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

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