Teeth forced to tell the story

By Maynard Vander Galien

Renfrew County farmer and columnist

Farmers sending beef to an abattoir have found out that the rules at the slaughterhouse have changed after Canada had one cow with BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, a commonly referred to as mad-cow.

Since July of last year, the operator at the abattoir and an inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) have to examine the incisor teeth of each carcass post-mortem at or before the head inspection station. Abattoir plant personnel examining teeth must be able to recognize permanent incisor teeth and be knowledgeable of the new policy.

Cattle are considered to be aged 30 months or older when they have more than two permanent incisor teeth erupted (i.e. the first pair of permanent incisor and at least one tooth from the second pair of permanent incisors).

That's how they tell the age of the beef you fatten up for your freezer, or meat that goes for export. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says checking the number of permanent teeth is the most effective method for now. Farmers can attest to the fact that it doesn't tell the true age of the animal.

When a carcass has been identified as being derived from an animal aged 30 months or older, it must be marked in a way that will permit easy identification of the head and the carcass sides (and quarters as needed) up to the point where all specified risk materials (SRM) are removed.

Specified Risk Materials are defined as the skull, brain, trigeminal ganglia, eyes, tonsils, spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia.

Abattoir plant personnel tell me inspectors spray the backbone with bright coloured paint so that it has to be cut out and thrown away.

In the Meat Hygiene Manual of Procedures, CFIA says "operators may be able to reduce or eliminate the need for certain requirements under this part if this does not affect the outcome of the policy. For example, an operator may decide to treat all slaughter cattle as being derived from animals aged 30 months or older. In such a case, specified risk material would be removed from all carcasses regardless of their age. There would therefore be no need to mark the head and the carcass sides (unless the removal of the vertebral column is performed in another establishment)."

"A CFIA inspector will monitor the accuracy of the operator's examination of incisor teeth, aging and carcass identification during the inspection of the head. Their focus with respect to the age determination will be on carcasses that are judged by the operator to be under 30 months of age."

An abattoir owner told me the technique is controversial because the eruption of permanent incisor teeth is known to vary according to the animal's sex, breed and diet Some breeds get their permanent teeth as young as 24 months.

There's nothing we can do, said the abattoir owner. We have to go by the teeth. And then we have to call the farmer and tell them that the backbone has to be cut out. It makes a lot more work for us and our customer gets some cuts of meat minus the bone. The farmer is mad as hell because he says the animal is only two years old. But the teeth show it's older, and that's what we have to go by. The inspector sprays it with orange paint and we have to remove it, he said.

"I hate having to tell dairy farmers that the young beef they fatten up, the teeth showed it was 30 months old. You know yourself dairy farmers keep good records when their cows calve. They tell you profoundly that the heifer you just slaughtered is just so many months old," he said.

I had a similar experience this spring when I sent four young beef to an abattoir. Two animals were under 24 months of age. Yet I got a call from the abattoir that the teeth showed they were 30 months of age. There's nothing we can do. We have to remove the backbone, said the operator owner.

The meat was excellent. Why wouldn't it be? It was from Red Angus heifers just under two years old.

(Beef farmer Maynard Vander Galien writes for the Cobden Sun and The Renfrew Mercury and is a perennial winner in the seed show at the Ottawa Valley Farm Show.)