Yesterday I spent an hour speaking with David, a former meatpacker at a Tyson hog plant in Iowa. The conversation left me near tears, and I wonder at how David has been able to pick himself up and move on - or for that matter, do anything other than curl up in a fetal position and cry.

Please read and rec this diary for David. He wants people to know what happened to him. If you are reading this and you are a member of the media, contact me and I will put you in touch with David if you'd like to cover his story too.

(Thanks to One Brave Kossack for first diarying this here.)

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's August, 1997 regulation permits known TSE-positive [transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed.

What did you say?

Mad Cow material.  It is neatly packaged in cans and bags, with cute pictures of happy pets, for your beloved dogs and cats ...  

But ...

Well, your dogs and cats probably'll die anyway before their brains turn soft ...

But ....

And the rest is nicely bagged up as feed for the pigs, chickens, and fish.

Cross-posted at my blog and BlueNC

Today's Charlotte Observer includes the first of a potentially devastating six-part series on poultry-plant safety.  

The first part focuses on House of Raeford, one of the ten largest poultry producers in the country.  It's based in Hoke County, half an hour south of Fayetteville and operates plants in North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana.  It supplies deli turkey and chicken products to companies such as Blimpie, Golden Corral and Food Lion.  It also counts several school systems among its customers--including my hometown system, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.  It claims to have one of the best safety records in the industry--but the Observer amply demonstrates that this record is a mirage.  

Many people feel strongly that animals should be protected from unnecessary suffering. To that end, some promote animal rights as an extension of human rights and equate animal liberation with human liberation. While this may sound appealing on the surface, it confuses the meaning of rights and liberation.

There is an important difference between advocating humane treatment for animals and granting them moral or legal rights. Where animal advocates are concerned primarily with human responsibilities towards animals, animal liberationists pit animal rights against human needs. As I will show, this undermines efforts to create a society that can protect people and animals.

Personal stories abound in every person's life.  For me the sharing of those stories brings great pleasure.  The passing along of a story allows my reliving the time and gives others a bit of vicarious experience.  My earliest childhood memory of chickens has to do with an aunt who grew her own food.  Tonight's offering comes from a somewhat later time in life but still a time long ago and far away.  One more true tale without embellishment.  Just the facts as best my memory serves.  Once again let us travel down the yellow brick road, over the fence, and beyond the fold for one more of the possum's tales.

Conventional wisdom in Democratic Party circles has long been that the robust growth of Hispanics due to immigration and higher birth rates in the Hispanic community will ultimately bring the Republican Party to its knees.  That may well be true in the long-term, but in the short-term that effect has been negligible, and in many places, has actually led to the Democrats losing ground.  I will present a series of numbers in this diary to back up the claim, and then analyze why the phenomenon is occuring and why it's likely to take many generations before Hispanics have an impact on elections that comes even close to approaching their proportion of the American population..