Day 291 - 31 Oct 96 - Page 27
1 Mr. Lyman's transcript, it was just easier to do everything
2 at once.
3
4 He said on page 9, line 25: "We used antibiotics in our
5 cattle that were in the feedlot every day. We changed the
6 variety of antibiotics every 30 days; because the bacteria
7 would get used to what we were using". He said: "This was
8 a standard the industry that was recommended. It was the
9 approved practice that was being used." And he was asked
10 whether or not the practices had been banned, and he
11 said: "The basic approach is the same", and that some of
12 the materials might be different because the individual
13 chemicals might have been banned or whatever, but, yes, the
14 basic approach was the same.
15
16 And he said he believed that the documentation shows that
17 over 90 percent of all fed cattle in the United States
18 today are injected with hormones. That was feedlot
19 cattle. He referred to the cattle feed. He said: "When I
20 first became acquainted with animal production, it was at a
21 time when all production was done using natural and organic
22 methods. This allowed the animals a great deal of freedom
23 and their diet was compatible with their natural choices."
24 This is the bottom of page 9. "As production
25 recommendations from the land grant colleges and the
26 government extension services became more well known, the
27 treatment of all animals started towards the present day
28 systems of total confinement, feeding diets that reflect
29 surplus products, and use of many chemicals that were never
30 known of at the time I started animal husbandry."
31
32 And he explained what he meant by surplus products, and he
33 said: "When I was feeding cattle, all products that had
34 feeding values were tested on animals, such things as
35 cement dust, paper, potatoes", and manure. He said that
36 these were things that were carried in the literature
37 recommended to most operators and he said: "Say, for
38 example, you had a damn that was being built in the area
39 and there was contaminated cement that was available, that
40 was free for the picking up, many people tried it, fed it"
41 to their cattle. He said: "Almost every feedlot I knew of
42 scraped up manure and added it to the ration".
43
44 And he referred to a computer service available listing all
45 these types of things and their nutritive value, which
46 presumably was not a great deal. And that you could go to
47 the feed manufacturers and ask them to make a formulation
48 of feed for the animals based on the lowest cost ration of
49 whatever was available. And I think that is just an
50 example of how of just how unnatural the farming process
51 has become, basically looking for products to fill out the
52 feed which are completely unsuited to being feedstuffs and
53 are hardly what the cattle would choose to eat if they had
54 any say in the matter.
55
56 At the bottom of page 10, he referred to slaughter house
57 waste byproducts being fed to cattle and he said that today
58 in the United States 14 percent of all cows by volume are
59 basically ground up and fed back to other cows. And he
60 said: "I have great concern that will do the same thing in
