1980s with the arrival of refugees from Vietnam and migrants from Mexico and Central America. In more recent years, refugees from Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all come to work in the plants. Today, nearly one in three Dodge City residents is foreign-born, and three in five are Latino or Hispanic. When I arrived at the plant on my first day of work, I was greeted by four banners at the entrance, one each in English, Spanish, French, and Somali, warning employees to stay home if they were exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19.

I spent much of my first two days at the plant with six other new hires in a windowless classroom near the kill floor. The room had beige cinder-block walls and fluorescent overhead lighting. On the wall near the door hung two posters, one in English and the other in Somali, that read bringing beef to the people. The HR rep who was with us for most of those two days of orientation made sure we didn’t forget that mission. “Cargill is a worldwide organization,” she said before starting a lengthy PowerPoint presentation. “We pretty much feed the world. That’s why when the coronavirus started, we didn’t shut down. Because you guys want to eat, right?” Everyone nodded.

By that point, in early June, COVID-19 had forced at least 30 meatpacking plants across the United States to pause operations and, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, had killed at least 74 workers. The Cargill plant reported its first case on April 13. Kansas public-health records reveal that over the course of 2020, more than 600 of the plant’s 2,530 employees contracted COVID-19. At least four died.

In March, the plant started to implement a series of social-distancing measures, including some that had been recommended by the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It staggered breaks and installed plexiglass barriers on tables in the cafeteria and thick plastic curtains between workstations on the production line. During the third week of August, metal dividers suddenly appeared in the men’s bathrooms, providing workers with a bit of space (and privacy) at the stainless-steel urinal troughs.

The plant also hired a company called Examinetics to screen employees before each shift. In a white tent at the entrance to the plant, a team of medical personnel—all of whom wore N95 masks, white coveralls, and gloves—checked temperatures and handed out disposable face masks. Thermal cameras were set up inside the plant for additional temperature checks. Face coverings were mandatory. I always wore the disposable masks, but many other employees preferred to wear a blue neck gaiter with a United Food and Commercial Workers International Union logo or a black bandana with the Cargill logo and, for some reason, #extraordinary printed on it.

Catching the coronavirus wasn’t the only health risk at the plant. Meatpacking is notoriously dangerous. According to Human Rights Watch, government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, a meat or poultry worker lost a body part or was sent to the hospital for in-patient treatment about every other day. On the first day of orientation, one of the other new hires, a Black man from Alabama, described a close call he’d had when he worked in packaging at National Beef’s plant up the road. He rolled up his right sleeve to reveal a four-inch scar on the outside of his elbow. “I almost turned into chocolate milk,” he said.

The HR rep told a similar story about a man whose sleeve got caught in a conveyor belt. “He lost his arm up to here,” she said, pointing halfway up her left biceps. She let this sink in for a few moments, before moving on to the next PowerPoint slide: “That’s a good transition into workplace violence.” She began explaining Cargill’s zero-tolerance policy on guns.

After a 15-minute break, we returned to the classroom for a presentation by a union rep.https://3246d20dbaf1d2e398ae640359a84593.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“Why are we all here?” he asked.

“To make money,” someone responded.

“To make money!” the union rep repeated.

For the next hour and 15 minutes, money—and how the union helped us make more of it—was our focus. The union rep told us that UFCW’s local chapter had recently negotiated a permanent $2 raise for all hourly employees. He explained that all hourly employees would also earn an additional $6 an hour in “purpose pay,” because of the pandemic, through the end of August. This brought the starting wage up to $24.20. The next day at lunch, the man from Alabama told me how eager he was to work overtime. “Right now I’m trying to work on my credit,” he said. “We’ll be working so much, we won’t even have time to spend all that money.”

On my third day of work at the Cargill plant, the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. surpassed 2 million. But the plant was beginning to bounce back from the outbreak that it had experienced earlier in the spring. (In early May, the plant’s production output had fallen by about 50 percent, according to a text message sent by Cargill’s director of state-government affairs to Kansas’s secretary of agriculture, which I later obtained through a public-records request.) The superintendent in charge of second shift, a giant man with a bushy white beard and a missing right thumb, sounded pleased. “It’s balls to the wall,” I overheard him say to contractors fixing a broken air conditioner. “Last week we were hitting 4,000 a day. This week we’ll probably be around 4,500.”

In fab, processing all of those cows takes place in a cavernous room filled with steel chains, hard-plastic conveyor belts, industrial-size vacuum sealers, and stacks of cardboard shipping boxes. But first is the cooler, where sides of beef are left to hang for an average of 36 hours after they leave the kill floor. When they are brought out for butchering, the sides are broken down into forequarters and hindquarters and then into smaller, marketable cuts of meat. These are what get vacuum-sealed and loaded into boxes for distribution. In non-pandemic times, an average of 40,000 boxes, each weighing between 10 and 90 pounds, are shipped out from the plant every day. McDonald’s and Taco Bell, Walmart and Kroger—they all buy beef from Cargill. The company has six beef-processing plants across the U.S.; the one in Dodge City is the largest.He showed me how to put on a chain-mail tunic that looked made for a knight, layers of gloves, and a white-cotton frock. He led me to a spot near the middle of a 60-foot-long conveyor belt.

The most important tenet of the meatpacking industry is “The chain never stops.” Companies do everything they can to ensure that their production lines keep moving as fast as possible. Yet delays do occur. Mechanical problems are the most common reason; less common are shutdowns initiated by USDA inspectors because of suspected contamination or “inhumane handling” incidents like the one that occurred two years ago at the Cargill plant. Individual workers help keep the line moving by “pulling count”—industry parlance for doing your share of the work. The surest way to lose the respect of your co-workers is to continually fall behind on count, because doing so invariably means more work for them. The most heated confrontations I witnessed on the line happened when someone was perceived to be slacking off. These fights never escalated into anything more than yelling or the occasional elbow jab. If things got out of hand, a foreman would be called over to mediate.

New hires have a probation period of 45 days in which to prove that they can pull count—to “qualify,” as it’s known at the Cargill plant. Each one is supervised by a trainer for the duration of that time. My trainer was 30, just a few months younger than me, and had smiling eyes and broad shoulders. He was a member of a persecuted ethnic minority from Myanmar, the Karen. His Karen name was Par Taw, but after becoming an American citizen in 2019, he changed his name to Billion. “Maybe I’ll be a billionaire one day,” he told me when I asked him how he had chosen his new name. He laughed, as if embarrassed by sharing this part of his American dream.

Billion was born in 1990 in a small village in eastern Myanmar. Karen rebels were in the middle of a long insurgency against the country’s central government. The conflict raged on into the new millennium—it is one of the longest-running civil wars in the world—and forced tens of thousands of Karen to flee over the border into Thailand. Billion was one of them. When he was 12 years old, he began living in a refugee camp there. He moved to the U.S. when he was 18 years old, first to Houston and then to Garden City, where he went to work at the nearby Tyson plant. In 2011, he landed a job at Cargill, where he has worked ever since. Like many Karen people who arrived before him in Garden City, Billion attends Grace Bible Church. It was there that he met Toe Kwee, whose English name is Dahlia. The two started dating in 2009. In 2016, they had their first son, Shine. They bought a house and got married two years later.

Billion was a patient teacher. He showed me how to put on a chain-mail tunic that looked made for a knight, layers of gloves, and a white-cotton frock. Later, he gave me an orange-handled steel hook and a plastic scabbard filled with three identical knives, each with a black handle and a slightly curved six-inch blade, and led me to an empty spot near the middle of a 60-foot-long conveyor belt. Billion slid a knife from the scabbard and demonstrated how to sharpen it using a counterweight sharpener. Then he got to work, trimming away cartilage and bone fragments and ripping off long, thin ligaments from boulder-size pieces of chuck moving past us on the belt.

Billion worked methodically as I stood behind him and watched. He told me that the key was to cut off as little meat as possible. (As a supervisor succinctly put it: “More meat, more money.”) Billion made the job look effortless. In one swift motion, he flipped over 30-pound slabs of chuck with the flick of his hook and pulled out ligaments from folds in the meat. “Take it slow,” he told me after we switched spots.

More: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/meatpacking-plant-dodge-city/619011/

Montana rolls out new wolf regulation proposals

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https://mtstandard.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/montana-rolls-out-new-wolf-regulation-proposals/article_37c25243-1de3-5a01-a9e1-47c3e4c122e2.html

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Wolf
A gray wolf is seen in Yellowstone National Park.In response to multiple new laws aimed at reducing Montana’s wolf population, state officials have rolled out regulation proposals for wildlife commissioners to consider later this month.National Park Service

Tom Kuglin

In response to multiple new laws aimed at reducing Montana’s wolf population, state officials have rolled out regulation proposals for wildlife commissioners to consider later this month. That includes some options that are more restrictive than the laws as written.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks last week released its wolf season proposals ahead of the June 24 meeting of the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission. At that meeting, commissioners are expected to adopt draft regulations to send out for public comment ahead of final passage in August.Download PDF

Much of the 17-page…

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Lab Leaks And Covid-19: Why The Lab Leak Hypothesis Doesn’t Mean The Virus Was Engineered

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2021/06/13/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-why-the-lab-leak-hypothesis-doesnt-mean-the-virus-was-engineered/?sh=3e73832f30f7

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https://2a398f8536a61d54b16160ced29c40bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.htmlJun 13, 2021,07:39am EDT|625 views

Steven SalzbergContributorHealthFollow

CHINA-HEALTH-VIRUS
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the… [+]AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The “lab leak” hypothesis about the origin of Covid-19 has been getting a lot of attention lately, and deservedly so. This is the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that conducts research on coronaviruses. Just a few weeks ago, a group of highly respected virologists and epidemiologistspublished a letter in the journalSciencecalling for a more thorough investigation, stating that the lab leak hypothesis was not taken seriously enough in earlier investigations.

The coincidence of having a major virus research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), just a short distance from the live animal food market that was originally believed to be the source of the outbreak…

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Hunter says even death threats won’t stop her from killing animals – including elephants

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https://texasnewstoday.com/hunter-says-even-death-threats-wont-stop-her-from-killing-animals-including-elephants/310110/

isabellakhademhosseini2 days ago

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A female hunter who has killed dozens of animals including a 300lb bear has hit back at critics who bombard her with death threats, insisting they will not stop her from pursuing her passion – while sharing her dream of one day hunting more exotic animals like red stags and even elephants.

Sales manager Brooke McGee, 26, from Texas, fell in love with hunting when she was just three years old and she shot her first animal at the age of six.Her father, Craig, 54, had been hunting since he was a child and wanted to pass the tradition down to Brooke and her siblings.

At six years old, she hunted her first animal; a whitetail doe. She recalls the experience being exciting and after the animal was hit by the lethal shot, Brooke helped to process the deer for meat so that she…

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Otter trapping, mountain lion hunting seasons OK’d by Nebraska Game and Parks

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https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/otter-trapping-mountain-lion-hunting-seasons-okd-by-nebraska-game-and-parks/article_77a44b44-bded-58ac-8917-bfaf3785b05e.html

  • Marjie Ducey Omaha World-Herald
  • Jun 12, 2021Updated20 min ago
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Nebraska’s Mahoney State ParkPlay Video

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Take a look at one of Nebraska’s most popular tourist destinations.

OMAHA — River otter trapping and mountain lion hunting seasons both were approved Friday at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission meeting in Chadron.

After information was provided to commissioners about the resiliency of the population, a harvest of 75 North American river otters was OK’d. The trapping season will start in November and close in February, or within three days once that total of 75 otters is reached.

The mountain lion…

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Underwater Drones: Regulators Trying New Technology To Enforce Lobster Trap Rules

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https://www.mainepublic.org/business-and-economy/2021-06-11/underwater-drones-regulators-trying-new-technology-to-enforce-lobster-trap-rules

Maine Public | By Fred BeverPublished June 11, 2021 at 5:44 PM EDT

Maine Lobsters
FILE- In this Sept. 21, 2020 file photo, a sternman checks a lobster while fishing off South Portland, Maine. The Maine Department of Marine Resources said Wednesday fishermen caught more than 96 million pounds of lobsters in 2020.

The enforcement of lobster trap rules far offshore is getting increased attention from state and federal regulators, who are turning to new technology to inspect gear for compliance with requirements that aim to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from deadly entanglements.

Michael Henry is a top fisheries enforcement officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the northeast. He says physically inspecting bulky gear out in federal waters dozens of miles off Maine can be a daunting and time-consuming task.

“It’s been a challenge for us for a long time to be able to effectively haul lobster gear offshore — just the environmental challenges, the safety challenges,” he says.

But inspectors are checking to see if lobstermen are complying with requirements to insert weak links into their traplines, to help whales break through the rope, and to use rope that sinks to the bottom, instead of floating into the water column where whales are more likely to swim.

In federal waters, NOAA inspectors traditionally winch those trap-laden ropes to the surface for examination. But last year, the agency started testing remotely-operated underwater vehicles, or ROVs, outfitted with video cameras, to dive underwater and send images back to a vessel.

Only when potential violations are found does the officer then winch the gear up for a direct inspection.

“We did have some success: we identified gear with floating ground lines, missing trap-tags and unmarked surface gear,” says Henry.

Henry says the agency is hiring a contractor to deploy the vehicles in the fisheries that lie farthest from shore more often this year, and may buy smaller versions for use by federal patrols closer in.

Some lobster industry advocates say NOAA needs to do more than just add ROVs to its toolkit.

“I don’t know why NOAA is investing in that and not actually having the same sort of enforcement across all segments of the fleet,” says Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

McCarron is skeptical that the addition of ROVs alone will be sufficient once new gear rules are enacted this fall. Those will likely require ropes to have specific breaking strengths and diameters, and contain more weak links.

She says a new initiative by the state’s Department of Marine Resources could help, though. As part of Governor Mills ‘budget proposal for federal recovery plan dollars, DMR is asking for $3.3 million dollars for marine patrol infrastructure, including the purchase of a large vessel equipped to routinely handle the challenges of at-sea inspections.

“And actually be able to go out, patrol, haul gear, you know, buoy-to-trap, look at everything, haul the gear on board and be able to do true enforcement,” says McCarron.

The Legislature’s Appropriations Committee could act on that request next week.

Rescuers free humpback ‘anchored’ down by prawn traps off Vancouver Island

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https://www.saanichnews.com/news/rescuers-free-humpback-anchored-down-by-prawn-traps-off-vancouver-island/

Members of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Marine Mammal Response Program rescued an adult humpback what that was entangled in commercial fishing gear in the waters off of Entrance Island on Thursday, June 10. (Photo courtesy Marine Mammal Response Program)

Department of Fisheries and Oceans responders spend hours untangling whale

Help was fortunately close at hand for a humpback whale that found itself entangled in commercial fishing gear in the waters off Nanaimo yesterday.

Paul Cottrell, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Marine Mammal Response Program coordinator, said fisheries officers happened to be working just off Entrance Island on Thursday, June 10, following up on reports of suspected whale entanglements, when an emergency call came in from a commercial fishing vessel just five minutes away that had discovered an adult humpback whale entangled in its prawn trap line.

Cottrell was linked in to the call and advised crews at the scene to stay back and monitor the situation.

The animal, an adult estimated at about 12 metres long, had become so entangled it was anchored in place, possibly for as long as 24 hours, when it was discovered.

“It was a 50-string trap line with anchors on either end on 3,000 feet of rope, so there was a lot of gear that was holding this guy down, a lot of weight,” Cottrell said.

The marine mammal response boat and team rushed to the scene from the mainland and started assessing the situation with an aerial drone and remote-control submersibles. The commercial fisher provided information about the equipment that ensnared the whale.

“We don’t go in and cut things until we know exactly the gear configuration because you can make things worse if you cut the wrong line and also it can hurt the animal, so we took our time,” Cottrell said.

The whole operation took about six hours, including about four hours to disentangle the whale, which had the rope wrapped about four times around its tail.

“The rope that’s used is Polysteel. It’s nasty stuff and it’s fairly abrasive and the animal had injuries on the dorsal side, on the dorsal ridge, from I think when it became entangled … and it was just anchored in place,” Cottrell said. “Its tail stock was down and the animal was just breathing, maybe every five to 10 minutes, just holding position and trying to breathe. It was something.”https://blackpress.tv/embed/47852/Rescuers_free_humpback_anchored_down_by_prawn_traps_near_Nanaimo

With the assessment done, Cottrell’s team was able to move in and cut the rope from around the whale’s tail as well as some loose lines and then they watched the animal for about 30 minutes.

“When it was freed … it took it a while to get back the tail fluke movement pattern, so it was slowly moving and we were just making sure all the gear was off,” Cottrell said. “There was one small piece of loose rope that’s left that we’re going to be monitoring, but there’s no tension on it and we believe it’s around the left pectoral fin. So, that’s something we’re going to watch over time, but it’s not considered life-threatening and it was loose, so we’re almost certain it will fall off on its own … By the end of about an hour after it was acting normally again and was moving on. It was fantastic.”

READ ALSO: B.C. getting a second chance to coexist with humpback whales

Cottrell said there are a large number of humpbacks in the area that have returned to the Salish Sea. The whales winter in Mexico and around Hawaii and return to the Salish Sea in the summer to feed on shrimp and other food sources. Last year about 30 whales returned, but a count for this year hasn’t been completed yet.

Humpback populations have been recovering after they were nearly hunted to extinction before whaling was halted in Canada in 1959.

The whale rescued Thursday has not been identified and its sex is unknown. That information will be gathered later with further observations.

“It couldn’t have worked out better,” Cottrell said. “I’m just still so happy.”

READ ALSO: Young killer whale untangles itself from trap line off Nanaimo’s Rocky Point

Zoonotic disease needs to be stopped at source, top scientist warns

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Exposing the Big Game's avatarThe Extinction Chronicles

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/humans-sars-ebola-nhs-b940200.html

Humans must think ‘more holistically’ about how we interact with nature to prevent future pandemics, Professor Peter Horby said.

Professor Peter Horby,
Professor Peter Horby,/PA Media

ByTess de La Mare1 day agoSPONSOREDFive quick ways to help you create a happy hybrid working lifeH

umanity needs “much more holistic thinking” about how it interacts with nature in order to prevent future pandemics, one of the scientists who identified a life-saving Covid-19 therapy has warned.

Professor Peter Horby was one of the architects of the Recovery trial that discovered the commonly-prescribed dexamethasone could cut coronavirus deaths by one third.

He is one of several scientists to be knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for their work fighting the pandemic, and is now heading Oxford University’s new Pandemic Sciences Centre.

These things are crossing over into humans from animal sources and we need to stop things at source, not when…

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How stressed out are factory-farmed animals? AI might have the answer.

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The promise and perils of using facial recognition technology on animals.By Laura Bridgeman  Jun 12, 2021, 8:00am EDT

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Much of the research into animal facial expressions has focused on species like dogs and horses. But some of the most cutting-edge work is aimed at an unlikely subject: the farmed hog.

The typical hog factory farm employs a small number of workers to oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of pigs — too many for the people running the facility to tell which ones might be in distress. Researchers at the Centre for Machine Vision at the University of West England, where pig emotion recognition work is being conducted, envision this technology could be used to help farmworkers more readily identify sickness and injury. If AI can routinely scan the pigs’ faces and alert workers to particularly stressed-out animals, treatment can come sooner and suffering can be reduced.

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There is even potential for the technology someday advancing to the point of detecting “happiness” in pigs — a holy grail for animal ag.

But while the idea of learning more about what animals are feeling is self-evidently enticing — why wouldn’t we want to learn more about them? — some animal welfare advocates question the very premise of this research. While the bulk of the funding is from the UK government, one reason for the skepticism is that the research is partly supported by companies in the meat and agriculture industry, including a pig genetics company that has availed its farms for the study. It’s not hard to see that industry’s interest in this work: Keeping more pigs alive under intensive conditions would be a financial boon, as would being able to advertise how “happy” the animals were — something the Centre’s website suggests could be possible.

And that all leads to a deeper question: Just how comfortable — let alone happy — can a pig be on a factory farm? In the US, nearly all pigs raised for meat are kept in unnatural, highly mechanized, and crowded conditions, given no access to the outdoors. Conditions are similar in much of the European Union, and factory farming is on the rise in low- and middle-income countries as global demand for meat increases. These environments are so difficult to endure that, by some estimates, up to 35 percent of US-raised pigs die before ever reaching the market.

Piglets crowd a stall inside a hog farm in Drahnsdorf, Germany, in 2016.

The project of discerning the emotional state of pigs — and the meat industry’s larger push to invent new technology that promises to improve animal welfare — illustrates the fine line between meaningful efforts to reduce animal suffering and so-called “humane-washing,” where animal welfare is portrayed as being better than it actually is.

There is a growing body of research that shows what changes farms could make today to reduce the suffering of farmed animals, like eliminating extreme confinement, ending breeding practices that make animals grow too big too fast, and providing outdoor access and enrichments designed to mimic experiences they would normally enjoy if left to their own devices. All of which raises the question: Who is this new technology really for — the pigs, or the humans who raise, slaughter, and eat them?

How to identify stressed-out pigs

The most cost-effective methods of raising animals tend to cause the most harm. Animals’ bodies become levers on which a balancing act is performed: expending the fewest resources (such as living space) while keeping animals alive and productive. Economic considerations often outweigh welfare, resulting in the inhumane conditions that are a hallmark of intensive animal agriculture.

On the side of animal well-being are researchers like Melvyn Smith, director of the Centre for Machine Vision, for whom improving animal welfare is a big motivator in his quest to use AI to identify stressed-out pigs. “If we could understand how the animal is feeling, if the animal can tell us this itself, then that gives us an opportunity to tailor treatment and care for individual animals,” he told me.

To try to understand how an animal is feeling, he and his colleagues, in partnership with Scotland’s Rural College, are building on past facial recognition research. They have already trained a form of deep-learning AI that is tailored to analyzing images, known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), to distinguish between individual pigs just by analyzing photos of their faces.

This new project — aimed at recognizing emotions — adds a layer of nuance to this research by training the CNN to recognize the difference between stressed and unstressed pigs.THE MOST COST-EFFECTIVE METHODS OF RAISING ANIMALS TEND TO CAUSE THE MOST HARM

Like other deep learning algorithms, the Centre’s CNN learns by being exposed to data sets — in this case, thousands of photographs of pig faces that are likely to be experiencing stress or not. Cameras affixed just above the water spigot where pigs drink allow for close-up and relatively uniform images of each pig every time they take a sip. The CNN then analyzes each photograph, searching for subtle variations in the pigs’ faces around the eyes, the position of the ears, and other features.

To observe whether pigs are stressed, the animals are placed in situations known to be either mildly stressful or preferable. Pigs kept in pens with multiple generations tend to experience stress (particularly true of younger pigs), whereas relatively stress-free environments can be created by giving pigs essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet. Saliva and blood can be measured to determine cortisol levels, a chemical associated with a stress response.

With the three-year project about halfway complete, the results so far are impressive: The CNN is able to distinguish between pigs’ stressed and unstressed facial expressions more than 90 percent of the time.

By helping AI recognize expressions related to core emotional states in pigs, farmworkers could be alerted to individuals that are experiencing discomfort, allowing for swifter medical attention or alterations to the pigs’ living environment.

Caring for farmed animals as individuals is becoming increasingly difficult due to intensive animal agriculture operations. On smaller-scale farms, workers are able to spend far more time with individual pigs, getting to know animals’ personalities and watch out for suggestions that they may be unwell. But most pigs live on factory farms, where just a few workers can be responsible for the care of thousands of animals.

And factory farms are ramping up around the world: In the US, where factory farming has become the norm for animal agriculture generally, nearly 130 million pigs were raised and slaughtered in 2019 alone. The UK saw intensive pig farming increase 26 percent between 2011 and 2017. In China, a “hog hotel” factory farm consisting of a collection of buildings reaching 12 stories into the sky clocks in as the biggest multi-story hog farm on the planet, with the capacity to house upward of 1,000 pigs per floor.

A sow with her piglets in a farrowing crate in Germany. Factory farms are ramping up around the world.

It is no easy task to keep pigs alive within the crowded indoor conditions of factory farms. According to the Iowa Pork Industry Center at Iowa State University, about one in three pigs die before reaching the market due to factors like stillbirth, sow crushing, infectious diseases, and poor air quality. Not only does this figure represent massive economic losses for the industry, it also demonstrates the sheer scale of health problems pigs on factory farms must regularly contend with, many of which can cause chronic physical and psychological pain even when they are not ultimately fatal.

Identifying negative emotions like stress could help reduce the suffering of farmed pigs. But the research won’t end there: The next goal is detecting subtler emotions, including happiness.

Can animals have a good life on a factory farm?

Interest in animal facial expressions seems to be growing within the scientific community. Facial coding systems are being developed for species like horses and dogs, where expressions related to pain or frustration are being mapped out. Dogs have been observed to make “cute” faces at humans, while rats and chimps are perceived to smile and laugh when they are tickled.

But is happiness something that can be measured by facial expression?

Smith’s team wants to find out. Once the current study on pig stress is complete, the next stage will be seeing whether the CNN can detect other, more nuanced emotions, perhaps one day giving “farmers and their prospective customers an idea of how happy their pigs are,” as the Centre’s website notes.

But technology capable of detecting happiness and more subtle or complex emotions is not without controversy. When it’s applied to human beings, critics warn of the inaccuracies arising with a one-to-one mapping of prototypical expressions to emotions. A scowl doesn’t always mean anger; a furrowed brow doesn’t always denote concentration.

Further complicating the matter is that happiness is a philosophically elusive concept even when it comes to Homo sapiens, since there remains a lack of consensus over what exactly constitutes happiness. Fleeting moments of pleasure, joy, or contentment, along with longer-term experiences of an engaged, meaningful life, are thought to be among the ingredients associated with states of happiness in people.

While the constituents of happiness probably look different depending on the species, certain conditions are more likely to guarantee the suppression of happiness regardless of the kind of animal.

“Pigs can never be happy in factory farms,” says Lori Marino, director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and an expert in animal behavior who co-authored a study on pig cognition and emotion. To Marino, “a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation] is so far from what a pig needs to thrive that it could not be a place that would make a pig happy or content. They are not designed for pig happiness.”

Inside a CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operation, in Lawler, Iowa, in 2018.

“I also worry that these companies will only share data that are self-serving and the data will be biased toward convincing people that pigs are happy in CAFOs,” she continued.

These concerns may be well-founded. People and businesses that use animals often state that the animals under their control are happy, like the California Milk Advisory Board’s “Happy Cow” campaign or Elon Musk’s “totally happy” lab monkey.

Such claims of animal happiness can be dubious given the mounting science revealing the extent to which animals can be harmed in captivity. One of Marino’s other studies looks at how captivity can cause brain damage in some animals, impairing cognitive functions such as memory and decision-making.

Other researchers conducted a study that found horses that were confined within stalls emitted brain waves associated with states like depression and anxiety, whereas horses allowed to roam in herds on pastures showed brain waves associated with feelings of calm. Pregnant pigs kept in gestation crates, cages that are barely bigger than their bodies, are known to become unresponsive over time — behavior that has been linked to depression. Much is already known about the emotional state of animals in captivity without state-of-the-art tech telling us.

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Smith’s inquiry into whether pigs are happy on farms may find they’re not, but that doesn’t deter him. He says he is interested in switching the longstanding emphasis within the animal research community from detecting simply an absence of negative emotions to detecting positive emotions, and that this might lead to a better understanding of what contributes to higher quality of life and happiness for pigs.

But given that the current project is partly supported by industry stakeholders, including the farming technology company AgSense (owned by Valmont Industries), JSR Genetics Ltd. (a pig breeding company), and Garth Pig Practice (a veterinary consulting service), skepticism about the uses of this technology is in order. (AgSense, Valmont Industries, and Garth Pig Practice did not respond to requests for comments for this article.)

Moving the needle on animal welfare

The intensive animal agriculture industry is facing increasing scrutiny of operations that not only harm animals but give rise to a litany of damaging consequences, from perpetuating environmental racism — especially in North Carolina, where hog farms disproportionately pollute predominantly Black communities — to accelerating climate change. Demands to abolish factory farming altogether are growing louder.

Still, improvements in farmed animal welfare are worthwhile since it’s unlikely factory farming is going away anytime soon. Once implemented, the Centre’s CNN may quantifiably improve the welfare of pigs on factory farms, even if incrementally.

But while there’s still much to learn about animal welfare, there’s even more that we already know. If the pork sector were concerned with animal thriving, practices known to cause chronic stress — such as gestation crates — would already be eradicated.

Greenpeace activists call on European Parliament members to vote against livestock factory farms in Brussels in 2019. 

There exists abundant evidence of the pain male piglets endure when they are castrated without anesthesia, yet these mutilations continue to be widespread.

Confining pigs indoors within crowded, barren pens on concrete flooring can lead to abnormal biting behaviors that can devolve into cannibalism — something that can be addressed by giving pigs additional space and covering floors with natural materials like peat or compost.

AI technology may one day yield deeper insights into farmed animals’ emotional states. And there’s some genuine value in research diving into what animals are feeling. The question that looms over the use of such tech in a factory farming context is whether we already know enough anyway.

Will humans ever learn to speak whale?

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https://www.livescience.com/can-humans-understand-whales.html

By Randyn Bartholomew – Live Science Contributor about 7 hours ago

What do those clicking sounds mean?

sperm whale in the ocean

What’s this sperm whale saying? (Image credit: Reinhard Dirscherl via Getty Images)

Sperm whales are among the loudest living animals on the planet, producing creaking, knocking and staccato clicking sounds to communicate with other whales that are a few feet to even a few hundred miles away. 

This symphony of patterned clicks, known as codas, might be sophisticated enough to qualify as a full-fledged language. But will humans ever understand what these cetaceans are saying?

The answer is maybe, but first researchers have to collect and analyze an unprecedented number of sperm whale communications, researchers told Live Science.

Related: Tale of 2 tails: Why do sharks and whales swim so differently?

With brains six times larger than ours, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have intricate social structures and spend much of their time socializing and exchanging codas. These messages can be as brief as 10 seconds, or last over half an hour. In fact, “The complexity and duration of whale vocalizations suggest that they are at least in principle capable of exhibiting a more complex grammar” than other nonhuman animals, according to an April 2021 paper about sperm whales posted to the preprint server arXiv.org. 

This paper, by a cross-disciplinary project known as CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), outlines a plan to decode sperm whale vocalizations, first by collecting recordings of sperm whales, and then by using machine learning to try to decode the sequences of clicks these fellow mammals use to communicate. CETI chose to study sperm whales over other whales because their clicks have an almost Morse code-like structure, which artificial intelligence (AI) might have an easier time analyzing.

Breaching the surface

The little that humans do know about sperm whales has all been learned quite recently. It was only in the 1950s that we noted they made sounds, and it wasn’t known that they were using those sounds to communicate until the 1970s, according to the new research posted by CETI.

This clicking appears to serve a dual purpose. Sperm whales can dive to depths of 4,000 feet (1,200 meters), or three times deeper than nuclear submarines, according to the Woods Holes Oceanographic Institution. Because it is pitch black at these depths, they have evolved to seek out squid and other marine creatures by using clicks for echolocation, a type of sonar. This same clicking mechanism is also used in their social vocalizations, although the communication clicks are more tightly packed, according to the CETI paper.

Figuring out even this much has been challenging, as sperm whales have “been so hard for humans to study for so many years,” David Gruber, a marine biologist and CETI project leader, told Live Science. But now, “we actually do have the tools to be able to look at this more in depth in a way that we haven’t been able to before.” Those tools include AI, robotics and drones, he said.

Pratyusha Sharma, a data science researcher for CETI and a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, told Live Science more about recent developments in artificial intelligence and language models, such as GPT-3, which uses deep learning to construct human-like text or stories on command, and last year took the AI community by storm. Scientists hope these same methods could be applied to the vocalizations of sperm whales, she said. The only problem: these methods have a voracious appetite for data.

The CETI project currently has recordings of about 100,000 sperm whale clicks, painstakingly gathered by marine biologists over many years, but the machine-learning algorithms might need somewhere in the vicinity of 4 billion. To bridge this gap, CETI is setting up numerous automated channels for collecting recordings from sperm whales. These include underwater microphones placed in waters frequented by sperm whales, microphones that can be dropped by eagle-eyed airborne drones as soon as they spot a pod of sperm whales congregating at the surface, and even robotic fish that can follow and listen to whales unobtrusively from a distance.

But even with all this data, will we be able to decipher it? Many of the machine-learning algorithms have found audio more difficult to analyze than text. For instance, it might be challenging to parse apart where one word begins and ends. As Sharma explained, “Suppose there’s a word ‘umbrella.’ Is ‘um’ the word or is it ‘umbrell’ or is it ‘umbrella’?” The barriers between spoken words are more ambiguous and less regular, and patterns may therefore require more data to suss out.

That’s not the only difficulty CETI will face. “Whether someone comes from let’s say Japan or from the U.S. or from wherever, the worlds we talk about are very similar; we talk about people, we talk about their actions,” Sharma said. “But the worlds these whales live in are very different, right? And the behaviors are very different.”RELATED MYSTERIES

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What’s more, sperm whales are known to have dialects, according to a 2016 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which analyzed codas from nine sperm whale groups in the Caribbean for six years.

But these difficulties are also what make the project so worthwhile. What exactly one sperm whale says to another remains as dark and murky as the waters they swim in, but this mystery makes any answers CETI finds all the more intriguing. As Gruber put it, “We learn so much when we try to view the world from the perspective of the other.”

Originally published on Live Science.