Failing Grade
CTV.ca News Staff

Canadians are a carnivorous bunch, consuming more than one million metric tonnes of meat a year. But after a year of mad cow, bird flu, reports of human remains possibly making it into meat processed at the Pickton pig farm in British Columbia, and other meat safety scares, it would be no surprise if confidence in Canadian meat and poultry was on the wane.

With a cattle industry worth billions of dollars, it’s no wonder public officials have been hard at work trying to reinforce the message that Canadian meat is safe. But as hard as they’ve worked to paint a picture of a heavily regulated and inspected industry, there’s a dirty little secret – the existence of illegal slaughterhouses producing unsafe meat. And some of that meat may be making it onto dinner tables across the country.

Bad meat isn’t just unsavoury – it can literally make you sick. From mild food poisoning symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting to diseases ranging from tuberculosis to rabies to the potentially deadly variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which comes from eating beef infected with mad cow disease, eating uninspected meat makes people vulnerable to a range of illnesses.

At licensed slaughterhouses across the country, veterinarians and health inspectors check animals for diseases both before and after they are slaughtered and monitor everything from the way animals are killed to the cleanliness of instruments, counters and storage facilities to the temperature at which meat is stored.

But though it’s required by law, paying for appropriate monitoring is a costly proposition, and it seems some businesses aren’t willing to pay for it.

You don’t have to look far to find illegal slaughterhouses in Canada. Mike Draper, chief inspector for the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA), estimates there are “hundreds” in the Toronto area alone. Last month, law enforcement officials seized more than 20,000 kilograms of illegal game meat from a Quebec wholesaler that was a supplier to restaurants and butchers across the province – the biggest illegal meat seizure in Quebec history. In Vancouver, one restaurant was shut down for selling uninspected goat meat, while in Edmonton, coyote carcasses were found in the freezer of another eatery only after it went out of business.

Draper chalks the prevalence of illegal meat across the country to the rules of supply and demand. “It’s cheap meat,” he says. “People want cheap meat. This is how they’re going to get it. As long as there’s a demand, there’ll be a supply. Just like drug dealers.”

At W-FIVE, we wanted to find out for ourselves how easy it can be to obtain black market meat, so equipped with a hidden camera, we went for a drive outside Toronto. It didn’t take long to find a willing seller.

The barn at the slaughterhouse we found was filthy, with garbage piled high and dogs roaming around the slaughter area. After a goat was selected, it wasn’t sedated or stunned. Instead, its legs were tied and it was held down while its throat was slit.

Ontario laws allow farmers to slaughter animals without supervision for their own personal consumption, but prohibit them from selling the meat. And while the farmer we met knows he’s not allowed to do so, he’s willing to sell us a whole goat for about $40 less than it would cost at a licensed slaughterhouse or butcher shop.

But you don’t have to go directly to the source to find uninspected meat. Jim Chan, who has worked as a health inspector in the Toronto area for 27 years, has a whole album of what he calls “dirty pictures,” filled with graphic evidence of some of the illegal meat that has made it into shops and restaurants in his jurisdiction. In the past, Chan says, there has been a big market for illegally slaughtered lamb, goat meat and beef, but most recently, inspectors in the Toronto are finding uninspected chicken, duck and pigeon.

“Very often inspectors … find bits and pieces of internal organs, including some of the soft eggs still inside the inside cavity of the birds,” he says. And while inspected meat can usually be clearly distinguished by an inspection tag, Chan found one illegal slaughterer that went so far as to attach bogus tags to its meat.

But while some illegal meat is visibly problematic – for example, it may be dirty looking or have obvious blemishes on the flesh -- Bernie Barber, who operates a licensed abattoir, says the naked eye can’t always spot problems. “You can never tell by looking at a carcass whether there’s contamination. If the carcasses were contaminated with fecal material during the killing process and someone took a high-pressure hose and just blasted the area where the fecal contamination was, what they’ve actually done is drive the bacteria more into the meat, and then you can’t see that,” he says. “You cannot see bacteria, you cannot see viruses. It could be there and be a potential hazard.”

And just as contamination can be hard to see, illegal slaughterhouses can also hard to find. “It’s very difficult for us to know where this is going on,” says Draper. “It goes on behind closed doors, of course. No one announces this.”

Chan says almost all of municipal health inspections are routine evaluations. “We really don’t have additional resources to really go out looking for uninspected meat,” he says. So much of that responsibility falls on Draper and other OSPCA investigators, who are interested in shutting down illegal slaughterhouses because of the inhumane methods most use.

“Our concern of course is how these animals are being killed,” Draper says. “We have cases where a screwdriver has been jammed in a goat’s heart; a pig has been killed by bashing its head with a sledgehammer; goats and sheep were killed essentially with a dull knife and sawing the animal’s throat instead of cutting. (This is) totally unacceptable and torture in my mind.”

Cruelty to animals aside, Draper adds that much of what he’s seen at illegal slaughterhouses also poses a risk to human health. “No sanitation program, no running water, fecal contamination everywhere – it’s disgusting quite honestly. … I as a citizen would be very concerned in consuming any of this meat. Flies, fecal matter, we’ve seen many goat carcasses with animal feces covering the carcass after it’s been slaughtered. No refrigeration of course – these animals are thrown in banana boxes and just carted off to a market.”

But if you think that just because the meat you bring home has been properly inspected it’s 100% safe, think again.

Eleanor Nash, a dietitian who now raises goats on her farm near Pickering, Ontario, used to work as a provincial meat inspector. But she quit her job in January 2003, after three years of watching some slaughterhouses constantly cut corners when it came to meat safety.

“There were a number of things,” she told W-FIVE. “Just poor sanitation in some cases – improper cleaning of counters and equipment and slaughterhouse facilities before the kill and during processes following a kill, so cleanliness was definitely an issue. Humaneness to animals was, in some cases, a real problem. Operators were pushing through too many animals, probably … at least partially because profits were involved.”

Nash says some of these problems fall through the cracks because inspectors are often undertrained and overworked. But she says although provincial officials were alerted to the problems, during the period that she was inspecting, little changed.

The end result? Unsafe meat was getting approved. “I know meat has gone into the system that probably shouldn’t have, and that would place somewhat unnecessary risk on the public,” Nash says.

And Nash isn’t the only one with concerns about the effectiveness of the inspection system. W-FIVE spoke to two slaughterhouse employees who, under the condition of anonymity, detailed similar ongoing problems.

“I’ve worked on my own for eight hours for the day,” one told W-FIVE. “I’ve had to leave the floor to release carcasses, and while I was doing that – for 40 minutes during that time – there would be nobody on the kill floor. I’d have to make catch up, but it would be impossible. … My bosses were well aware that this was going on and nothing was done about it.”

As proof that some inspectors are giving a passing grade to bad meat, the whistleblowers showed us photos taken inside a slaughterhouse in February and March 2004. The photos show meat with visible flaws including an abscess and melanoma that was given the stamp of approval. Fortunately, when one of the inspectors W-FIVE spoke to spotted the meat, he had it pulled.

After a scare at one Ontario meat plant last year, procedures at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food – the body in charge of the province’s slaughterhouses – are under review. At W-FIVE we had our own questions about the province’s inspection, but the ministry turned down repeated requests for an interview.

And there’s yet another worrying aspect about the Canadian meat that makes it into our kitchens – the use of so-called downers, cattle that are too sick or injured to walk on their own.

Fast food chains have banned such animals from their food stock for years, and in December 2003, the U.S. followed suit.

“The thing about downed cows is that they should never be used for human consumption,” Dr. Lester Friedlander, an award-winning U.S.-based veterinarian, told W-FIVE.

A downer was the source of a recent case of mad cow disease in the U.S., and Friedlander says such cattle have potentially been exposed to a number of other diseases. Canada has agreed not to export downers to the U.S., but such meat remains a part of our own food supply.

In an interview, George Luterbach, a chief veterinarian with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, insisted that the decision to allow downers in Canada is just a different approach and that our meat is just as safe as the supply south of the border.

“There’s a whole cascade of inspections here that insure that we have a safe and wholesome food supply, and we’ve addressed our issues in a slightly different manner than the United States,” he says.

But Friedlander says even if the risk from downers is low, it exists. “A lot of people say it’s a low risk,” he says. “Well, I’ll tell you what – the risk is so low you can die from it.”

For now at least downers remain a part of our meat supply. So what do you do if you are worried about the meat you eat?

Eleanor Nash suggests consumers take their safety into their own hands, carefully inspecting and cooking all meat before eating it.

“The final responsibility for food safety still rests on the consumer,” she says. “I would always tell people, don’t ever trust that meat is going to be safe.”