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Animals avoid GM food (Was: biotech & famine)
James Curts wrote:
The folks I, or those associated with our projects, deal with generally ask for water, transportation and equipment and in about that order. This is pertaining to food as we know that medical assistance is of high priority also. Seldom if ever do we get requests for seeds except to borrow or buy from a nearby group of the same culture. The increasing millions spent on experimenting is almost proportional to the increasing hunger in the world. This dilemma is not to be resolved by our huge corporations but by you and I. Linkname: GM Animal Feed URL: http://www.btinternet.com/~clairejr/Animal/animal.html size: 547 lines [...] Animals say no to GMO There's a more serious problem with the idea of disposing of tonnes of unsaleable GMOs into animal feed. Animals are refusing to eat it. Recently, American journalist Steven Sprinkel recently spent four months collecting reports from farmers growing GM crops. His article, entitled "When The Corn Hits The Fan" details the following observations: * Cattle who were put out into GM corn stubble wouldn't touch it. * Pigs wouldn't eat the ration when GM crops were included. * A farmer said, "If you want your cattle to go off their feed, just switch them out to a GM silage." * A farmer said that his cattle broke through a fence and ate the non-GM hybrids but wouldn't touch the GM Roundup Ready corn, even though they had to walk through the GMs to get to the non-GMs on the other side of the fence. * A cattleman saw the weight-gain of his cattle fall off when he switched to GM feed. * An organic farmer with a terrible deer problem on his soybeans found forty of them mowing down his tofu beans while across the road there wasn't one eating the Roundup Ready GM soy. * Raccoons romped by the dozen in a field of organic corn, while down the road there wasn't one ear that had been touched in the Bt fields. * Even mice will move on down the line if given an alternative to GM crops. Sprinkel asks, "What is it that they know instinctively that most of us ignore?" He predicts, "When the rotting corn hits the fan, it will make a tremendous mess, with the debris lying equally on the tables of the great leaders of the world as well as on the plates of consumers." Bt crops: toxic harvest There may be a particular problem with crops genetically engineered to express the natural insecticide Bt. As long ago as March 1998, a letter in Farmers Weekly reported that livestock on farms from Nebraska to Iowa were not grazing normally in fields that contained GM Bt corn. Ohio farmer Leon Ridzon does not grow GMOs, but he deals with farmers who do. He recounted local farmers' experience with Bt corn: "We first had problems three years ago, when famers planted Bt corn and the cows refused to eat it. The farmers had to camouflage it to get them to eat it." Maybe these cows are just finicky? Ridzon says not - other animals won't eat Bt grain either: "The Bt corn was left on the cob and stored in an open bin. The rabbits would not touch it, the squirrels would not touch it. The rats and mice didn't go near it. It killed all the spiders in the bins." Ridzon has become increasingly suspicious about the possible toxicity of Bt corn. His testimony is the more remarkable for the fact that the norm for most Ohio farmers is intensively grown and chemically treated corn - which the animals apparently prefer to GM Bt corn. Ridzon confirms Sprinkel's account of reduced weight gain in Bt corn-fed cattle. He says farmers report that cattle need nine pounds of Bt corn to make a one pound weight gain as compared with only six of normal corn. Journalist Steven Sprinkel says that a major U.S. seed dealer told him that there is evidence that earthworms are dying as a result of the effects of Bt corn. Sprinkel comments, "This is not an activist promoting the notion that GMO plants have unpredicated results. It's a midwestern big seed dealer who would have more to gain by keeping quiet, and much to lose if he got caught in a liability cross-fire. So my assumption is that there is a big iceberg under these rumours and chit-chat. Reasonable people are asking reasonable questions." Waiting for science These reports from farmers and seed dealers can easily be dismissed as anecdotal evidence from which no conclusions can be drawn. But if we wait for the scientists to catch up, it could be too late. Scientific studies take years to do, and the majority are funded by industry or governments greased with biotech dollars. Who is going to fund a study which may find that a GM crop is toxic? [...] |
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