LMD Apr 2017

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Riding Herd

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”

by LEE PITTS

– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

April 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 59 • No. 4

Big, Bad Behavior BY LEE PITTS

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here are many problems with putting all your proverbial eggs in one basket. The most obvious is that the person responsible for the eggs might fall and all your eggs would break. Or, by keeping all your eggs in one place you just made it easier for someone to steal them all in one heist. Even worse, people could simply stop eating eggs. In any of these instances there wouldn’t be any need for egg producers to keep producing eggs. Hopefully you’ve figured out by now that we aren’t talking about just eggs here in a beef publication. Well, in a way we are because I was going to write this month’s missive entirely about Tyson, the beef packer and well known monopolizer of the chicken industry. Then a Brazilian bombshell went off that made Tyson look like a choir boy.

Mr. BIG Shot

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

For awhile it seemed that Tyson couldn’t keep out of the news. First it was a strain of bird flu being found at one of Tyson’s Tennessee contracted chicken farms. Tyson’s fairly new CEO, Tom Hayes, seemed to have blamed Tyson’s bigness for the problem, and he should know a lot about BIGness. Previously, Hayes was a big shot at Hillshire Brands, a company

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. Tyson gobbled up. He was also an executive for Sara Lee, US Foodservice, Inc., ConAgra Foods, Stella Foods and Kraft Foods. That’s a BIG pedigree. In referring to the company he now leads Hayes said, “We do a lot. We have 114,000 people and we have 100 plants and we have 11,000 family farms that we work with, so there is a lot that can go wrong.” Next, Tyson made news when an undercover video depicted inhumane abuse at a chicken facility in Texas. A member of The Animal Legal Defense

Fund went undercover at Tyson for three weeks to document the cruelty and they are now asking the Attorney General of the State of Delaware, where Tyson Foods is incorporated, to punish the company. As if animal abuse and a disease outbreak weren’t enough, last year Tyson was subpoenaed by the SEC to testify in a civil case that alleges Tyson and other industry behemoths were engaged in a conspiracy to reduce production and drive up prices at the supermarket. Tyson denied the allegations that since

2008 they routinely engaged in price fixing and colluded with other corporate officials to manipulate the prices they paid. The growers say Tyson kept consumer prices high while the prices paid to them were, well, they were for the birds. Chicken feed, you could say. In trying to defend Tyson their President may have let the cat out of the bag, or the chickens out of the coop in this instance, when he said the company had not changed pricing practices. This could be interpreted to mean that they were also price fixing and manipulating contract grower’s prices prior to 2008. Whatever they did must have worked because recently the $41 billion per year in receipts company told their stockholders that due to “outstanding performance in beef and pork we’re on continued on page two

Environmental Groups Say More Research is Needed on Reintroducing Jaguars to Southwest BY TONY DAVIS ARIZONA DAILY STAR

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eintroducing the jaguar into the United States is an idea whose time has come, says a Tucson-based environmental group. A national conservation group says it’s at least an idea worthy of more analysis than the federal government has given it. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), which manages endangered species, doesn’t agree. It says the best use of its resources is to focus on what it sees as the jaguar’s core areas in Mexico, not on “secondary” jaguar habitat in the southwestern U.S. The debate over bringing jaguars from Mexico to the Southwest comes as part of a larger discussion of the federal government’s draft jaguar recovery plan. That plan, released in December, advocates putting the most energy toward jaguar recovery in Mexico, where most borderlands jaguars live. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Defenders of Wildlife (DOF) said in their written comments on the plan, and in a separate report by DOF, that more attention needs to be paid to bringing back jaguars in the Southwest, including possible reproduction. Reintroduction of predators has always been a hot-button issue here. It took more than a

decade for environmentalists and federal biologists to get a Mexican wolf reintroduction program started because of controversy over the wolf’s impacts on livestock. It remains controversial today although wolf populations are slowly recovering. Jaguars are in better shape in the U.S. today than wolves were before reintroduction started. Only seven Mexican wolves remained in 1980 when the last five were pulled out of the wild to be put in captive breeding facilities. About 4,000 jaguars are known to live in Mexico today, but only seven, all males, have been confirmed to be living in Arizona and New Mexico since 1996. Defenders doesn’t advocate reintroduction now, but “we are calling on (Fish and Wildlife) to do a scientific, objective analysis and we’d like to see their work reviewed by an independent, scientific body,” said Rob Peters, Defenders’ Southwestern representative. The 508-page jaguar recovery plan didn’t discuss reintroduction, he noted. The seven known Southwestern male jaguars are believed to have come from northern Mexico. But “I think it’s very unlikely” that natural jaguar migration from Mexico alone will bring continued on page five

Ask The StyleMaster

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t’s been awhile (30 years) since I, the god of good taste, answered your many questions regarding what’s in style. It’s quite natural that you’d seek guidance from such a fashion forward expert as myself. By the way, I learned that term, “fashion forward”, the last time I was stuck in a “semi-private” room in the hospital and there were three beds, five generations of family belonging to one of the other inmates, and ONLY ONE REMOTE CONTROL! I was forced to watch a marathon of Project Runway reruns. I told the Doc if he didn’t let me go home I was going to kill myself because I couldn’t take one one more minute of Iron Chef or the Property Brothers. While my good friends may NOT be surprised to learn that I’m still wearing the same Pendleton wool shirts I was wearing three decades ago, there have been many changes in the fashion world since last time we visited. So, once again its time to “Ask The StyleMaster.” Dear StyleMaster, Are laceup cowboy boots in fashion or not? Signed, Conflicted. Dear Conflicted, I’m glad you asked because this is something I have strong feelings about. While it’s okay for a cowboy to wear laceups while he’s fixing fence, washing dishes, or feeding cows, a real cowboy never wears lace-ups while riding a horse. I know from personal experience that as you’re being drug over rocks, tumbleweeds and cactus because one of your lace ups is stuck in the stirrup of a runaway horse, you don’t really have time to untie your shoes. Yo, what’s up? I was trippin’ on a rodeo on my iPhone and saw one of the saddle bronc dudes was wearing a necktie. What’s up with that? It makes as much sense as surfers wearing ties. Signed, Strangled in Santa Monica Dear Strangled, I feel your pain. While it’s true that many years ago some cowboys actually wore neckties to work and at rodeos instead of wild rags, it is NOT a fashion trend we need to revisit or encourage. After all, we

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