It’s said to be a rite of passage, growing up in rural America:
Get drunk with your pals, sneak up on a cow in the dark of night, push it over, then laugh hysterically as the cow wakes up and goes “moo.”
Cow tipping has long been derided as an urban myth. Cows are simply too heavy for a bunch of guys to roll. Unless, of course, they are driving a forklift.
The Humane Society of the United States has posted a video of industrial-strength cow tipping on its website, .
These images of a forklift rolling a downed dairy cow into a slaughter pen led to history’s largest beef recall Sunday. Or was it the multiple shots of forklifts dragging cows by the hooves with chains? Or the one of a worker kicking an immobile cow in the face?
All of this is cruel, illegal and dangerous. Cows that can’t walk must be inspected for sickness.
Dragging a sick cow through feces just before slaughter heightens the risk of E. coli, salmonella and even mad cow disease.
Caught on camera, the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, Calif., has just recalled 143 million pounds of beef.
This is four times the size of the previous record recall of 35 million pounds in 1999 — or enough to make more than a half billion quarter-pound hamburgers.
Much of this meat went to the National School Lunch Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Food Assistance Program on Indian Reservations.
U.S. Department of Agriculture officials say most of it has likely been eaten already. Yum!
There are no reports of illnesses. Perhaps kids came home from school, regurgitated their taco lunches and thought it was the flu. Or maybe a Medicare patient needed another bottle of Milk of Magnesia after that meatloaf.
“It’s the high price we pay for cheap food,” said Michele Wells, a Colorado communications consultant to the beef industry.
To pump up the volume and lower the price, producers sometimes serve up a sick cow or two.
None of this would have come to light if it were not for the Humane Society’s undercover videos. The USDA’s inspectors didn’t break this news. Neither did plant executives or the beef-industry trade groups and their allegedly vigilant self-policing practices.
USDA officials said the video merely caught “an isolated incident of egregious violations to humane handling requirements and the prohibition of nonambulatory disabled cattle from entering the food supply.”
“It is important to note that the government has found no evidence that the meat was unsafe,” said American Meat Institute general counsel Mark Dopp. “The fact that an animal becomes not ambulatory does not necessarily mean it is ill.”
“This recall is happening,” said James Reagan of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, “out of an abundance of caution. . . . The ban on nonambulatory . . . cattle is one of many steps in a robust system to produce safe beef.”
Still, one thing is certain:
Beef producers can no longer pretend that big corporate cow tipping is just an urban legend.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to him at ., 303-954-1967 or alewis@ .
