Author wrote:
Dear Jane: Typically, I purchased an average of 35,000 head of hogs per year during my tenure with Oscar Mayer & Co. That company then had four hog kill floors and plants, and was considered to be the industry leader in the processing of hogs in the U.S.A.
This problem with PSS Porcine Stress Syndrome and PSE pork was a very serious problem for every meat packer that killed hogs.
Apparently, you don't like the idea that hogs are produced to make money for people...to provide food, pharmaceuticals, health care by-products, and leather goods. You fail to consider the Fact, that pigs are not pets...even the pets grow and then something has to be done with them.
Here, and in the U.K, as well, commercial hog production is a business. It is a business of Death. Hogs are produced to produce meat for all of us to eat. This is Big Business...and it's growing now to meet the needs of people all over the world that like to eat pork. I am not the person that intends to change that...that was not the point of my sharing a personal story with you all.
The hogs that I used my knife treatment on were going to die before fulfilling their destiny. They were going to be killed within 24-hours of entering our yards.
What you consider appalling, was the action I took to keep them alive to reach their final destiny. I didn't like doing that, the ear-slitting and tail docking....but they stayed alive.
When these PSS-bred hogs became stressed they died painful deaths. They could not get enough oxygen in their bloodstream to live. And that was horrible to watch. By cutting their ears and tails....their blood pressure was lowered. They could breathe again. Most of them survived then.
You say that is a brutal remedy. Death loss at my stations was the lowest in the company. There were 81 other buyers, just for Oscar Mayer that were faced with these same problems.
My customers were happy, the company was happy and I didn't have to drag 250 pound dead hogs by hand out of the buying station to draw flies and stink things up, waiting for a rendering truck to show up two or three days later.
So you say I was brutal and inhumane. No, Jane, I was not.
It was more humane to do the slitting than let the animals suffer a miserable death.
We knew which herds had this problem and suggested the owners select boars and gilts from other sources. That was the only real alternative to solve this problem....and it was a very big problem for the industry as a whole.
Maybe you don't like the ways and means I used to do this to save an animal's life....but it was done on the recommendation of some vet friends I had at the time.
Burkie in Kansas
PS. You have serious porcine health problems now in the U.K.
You have had them for a very long time. You had CSF...classic Swine Fever hit you in the fall of 2000. The UK has tried to hide PDNS and PMWS from the Public. What's happened to all the "deads?" Thousands. Not five or ten animals, like I had to contend with in 35,000 head buys per year....but thousands.
So don't jump on my case, Jane. I'm one of the few that even tells you the Truth.

Author wrote:
To have and maintain a respect for all life forms should surely be commended.
It should lead to a desire to learn as much as we can about them all and gaining this knowledge should enable us to understand and care for them too.
So often this respect, however well intended, is over-ridden by our own selfish desires and needs.
In an effort to protect our FMD free status we lost respect for the animals and eachother during 2001, inflicting tragic and painful results on so many of our hunman and animal population.
The excuses/justifications made for these actions by the Government, their agents/employees, the RSPCA and RCVS and many others including farmers, were varied but they all boiled down to a selfish self-interest.
From Gary's story, relating his deeds in the past, we cannot fail to notice that his excuse for inflicting appalling cruelty on pigs by docking their tails and slitting their ears, was due to his effort to protect the interests of his farmer producers and his employer and thus himself.
He said – 'hogs had to bleed to remain alive. It was either that, or the PSS-Porcine Stress Syndrome would kill them before we could get them off the truck and onto a scale' he also said – 'Do you work for your employer, or do you help your customer?
I tried to do both...because disposal of "deads," wasn't a lot of fun.'
In no time at all he admits that this cruel act became the 'norm' when he added –
'At first, my customers objected to me slitting their pigs ears and docking tails. But after they saw their animals alive...it became an accepted practice.'
It is the most horrific and appalling admission.
Similarities with what happend here in 2001 are unavoidable. The cruelty inflicted became the 'accepted practice' in no time at all.
For those of us who have been fortunate enough to get to know a pig as an individual, learn that they are sensitive and intelligent animals and have many similarities with human beings both physically and mentally.
Just like us, they do suffer from stress and panic and this can have very serious consequencies for them and us.
If we are lucky enough to meet someone who will take the time to understand our fears and help us to face them calmly and cope with the problem, our stress will be relieved.
Unfortunately, so often, there is no one willing to spare the time for the human us or the animals. Their stress and distress is ignored as we strive to achieve our own selfish desires at their expense.
There can be no excuses. Such selfish deeds are shameful and unforgiveable but cannot be undone.
The only way we can achieve some self respect and make atonement for what we have done has to be through continued efforts to ensure that we and others are never guilty of such crimes again.

Author wrote:
Dear Pat: Way back in ancient days of college....even prior to that....a problem surfaced with our hogs, here in the USA.
We could grow and feed them to slaughter weights...and the performance improved with selection of better and better sires, many of those boars were sold at University testing stations, after having been "nominated" by purebred breeders to be tested for "performance." The goal was to find superior breeding stock to be used on sow herds at the commercial or even purebred level.
Many Universities developed these testing facilities, collected the performance data, and subsequently published the results in their catalogues for the Public to peruse. A sale date was scheduled and people poured into these sales, as "Grade and Yield" marketing of swine was becoming more and more popular.
Grade and yield, paid a market premium for superior carcasses of hogs.
For any commercial producer of hogs, that meant a "premium" for slaughter hogs marketed....and I had some really good producers who adopted these practices when I was a buyer for Oscar Mayer & Co.
There was one problem that surfaced its ugly head around 1970.
A producer could load up his market hogs on a truck, and by the time they were delivered to a buying station, they were either dead or about to die.
You could hear these hogs undergoing this stress when the truck hit the buying yard. In those days, it was normal for a producer to follow a truck to the yard, watch his hogs scaled and tattoo-slapped, either receiving a bidded price (my bid) or sent to the plant to be killed on a "grade and yield" basis.
So, here came a load of say, 40 hogs, all finished, ready for sale into my facilities...only to have two or three that were in stress or dead or about to die.
At first, we didn't know what to do about this. But I learned a little "trick." A sharp knife whipped out of my pocket, three swipes later...slitted ears and no tail. The poor hogs had to bleed to remain alive. It was either that, or the PSS-Porcine Stress Syndrome would kill them before we could get them off the truck and onto a scale. That was important to Oscar Mayer, too.
Once scaled, they became the property of Oscar Mayer...and us buyers were evaluated monthly on the basis of many factors, one of which was "death loss."
This really presented a buyer a dilemma. Do you work for your employer, or do you help your customer?
I tried to do both...because disposal of "deads," wasn't a lot of fun.
At first, my customers objected to me slitting their pigs ears and docking tails. But after they saw their animals alive...it became an accepted practice.
Now then, these hogs that exhibited these symptoms were some of the best-cutting hogs I ever bought. They were very lean, very good ham and yield...gret loin eye measurementd which made the Iowa Pork Chop famous. A two-inch thick chop, bar-b-qued, basted in beer as it was cooked......Yum, Yum. If you ever whole-hog roasted one of these pig carcasses, you probably had to baste it because of such a small amount of fat, as it was cooking.
But, were those roasted hogs ever great to eat!
Now then, as more time passed, PSE problems showed up at the abattoir on the meat from these carcasses. Everybody was concerned. "What's causing all this?"
PSE Pork.....Pale, Soft, exudative.
And it was getting worse.
In 1975, I operated a buying station in Illinois. The first thing my trucker told me, was who NOT to buy pigs from. They were "die – ers," he said. If you could keep them alive, they had great carcass cut-outs, based on measurement the company provided, but there were actually herds black-listed, because we couldn't get the darn pigs to the plant to kill. Either they died at the station, or in transit, or at the plant, before being killed.
All we had to really do to help solve these problems for our customers, was select boars and gilts that didn't exhibit these devastating genetic faults.
Each station had its own records of whom we did business with.
So we would talk to our producers and suggest making some changes.
That helped....everyone.
It seemed that the worst ones affected were using Yorkshire sows and Hampshire boars. It was in the mid-70's when the first Hybrid hogs started showing up. In some instances, that seemed to help...in others, it exacerbated the problem.
All in all, what I am trying to tell you is that PSS – Porcine Stress Syndrome has been here in the US for a very long time.
With the technology we have now, there should be no reason for it. Many advances have been made to identify carriers of these gene traits.....that, in my opinion, would be progress.
All the Best – sorry for rambling on so long.
Burkie in Kansas

Author wrote:
Good Morning
Just in case you think Burkie is off on some wild goose chase, I think you should see what sparked this...I sent an email last night to a number of people including Burkie. I can only reproduce part:
Quote
1. It is now very clear that the complex of new diseases PMWS/PDNS was present in East Anglia "un-named" very much earlier that previously thought. Some elements (probably PMWS itself plus PDNS) may date back to the mid/late 1980s.
This seems to have been the cause of very early reports of death through "stress." Stress is still mentioned today and looks a bit unscientific to me.
2. Exports of live pigs from Britain have been very much greater during the 1990s than I ever imagined. They seem to have been massive. It will be possible to get the statistics. North America seems to have been virtually restocked from Britain -by air. Semen must also have been moving internationally outwards.
It looks increasingly likely that Britain may have been the source of the current world-wide outbreak of "Emerging Pig Diseases."
Hence the drive not to recognise disease movements internationally in either direction as being related to live movements and genetics.
Even prior to 2000, the piggy specialists were probably in self-denial
Unquote
I had no idea that there was such a thing as a "stress gene"
The use of the word "stress" in East Anglia in relation to pig illness has been all pervasive for years. It has been used in the ordinary common meaning of the word and usually rendered in a rich Suffolk accent. Deaths and illness are always attributed informally to "stress."
It has been noticable that pig specialists have also made very frequent reference to stress, but I've never picked up on anything to suggest that there was another deeper meaning.
Burkie is to be congratulated on his enquiries. We will both be taking a much closer look at what seems to be something rather sinister. It may be conincidence, but after what we have all seen and experienced...
Regards
Pat Gardiner

Author wrote:
Here's what one gets when you look up Michigantown Pigs:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Business/Agriculture_and_Forestry/Livestock/Swine/Breeders/
Sorry to say it...but there are some familiar names.
Burkie – I really don't feel too good about all this.

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Author wrote:
Here's some really rugged Truth!
It seems a Gwaltney (Gwaltney's bought by Smithfield) descendent sent some semen to the U.K to test some pork quality issues:
http://www.ext.vt.edu/news/periodicals/livestock/aps-97_01/aps-737.html
Gwaltney Gift Creates Unique Opportunity to Study
Pork Quality
Livestock Update, January 1997
Allen Harper, Extension Specialist, Swine, Tidewater AREC
The Gwaltney name has been associated with fine Virginia pork products for over 100 years.
This tradition continues today with the Gwaltney of Smithfield plant producing and marketing a
variety of pork products throughout the United States. A recent financial gift by Mrs. Henrietta C.
Gwaltney, a member of the family that founded the Gwaltney packing plant, has provided a
unique opportunity to fund useful research for the pork industry.
An interdepartmental team of faculty consisting of Cindy Wood (Animal and Poultry Sciences),
Jim Claus (Food Science and Technology) and Allen Harper (Tidewater Agricultural Research
and Extension Center) has the responsibility of developing and conducting a project which
focuses on the gift's intent of beneficial "swine improvement research." Brent Green, a recent
graduate of Animal Science at Kansas State, is also working on the project as part of his master's
degree program.
The project seeks answers on two important swine industry concerns. First, market pigs that are
carriers of the "stress gene" (also referred to as Halothane 1843 carrier pigs) are known to
produce carcasses with less external fat and heavier muscling than their non-stress gene
contemporaries. However, research also suggests that stress gene carrier pigs may produce pork
cuts that are paler in color and subject to shrinking and excess drying when processed and
cooked. Currently there is debate in the industry as to whether the stress gene should be
strategically used to produce leaner carcasses or totally eliminated by selection to avoid possible
pork quality problems.
Our project will involve breeding approximately 24 sows for two consecutive farrowings to
produce at least 160 test pigs. These terminal market pigs will be sired by full-sib stress gene
carrier boars, making them genetically similar in all respects except that half of the pigs will be
stress gene carriers and half stress gene free. This approach will provide an opportunity to
accurately evaluate effects of the stress gene on pig performance, carcass fat and lean content,
and pork muscle processing quality.
A second component of the project is to evaluate addition of trace mineral chromium to the
mineral supplement for both genotypes of pigs. Feeding and carcass evaluation trials at Virginia
Tech and other land-grant universities have shown some improvement in feed conversion, backfat
depth and muscling with chromium supplementation from an organic chromium source called
chromium picolinate. This product was recently approved by FDA as safe to include in swine
feeds. But, there is still a deficiency of information on how the product may impact pork
processing and cooking qualities or performance of market pigs sired by extremely lean, stress
gene carrier boars.
In November of 1995, the project got underway with the artificial mating of 28 sows at
Tidewater AREC swine unit in Suffolk. Semen was collected for these matings from 2 littermate
stress gene carrier boars at a commercial boar stud in Michigantown, Indiana. From the litters
produced by these matings, a portion of each piglets' docked tail was assayed under the direction
of Eric Wong at the Animal and Poultry Sciences Biotechnology Lab to determine stress gene
carrier status. Once stress gene status was established, feeding trials were conducted followed by
carcass and muscle quality evaluations at the Food Science and Technology Meats Lab. This
same process is currently being repeated on a second set of pigs produced by the same stress
gene carrier boars. Overall results of the study will be available in late Spring of 1997.
This effort is unique in that it will provide beneficial information that can impact the complete
process of pork production, from conception to processing of edible product. We are excited
about this collaborative effort and about the valuable information it will provide to the swine
industry. We are also appreciate of Mrs. Gwaltney's gift which makes it possible.
Burkie in Kansas