Increased Cost of Living
By Trent Loos

I was traveling through several airports on the day of the manhunt in Atlanta and the parallels between Bryan Nichols and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy became glaringly apparent. Cable “news” networks continually delivered the latest on where Nichols was seen last and chronicled his every move. They intertwined these updates with comments from “experts” about how this happened and what we must do to do stop it. With his picture on the front page of every newspaper, the media has made Nichols a hero with criminally minded individuals who will be motivated to be like him.

The next step will be increased regulations and a loss of freedom in and around courthouses across the nation. I have my own news flash. People on trial have been killing judges as long as trials have been a method for determining guilt. The problem is that we are exposed to so many more details today that our human mind struggles to make a logical decision when it comes to risk. Who will pay the price for the worldwide exposure of the Atlanta killer? All of the innocent people through the loss of their freedoms.

To me this is no different than the cost of BSE to the United States beef industry. The first five days after Dec. 23, 2003, the lead news story in every media outlet was “Mad Cow” disease. They followed their “disaster alert” with “experts” spewing about how we can protect our children and ourselves. Foreign markets have now been closed for 15 months at a cost of billions of dollars to the US beef industry.

When I first heard that President Bush budgeted $7 million dollars for additional research on BSE, I thought that was a good thing. I am beginning to think that spending money on that may be as frivolous as devoting millions of dollars to psychological testing about why people kill other people. My rationale behind this is simple cowboy arithmetic. The world loses 10 million people every year to starvation. That is not a small risk yet innocent beef producers have lost billions of dollars due to a disease that has caused only 158 deaths in the entire history of it’s existence.

I would like to share this paragraph with you from a John Stossel speech given February 20, 2001, in Fort Myers, Florida, at a Hillsdale College Seminar.

A turning point in my career came when a producer came into my office excited because he had been given a story by a trial lawyer about Bic lighters spontaneously catching fire in people's pockets. These lighters had killed four Americans in four years. By this time I'd done some homework. I said "Fine, I'll do the exploding lighter story after I do stories on plastic bags, which kill 40 Americans every four years, and 5 gallon buckets, which kill 200 Americans every four years." Cars, I fear, would never make it off the drawing board in 2001. When ABC gave me three 1-hour long specials a year in order to keep me, I insisted the first one be called, "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?"

We will never fully understand the cost of one cow testing positive for BSE in our country, but here is what we do know: Prior to that discovery, we exported $3-4 billion dollars worth of beef annually. We are now spending $150/head to remove specified risk materials (SRM) in at-risk cattle. Some are now proposing a mandatory $50/head testing fee for all animals. We have banned all non-ambulatory cattle from our food system. We have key people tuned in to legislative initiatives and they are constantly monitoring all new and unnecessary regulations that will be proposed regarding this matter. But the greatest cost of all, to our industry and our nation, is the division this matter has caused within our already dwindling rural communities.

While we may not want to turn a blind eye to BSE, we must reasonably analyze the level of risk associated with the disease. We can’t put our kids in plastic bubbles to protect them from every potential danger. Nor do we gain anything if we stop living just to eliminate every possible risk of death that we may encounter on a daily basis. Life expectancies in this country have nearly doubled and yet we are willing to “stop living” just to make sure that something we do doesn’t kill us. To steal a few choice words from a Tim McGraw song, wouldn’t we all be better off if we chose to “live like we were dying”?

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