"A Horse, A Horse .....My Burger is Horsemeat?" USDA approves horse slaughterhouse to produce meat for human consumption

"A Horse, A Horse .....My Burger is Horsemeat?" USDA approves horse slaughterhouse to produce meat for human consumption.HT: NaturalNews.

The next burger you bite into might be a horsemeat burger, thanks to the U.S. government approving horse slaughterhouses to produce meat for human consumption. Valley Meat Co in Roswell, New Mexico, is being green-lighted by the USDA, which will routinely send inspectors to make sure it is slaughtering horses and processing horse meat in a “clean”....(Halal?) way.

Additional horse meat plants are expected to be approved by the USDA in Missouri and Iowa. While horse meat can’t legally be sold in the USA for human consumption, it can be used in pet food. 
It may also turn up in the U.S. food supply despite its legal status because it can be sold to Mexico for human consumption, then re-labeled and shipped back into the USA for use as a low-cost meat filler. Horse meat has already been identified in a scandalous food operation in Europe, where meatballs sold throughout European grocery stores were found to be made with horse meat.

Under the Obama administration, horse slaughterhouses became legal again.

Horse meat slaughterhouses were banned during the Bush administration, but under President Obama, the ban expired (in 2011), allowing horse meat slaughterhouses to restart operations. Obama says he wants Congress to ban horse meat slaughterhouses in the USA, but then again, Obama says a lot of things he doesn’t actually intend to make a reality (closing of Guantanamo, labeling GMOs, making health care free, reducing the budget deficit, etc.).
The USDA says, “it was required by law to issue the grant of inspection because Valley Meat met all federal requirements,” reports Reuters, which also says that 130,000 horses are slaughtered each year in Canada and Mexico.
U.S. companies want a piece of that business, it seems, because horses can be acquired for virtually free.

Where horses really come from for meat production.

So here’s the scary part of this article for those who might be a little squeamish: Most of this horse meat comes from horse owners who decide to have their horses killed for a variety of reasons: illness, injury, or simply economic reasons such as not affording to keep them fed and cared for.
Instead of having the courage to give their own horse a dignified death — i.e. having the vet administer a lethal injection, saying a prayer and burying it on the land it enjoyed — many owners call the slaughterhouse to have the horse hauled away and subjected to a terrifying, gruesome death in a meat packing plant, surrounded by other screaming horses who are in the process of being murdered.
Horse slaughterhouses are therefore able to purchase these horses for a dollar amount that’s far below the actual cost to raise a horse. The horses are transported to the slaughterhouse facility (which is actually the largest cost of the entire thing due to fuel prices) and then their throats are slit to begin the “processing” of the meat.(Halal?).

Yep, Becky’s little pony that she grew up with as a teenage girl ends up bleeding out on the floor of a horse slaughterhouse in New Mexico. When expensive family pets are no longer needed, they’re just sold off for meat.Keep that in mind if you’re considering buying a horse for your teen daughter or granddaughter. What will happen to that horse once your daughter loses interest in raising horses after discovering that raising a horse requires a tremendous amount of physical labor?

If you’re a horse owner, be a responsible one. Don’t let your horse get slaughtered for food. Because if you do, you not only cause your horse to experience a terrifying ending; you also may end up eating your horse the next time you whip up some spaghetti and meatballs.Hmmmm......The Horse. Man's noblest companion.........Now available in Cans.Read the full story here.

Monsanto files patent for new 'invention': The Pig !

Monsanto files patent for new 'invention': The Pig !(GreenPeace).It's official. Monsanto Corporation is out to own the world's food supply, the dangers of genetic engineering and reduced biodiversity notwithstanding, as they pig-headedly set about hog-tying farmers with their monopoly plans. We've discovered chilling new evidence of this in recent patents that seek to establish ownership rights over pigs and their offspring.

In the crop department, Monsanto is well on their way to dictating what consumers will eat, what farmers will grow, and how much Monsanto will get paid for seeds. In some cases those seeds are designed not to reproduce sowable offspring. In others, a flock of lawyers stand ready to swoop down on farmers who illegally, or even unknowingly, end up with Monsanto's private property growing in their fields.

Oneway or another, Monsanto wants to make sure no food is grown that they don't own -- and the record shows they don't care if it's safe for the environment or not. Monsanto has aggressively set out to bulldoze environmental concerns about its genetically engineered (GE) seeds at every regulatory level.
So why stop in the field? Not content to own the pesticide and the herbicide and the crop, they've made a move on the barnyard by filing two patents which would make the corporate giant the sole owner of that famous Monsanto invention: the pig.

The Monsanto Pig (Patent pending)

The patent applications were published in February 2005 at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva. A Greenpeace researcher who monitors patent applications, Christoph Then, uncovered the fact that Monsanto is seeking patents not only on methods of breeding, but on actual breeding herds of pigs as well as the offspring that result.

"If these patents are granted, Monsanto can legally prevent breeders and farmers from breeding pigs whose characteristics are described in the patent claims, or force them to pay royalties," says Then. "It's a first step toward the same kind of corporate control of an animal line that Monsanto is aggressively pursuing with various grain and vegetable lines."
There are more than 160 countries and territories mentioned where the patent is sought including Europe, the Russian Federation, Asia (India, China, Philippines) America (USA, Brazil, Mexico), Australia and New Zealand. WIPO itself can only receive applications, not grant patents. The applications are forwarded to regional patent offices.
The patents are based on simple procedures, but are incredibly broad in their claims.

In one application (WO 2005/015989 to be precise) Monsanto is describing very general methods of crossbreeding and selection, using artificial insemination and other breeding methods which are already in use. The main "invention" is nothing more than a particular combination of these elements designed to speed up the breeding cycle for selected traits, in order to make the animals more commercially profitable. (Monsanto chirps gleefully about lower fat content and higher nutritional value. But we've looked and we couldn't find any "Philanthropic altruism" line item in their annual reports, despite the fact that it's an omnipresent factor in their advertising.)

According to Then, "I couldn't believe this. I've been reviewing patents for 10 years and I had to read this three times. Monsanto isn't just seeking a patent for the method, they are seeking a patent on the actual pigs which are bred from this method. It's an astoundingly broad and dangerous claim."
By claiming global monopoly patent rights throughout the entire food chain, Monsanto seeks to make farmers and food producers, and ultimately consumers, entirely dependent and reliant on one single corporate entity for a basic human need. It's the same dependence that Russian peasants had on the Soviet Government following the Russian revolution. The same dependence that French peasants had on Feudal kings during the middle ages. But control of a significant proportion of the global food supply by a single corporation would be unprecedented in human history.Read the full story here.