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On sperm/egg donor privacy
Are You My Sperm Donor? Few Clinics Will Say
By AMY HARMON
As soon as she gave birth to healthy triplets, Raquel Villalba knew she wanted them to meet the woman whose donated eggs had made it possible. The donor, Marilyn Drake, was just as eager to meet the babies.
But the fertility clinic did not think it was a good idea. Ms. Drake had grown "overly maternal," the counselor warned Ms. Villalba. Ms. Drake, in turn, was told that Ms. Villalba would blame her if anything went wrong with the triplets, so it was best to stay away.
Largely unregulated, fertility clinics have long operated under the assumption that preserving anonymity is best for all parties. But as the stigma of infertility fades, the secrecy of the process is coming under attack, both from parents like Ms. Villalba and from the growing number of adults who owe their lives to donors.
"I don't understand why these clinics are being so difficult," said Ms. Villalba, who finally prevailed on the clinic to let her contact Ms. Drake.
Critics say the industry's preference for anonymity allows it to escape accountability. How would anyone know if a sperm donor advertised as a Ph.D. who does not smoke is really a chain smoker with a high-school diploma, for instance? Or how many offspring a donor might have? With neither party in a position to verify the number, there may be little incentive for sperm banks to impose limits on their best sellers - whose offspring might number more than 100 - leaving children at risk of unwitting incest.
Many also complain that they are at the mercy of the fertility industry for important information - for instance, that a donor developed diabetes in later life - that might signal health risks. And some critics are pondering the larger question of whether anybody, having already decided that one's children will never know where they came from, has the right to bring them into the world. Many children born from donors are haunted by questions of identity, for which they blame companies that require anonymity as a condition of buying their sperm and eggs.
With ever more exotic reproductive technologies looming, like cloning and the engineering of traits like eye color and intelligence, some advocates for more regulation say there is a growing urgency to protect these children from what they call "genetic bewilderment." Guaranteeing children access to their genetic heritage, they say, could be the cornerstone of an industry ethics code.
"We need to get it right for donor conception," said Rebecca Hamilton, a law student at Harvard who created a documentary about searching for her donor father in New Zealand, "and use it as the basis for the million weird and wacky decisions coming our way."
The documentary helped rally support for a law there prohibiting anonymous donation. Several European countries have already begun to ban anonymous donation of genetic material. Britain, for instance, began requiring fertility clinics last April to register donor information, including names, in a database that offspring can view when they reach 18.
But those regulations have resulted in a steep decline in donors, which has made sperm banks and fertility clinics here more determined to oppose mandatory identity disclosure.
"If that was required, it would devastate the industry," said William W. Jaeger, vice president of the Fairfax Genetics & I.V.F. Institute in Virginia, one of the nation's largest fertility clinics, which routinely turns down offspring who ask if their donor might be open to contact. "The agreement we have is that the donor is forever anonymous."
Unlike adoption, which requires judicial action to create a relationship between the adoptive parent and child, parenthood via assisted reproductive technology is mediated entirely by the private agencies that supply the genetic material.
While the Food and Drug Administration requires donor agencies to screen for several communicable diseases, including H.I.V. and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it has allowed the fertility industry to set its own rules regarding just about everything else. About 40,000 children are born each year through donor eggs and sperm, according to rough industry estimates.
Some fertility experts say they advocate anonymity to protect both donors and customers from being caught up in the murky issues of custody and liability. They point out that there is little established case law on the subject and that states interpret parental rights differently.
But critics say such policies are as much a shield for the booming fertility industry, which might suffer from high-profile legal battles or scandals like one case in the early 1990's when a fertility doctor in Virginia was found to have fathered as many as 75 children by inseminating patients with his own sperm.
Pressure from a growing customer base of lesbian couples and single women, who have to explain the absence of a father to their children, has led many sperm banks to begin charging more for sperm from donors who agree to be contacted by adult offspring.
Still, perhaps because assisted reproduction is viewed as a medical procedure for adults, critics say the children are often forgotten. Unlike adoptees, who have gained the right to their original birth certificates, some donor-conceived offspring still do not know how they came to be. One reason for the pressure on the industry now is that more parents are telling their children about the method of their conception.
"Fertility clinics present themselves as simply providing treatment for people who are infertile, and they make lots of money doing it," said Joan Hollinger, a leading scholar on adoption law at the University of California, Berkeley. "There isn't anyone at the table assigned to think about the needs of any resulting children."
When Eric Schwartzman and his wife were considering accepting donor sperm in 2001, no one suggested that their children might be interested in contacting the donor. Now, having listened to the yearning expressed by some donor-conceived offspring, they want their young son and daughter to have the option.
"At a minimum, they should be recording the live births and making it public," said Mr. Schwartzman, 41, a tax lawyer in Manhattan who has formed a committee to draft a model set of rules for sperm banks, which might include testing for common genetic diseases, keeping health records and providing more biographical information, rather than charging extra for pictures of a donor or a tape recording of his voice, as is now standard practice.
Critics of donor anonymity do not expect further regulation of the industry's policies any time soon, but they say they hope market pressure and public opinion will persuade the institutions to be more open.
Ellen Glazer, a social worker who arranges meetings between egg donors and recipients, says both parties often defer to the donor agencies for guidance. The meetings are often supervised by the agency.
"They'll say, 'This is great, let's go out to lunch' and then they'll look at me and say, 'Are we allowed?' Ms. Glazer said. "And I'll say, 'You two are engaging in some of the most intimate connection that two women have, why wouldn't you want to go out to lunch?' "
Ms. Villalba, who told her triplets from the beginning that she had needed a "helper" to have them, said she wanted them to be able ask Ms. Drake whatever questions might arise. Ms. Drake, who has two children of her own, says she feels like an aunt to the children.
The women said the clinic, the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco, initially insisted that they correspond only through its counselors, who censored identifying information out of their letters. When the triplets, now 3, were infants, Ms. Villalba asked to be contacted when Ms. Drake came to donate again, only to find that she had returned to Southern California. Finally the clinic set up a phone counseling session with both of them and agreed to disclose Ms. Drake's address. A letter with pictures arrived a few days later.
The center did not return repeated calls asking for comment, but experts say many fertility centers follow similar guidelines, under the presumption that anonymity is the most compassionate approach for a couple already grappling with infertility.
"We want the recipient to feel she's getting genetic material from the donor with which she can make a baby that is very much hers," said Dr. Brian M. Berger, director of the donor egg program at Boston I.V.F. "If you then try to create a personal relationship between donor and recipient, it becomes more murky. The donor has an investment which we'd rather they didn't have."
Some fertility experts say there are more pragmatic reasons, too.
"Frankly I think it's just easier for the industry to do it anonymously," said Hilary Hanafin, a psychologist in Los Angeles who frequently consults with infertile couples. "If you're in total control of the information, it's more efficient and less work."
A few sperm donor offspring have circumvented the system, finding their biological fathers through ad-hoc Internet registries and long-shot DNA tests, using the shards of biographical information provided by the sperm banks or clinics. On e-mail lists like DonorMisconception and an international group called Tangled Web, they argue that an institutional change is required.
Even some donors who initially coveted anonymity have said they now feel the tug of genetic bonds. They, too, have begun to petition donor agencies to open their records.
"I have this overwhelming desire to meet my genetic offspring," said John Allison, 46, a software engineer in Tucson who donated sperm for easy money as a graduate student in the mid-1980's and never had children of his own. "We'd rent a boat, we'd go fishing. I'd answer anything they had to say."
Mr. Allison wrote to the sperm bank, Idant Laboratories in New York, several months ago expressing his willingness to meet, but he never received a reply.
It's so stupid. Obviously, if both donor and donee (or donor's donated kids) want to meet, or not be so private, it should be allowed.
Oh, hey, it's by Amy Harmon. Dear God. It seems like every other article I really like turns out to be by her. I'm turning into a fangirl. So embarassing.
NY is pushing for better food options in poorer neighborhoods.
New York Pushing Better Diet in Poorer Neighborhoods
By MARC SANTORA
Look in just about any bodega in the city's poorer neighborhoods and it is easy to find shelves well-stocked with potato chips, sodas and doughnuts. But just try to find something healthier like fruits or vegetables.
For many low-income city residents, such bodegas are more common shopping options than supermarkets with a much larger roster of healthy items.
So in an effort to provide healthier food choices, city health officials have enlisted bodega owners in an effort to encourage the sale of low-fat milk.
The program, which health officials hope to extend to items like fruits and vegetables if it proves successful, is an attempt to combat the city's obesity epidemic. As the rate of obesity in the city continue to rise, so do associated chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes.
The milk program follows studies indicating that healthy food is scarcer and more expensive in poorer neighborhoods. Many of those communities are served primarily by bodegas in which, compared with supermarkets, the sale of fresh fruit is limited, unhealthy foods are heavily promoted and vegetables are almost nonexistent.
Besides announcing the milk program yesterday, the Health and Mental Hygiene Department released the results of its survey of the availability of various healthy foods in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
The agency found that only one in three bodegas there sold reduced-fat milk, but that 9 out of 10 supermarkets in the neighborhoods did. More than 80 percent of the 373 food stores surveyed in the two neighborhoods were bodegas.
The department is beginning the milk program in three areas with similar food problems: central Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem. Those areas have some of the city's highest obesity rates. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, 30 percent of adults are obese, though the citywide rate is 20 percent.
For several months, the two dozen bodegas that have signed up for the milk program will offer customers discounts on low-fat milk and pass out fliers provided by the health department. There is no financial incentive for the bodegas to participate, but health officials said they have received a positive response.
"Bodegas are essential food providers in our communities, but healthy options are often unavailable," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner. "Cutting down on unnecessary calories and saturated fat can prevent diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. Most people want to be healthier, and even small lifestyle changes - like switching to 1 percent milk, eating more fruits and vegetables and increasing physical activity - can make a big difference over the long term."
The department's survey in the two Brooklyn neighborhoods found that a scarcity of low-fat milk was just one of many obstacles to healthier eating.
The most common products advertised by bodegas, the survey found, are sugar-laden sodas and sports drinks. Nearly half the stores also advertised cigarettes.
"A typical school has five stores advertising cigarettes within a three-block radius," according to the report.
Bodegas are also much less likely than supermarkets to stock fruits and vegetables, it said. While the majority of bodegas and supermarkets carry some kind of fresh fruit, only 21 percent of the bodegas in Bedford-Stuyvesant offered apples, oranges and bananas. Supermarkets were four times more likely to carry all three.
Leafy green vegetables like spinach and kale were found in only 6 percent of the bodegas surveyed. Bodega owners said an important reason they did not carry healthier foods was that they are not very popular.
Even when healthy food is available, bodegas often charge more for it than supermarkets do. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the average cost of a gallon of milk was 79 cents more in a bodega than in a supermarket.
In order to compile the report, health department workers visited all food stores within a five-mile radius in central Brooklyn. In the bodegas and supermarkets, they recorded both the availability of certain types of food as well as the prices. They also examined the restaurants in the same area.
While national fast-food chains like Burger King and KFC accounted for 13 percent of 168 restaurants surveyed, three out of four restaurants sold only takeout food. The most common categories in the survey were Chinese, Latin American and pizza.
Health officials concede that it is hard to get people to change their eating habits, but they believe they can make a start by heavily promoting good habits and making nutritious food more available.
At a bodega in Harlem, where the milk program was starting yesterday, children at nearby Public School 57 were happy to try low-fat milk. As crossing guards passed out the department's fliers on the product's health benefits, Tiffany Rodriguez, 11, said that she had drunk only whole milk before but that she liked her first sip of the low-fat alternative.
"I think this tastes better than the regular milk," she said.
Transit workers reject deal that ended strike. Well, fuck.
N.Y. Transit Workers Reject Deal That Ended 3-Day Strike
By SEWELL CHAN
In an extraordinarily close vote, the New York City transit workers' union today rejected the contract settlement its leaders reached last month with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, scuttling the deal that ended a three-day citywide strike and raising anew the prospect of continued labor unrest.
Of 22,461 votes cast by the deadline at noon today, 11,227 workers voted to ratify the contract and 11,234 voted to reject it, a margin of just 7 votes - or 0.03 percent. The rejection was a stunning defeat for Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, which represents 33,700 subway and bus workers at the authority.
Mr. Toussaint had urged his membership to accept the agreement.
The decision leaves open several possibilities, including that of another walkout. Negotiators from both sides might resume direct bargaining or call for mediation, but both approaches might be fruitless because the authority is unlikely to offer new concessions.
Either side could also petition for binding arbitration - an option that the authority supports but that Mr. Toussaint has adamantly rejected.
Looking grim and tired, Mr. Toussaint said he was disappointed "to go back to the drawing board" but gave no indication of his plans. He accused Gov. George E. Pataki, union dissidents and the authority's negotiators of dampening support for the vote.
"The net effect was that members came to doubt that the key benefits of the deal were forthcoming," he said.
The settlement rejected today was nearly identical to a contract proposed by three state mediators who helped to end the strike, which lasted from Dec. 20 - 22, by persuading both sides to resume negotiations while union members returned to work.
The settlement was announced on Dec. 27. It required ratification by a majority vote of union members and then approval by the authority's board, which is scheduled to meet on Wednesday.
"We proposed terms and conditions that we believed the negotiating teams could find acceptable," said the chief mediator, Richard A. Curreri, who is director of conciliation at the state's Public Employment Relations Board. "The rejection obviously complicates matters."
In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the vote as "disappointing news to all New Yorkers" and urged that both sides "work together on an amicable resolution to their contract dispute."
Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for the governor, was equally noncommittal, saying only that both sides should "engage in good-faith negotiations" and "expeditiously resolve their differences."
The strike cost businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue in the week before Christmas. Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, the city's largest association of business leaders, said she was astonished by the close outcome.
"Clearly, everything we've been hearing about chronic labor-management problems is coming home to roost," she said. "Second, it's a sign of substantial problems between union leaders and members. From the standpoint of the business community, nothing is worse than uncertainty, and this casts another pall over the reliability of the city's transit system."
The new contract would have given workers raises of 3 percent, 4 percent and 3.5 percent over the next three years . But it also would have required them for the first time to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care premiums.
Loosely on threats to media in Iraq
Fear and loathing in Baghdad
For the few Western reporters left in Iraq, Jill Carroll's kidnapping is their worst nightmare.
By David Axe
Jan. 20, 2006 | Last summer in the town of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq, I was accompanying British diplomat Karen McClusky in the downtown market, interviewing residents, when one of McClusky's guards abruptly said, "We have to leave now." We left immediately, no questions asked. The guard later explained he'd sensed hostility in the crowd: dark looks, unintelligible muttering.
Perhaps it was no more than a fleeting specter -- but across Iraq these days and particularly in Baghdad, angry looks and whispered words can be a prelude to death. Westerners, including those working for the media (along with anyone helping them), have continued to be targets for abduction, torture and murder at the hands of insurgents.
The abduction in Baghdad on Jan. 7 of 28-year-old freelance reporter Jill Carroll, who was on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, is the latest example of how difficult conditions have become. Her respected translator, Alan Enwiyah, was murdered at the time of the kidnapping; Carroll's fate remains unknown. On Jan. 17, Carroll's captors issued a statement demanding that the United States free all female Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody, threatening to kill Carroll if their demand was not met within 72 hours.
According to veteran war reporters, the security threat to journalists in Iraq today is as bad as ever. The growing danger and increasingly prohibitive cost of security measures have sharply limited their ability (and in some cases their willingness) to move around and provide accurate, comprehensive coverage of Iraq. Increasingly, they must rely on the U.S. military for protection and access. The remaining handful of non-embedded reporters in Baghdad are mostly holed up in a few besieged hotels, which, according to one source, are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Western reporters rarely venture out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories.
Since the beginning of the war, 60 journalists have been killed in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 37 have been abducted, several of whom were found dead. Carroll is the first American woman abducted.
Veteran war correspondent John F. Burns, the New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad, says "hotel journalism" has become the norm rather than the exception, although he adds that his own bureau has worked hard to keep its reporters on the streets. Very few Times employees have decided to leave because of the hazards they face, Burns says. Nonetheless, the security situation has been "woeful for really quite some time now," he says. "There are levels of risk that often seem beyond reason."
Journalists here are concerned and deeply sympathetic about Carroll's situation, while remaining resolute about their work. "People are realistic ... they know that these things can happen. They're more likely if you have no protection," Burns says.
Other veteran correspondents declined to talk about conditions in Iraq. Some agreed only on the condition that they were not identified. "Baghdad is ridiculously dangerous for a Westerner to move around in," said one longtime freelance war correspondent in an email. "Large news organizations like Time magazine and the New York Times still send some people around, followed at all times by chase cars filled with dudes with AK-47s. And then they sprint in, do some quick interviews, snap some pictures, and sprint back home. Not really good journalism in my book, but it's the only way to work." Carroll remained one of few who were still willing to venture out on their own with only nominal security, he said.
According to Burns and other reporters, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, journalists could more or less move freely throughout much of Iraq, including Baghdad. Then the insurgency began to flare up in summer 2003, and travel became more difficult. Local conditions varied -- hot spots included Fallujah and Najaf -- but everywhere the danger increased.
Burns says it was evident even back then that Iraq had become a "360-degree conflict," as U.S. commanders had begun describing it. He says the major insurgent attacks on the U.N. headquarters and International Red Cross in Baghdad in 2003 were a turning point. "I came to the conclusion walking through the rubble that we would have to adapt measures for our security that were quite remarkable," he says.
Soon thereafter, entire provinces like Al Anbar in the west essentially became off limits. Baghdad closed itself off to reporters "neighborhood by neighborhood," according to one correspondent. By 2005, only a few reporters would risk pursuing all but the biggest stories without taking serious, "very expensive" precautions, including heavily armed escorts.
Even with extensive security measures -- perhaps still only affordable for the largest media organizations today -- staying in business also requires "a measure of good judgment and good luck," Burns says. "With all the precautions in the world, we're still part of the inshalla brigade." ("Inshalla" means "God willing" in Arabic.)
Asked why insurgent groups would target journalists, public affairs officer Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, chief of the Army's Baghdad press center, says that it boils down to trying to influence the media environment. "Insurgents count on the media to carry their story." That story is about fear, death and destruction, he says, and "that's certainly one way to get attention away from progress [in reconstruction efforts]." Johnson also acknowledges Iraq today is "a very dangerous, hazardous place" for journalists. They usually travel predictable routes, stay in known locations, and are a "fairly available target," he says. He declined to comment about Carroll's case.
The worsening security situation means that options for journalists, other than embedding with the U.S. military, are almost nonexistent. This state of affairs raises concerns among reporters. One is that it could fuel the perception among Iraqis that Western media are in bed with the military occupiers, further stoking hostility. It also leaves reporters -- and perhaps their audiences -- wondering whether coverage from Iraq is increasingly in the hands of the military, as it wields greater influence over journalists' protection and access.
Insists Burns, "We are not an outpost of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq." But increasingly, relying on military transport and security is the only safe and cost-effective way to report on Iraq, and the Times bureau is no exception to that, he says.
Even Lt. Col. Johnson acknowledges that embedding can shape a reporter's work.
On PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on Wednesday, CBS News reporter Lara Logan spoke about just how constrained the media, especially television crews, are now: "The big complaint about this war coming from the American military and the Bush administration is that the media aren't telling the 'real story.' They don't talk about all the good things that are happening, and I frequently say to American military officers and soldiers on the ground: 'Look, you want us to risk the lives of all our team to come and film the opening of a bridge that was intact before it was bombed in this war anyway, or a school that's had new windows put in and been painted? I mean, those are just not reasons to risk the lives of all the people that are involved in trying to tell the story.'"
Logan reiterated how little freedom of movement there is in Baghdad and beyond. "We used to be able to drive to Fallujah," she said. "I want to go down to Najaf and interview Moqtada al-Sadr, I can't do that anymore. It has a huge impact on your ability to tell the story."
After numerous kidnappings and killings of journalists, some French and Italian agencies decided simply not to send their reporters back to Iraq. But grim as the conditions may be, Burns says that the New York Times bureau continues to adapt to the security threat and will stay in Iraq. And he believes other big media will do the same. "What's the alternative?" he asks. "The American press can't leave, because it's an American war."
On illegal spying, and Democrats, and... gah.
Fear of spying
Democratic strategists say opposing Bush on NSA spying makes the party look weak. Of course, that's what they said about Iraq.
By Walter Shapiro
Jan. 20, 2006 | What does Dick Cheney have in common with Democratic campaign consultants?
This is not a trick question built around hairline, health or hard-nosed philosophy of government. Instead, what unite the vice president and the opposition-party operatives are their fears of the fallout from the National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal. Cheney, of course, is not talking, so his views have to be inferred at a distance. But the Democratic consultants are outspoken about their political concerns over the warrantless wiretapping furor, as long as their identities are protected by don't-use-my-name-in-print anonymity.
Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the "Big Brother is listening" issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, "The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats -- that we're weak on defense and weak on security." To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore's fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president's contempt for legal procedures.
A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?
Recent polling data reinforces skepticism about the size of an untapped civil liberties vote. In a survey conducted in the first week of January, after the eavesdropping scandal hit the headlines, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the electorate evenly split on the issue. (For those who love the precision of polling questions, 48 percent said it was "generally right" to monitor Americans suspected of terrorist ties "without court permission," and 47 percent said it was "generally wrong.") This division should not be surprising, since voters are evenly split on virtually every public issue aside from declaring war on Canada.
It is a truism of political discussion that everyone loves to refer vaguely to an entity known as "the polls," but no one likes to read clotted paragraphs filled with numbers. So trust me when I say that Pew and other pollsters have repeatedly found that fears of terrorism trump a concern for civil liberties. (Here are the details, if you really must know: In the same January poll, Pew found that 46 percent of the electorate worry that the government "has not gone far enough" in fighting terrorism, while only 33 percent said that the government "has gone too far in restricting civil liberties." Those numbers have remained consistent since Pew first asked this question in mid-2004.)
Asked to put the survey results in 2006 campaign terms, Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Center, said, "If I were a Democratic consultant, this issue wouldn't be a top one that I would take to swing voters. I would use it to rally the base. But I think overall the Democrats have better issues." Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, sounded a similar theme: "I don't think that the eavesdropping issue will be a big negative for the Democrats, but I don't think it will be a positive either."
These assessments were all made before Osama bin Laden released his latest tape threatening new attacks on America. Even card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union may have felt a momentary shiver of fear that (to quote an ad for a "Jaws" sequel) "this time it's personal." But more than four years after the horrors of Sept. 11, ingrained American political attitudes are unlikely to significantly change either way because of the broadcast of a menacing videotape on Al-Jazeera.
The larger question hovering over the Democrats, like any other out-of-power party, is how to strike the right balance between conviction and expediency. Rich Galen, a Republican strategist, expressed the consultants-know-best argument in the most bipartisan tone he could muster: "As we Republicans learned with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition, those on the ideological edges are willing to lose an election on the grounds of doctrinal purity. Consultants don't do that. Consultants are in the business of winning elections."
But Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ("Primary Colors") will argue in a new book coming out this spring, "Paradise Lost," that misjudgments by Democratic consultants have played a major role in leaving the party without a power base more influential than the state of Illinois. And from my own vantage point, the Democrats' positioning on the eavesdropping issue invites comparisons to their fetal crouch in the run-up to the Iraqi War. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bush's go-to-war resolution -- including John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- at least partly because the pollsters insisted that it was the only politically safe position, a ludicrous and self-destructive notion in hindsight.
The problem with a consultant-driven overreliance on polling data is that it is predicated on the assumption that nothing will happen to jar public opinion out of its current grooves. As Elaine Kamarck, a top advisor in the Clinton-Gore White House and a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued, "These guys [the consultants] just don't get it. They don't understand that in politics strength is better than weakness. And a political party that is always the namby-pamby 'me too' party is a party that isn't going to get anyplace."
Kamarck also shrewdly pointed out that if leading Democrats follow the consultants and abdicate the field on the NSA spying issue (Hillary Clinton, please call your office), "They're going to leave the critique open to the far left. And that will exacerbate two problems the Democrats have: one, that they look too far out of the mainstream, and the other, that they don't believe in anything."
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on illegal eavesdropping, scheduled to begin Feb. 6, come at a time of intense soul-searching by the lost-in-the-wilderness Democrats. Having failed to mount a coherent and consistent opposition to Samuel Alito -- the long-feared judicial nominee who would destroy the balance on the Supreme Court -- the party's leadership may be tempted to drop the wiretap issue if the first few days of hearings do not deliver any vote-getting revelations. But politics sooner or later becomes a test of character and not merely a paint-by-numbers exercise in low-risk electioneering. These are key weeks for the Democrats to decide whether they believe in anything other than polls and the frail hope that the Republicans will self-destruct.
On raw food for pets
The beef over pet food
Bowser gets raw meat because wolves eat it in the wild. Tabby gets raw chicken because lions don't eat kibble. But vets say the recent trend of raw feeding is dangerous to pets and people.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Jan. 19, 2006 | On a recent winter afternoon in San Francisco's well-heeled Marina district, there's blood on the sidewalk.
Spilling out of the garage of a neat yellow house, dozens of cardboard boxes overflow with a smorgasbord of frozen raw meat and bones sealed in plastic bags. There's pork and beef from Niman Ranch, and whole quail from Cavendish Game Birds of Vermont. It looks like an upscale butcher has been pillaged by a modern-day Robin Hood, who left the spoils for the taking: lamb, chicken, goat, turkey, rabbit, buffalo -- a veritable Noah's Ark of high-quality protein plunder.
Straining at his leash, a golden retriever is overcome by lust, sniffing frantically at the inside of a box, drinking in the lingering scent of flesh and blood. Not to worry; this dog surely will get more than a nose-full later because the thousands of pounds of meaty carnage piled up here is all for dogs and cats.
It's monthly delivery day for San Francisco Raw Feeders, a buyers group with some 350 human members who strive to feed their animals a diet rich with raw meat -- and not just any meat, but sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms.
Joyce Chin is here to get chow for her eight greyhounds. She looks at the haul and stifles a laugh. "If my mother only knew the stuff that I feed my dogs, she would be horrified because a lot of this would go to feed people in China," she says. "People in America don't even eat a lot of these cuts."
That's true of the pork neck bones and feet, as well as the green tripe with trachea and gullet. Here's 5 pounds of beef hearts for $13.20, 12 pounds of beef livers for $25.80, and a 10-pound case of lamb breast bones for $20.
Tina Maria van der Horst, a tall blonde wearing a blue fleece jacket and jeans, is loading up her trunk with Niman Ranch pork neck bones and beef ribs. She's driven three hours in traffic from Grass Valley, Calif., to make the monthly pickup for her three Rhodesian Ridgebacks. She's been feeding them a raw diet for almost four years.
"I was a kibble person before that, and never again," says van der Horst. "All the little problems they had were instantly solved with the raw diet -- tooth problems, inflammatory bowel disease, ears that accumulated wax. They even smell better. It's like a car that's running well." Van der Horst spends $180 a month to feed her dogs (a 50-pound bag of kibble costs $21). But she thinks the price comes out in the wash. "You're sure to save in the end because you're not going to be running to the vet all the time with allergies, ear infections and teeth cleaning," she says.
Yes, the organic, sustainable, locally grown food craze has migrated off the dinner plate and into the dog dish and cat bowl. In recent years, dozens of raw feeding groups and co-ops have sprung up around the country. Pet owners from Texas to Kansas to Pennsylvania and Washington are trading treasured recipes as well as tips on the best source for whole rabbit.
Pet food companies aren't standing by and watching the customers most willing to spend money on their pets negotiate directly with farmers and ranchers. People annually spend $13 billion on dog and cat food, and pet companies are chomping at the bit to cater to organic customers. So far the Purinas haven't entered the fray but start-ups like Primal Pet Foods offer pre-mixed grinds of raw pet diets for sale at Whole Foods Market and boutique pet stores. Primal sells 65,000 pounds of frozen meals per month in 15 states including Illinois, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods, with two locations in San Francisco, pulls in $300 a day in raw food sales at one of its neighborhood stores.
Although many San Francisco raw feeders say they are vegetarians, they see no contradiction in buying gore by the case for their animals. They view their dogs and cats as domesticated carnivores that should be powered by raw protein, not by packaged, processed, preservative-laden kibble made out of who knows what.
Just over a week ago, their suspicions about commercial pet food got some grisly confirmation when 100 dogs in the United States died from contaminated pet food sold under the Diamond, Country Value and Professional brands, now under recall. The food was contaminated with a toxin that wastes the liver, causing vomiting, orange-colored urine and jaundice. The toxin occurs naturally in corn crops that experience wet conditions following a drought. Diamond states that last summer it was rejecting one or two shipments per week of corn because of high levels of the toxin, but some slipped by. Meanwhile, the Pet Food Institute, which represents pet food manufacturers, issued a statement to reassure the public that most pet food is safe.
Raw feeders are not reassured. They insist their pet diets are safer than supermarket brands of pet food, and that dogs and cats get more vitamins and nutrients out of a raw piece of flesh than processed kibble or canned food, largely because "raw" is more natural.
The veterinary establishment is not sold. Neither the American Veterinary Association nor the British Veterinary Association endorses the health benefits of raw food. Both organizations caution that animals fed raw meat run the risk of contracting food-borne illnesses. The British veterinary group declares that "there is no scientific evidence base to support the feeding of raw meat and bones," and warns humans they risk exposing themselves to bacteria like salmonella.
The raw feeders find the dire warnings laughable.
Joanie Levin-Yarlick, a dog trainer, arrives at San Francisco Raw Feeders with her 12-year-old border collie, Levi. "He eats better than I do," she says. The dog sticks out his tongue, happily panting. "You eat better than I do," she coos.
Levin-Yarlick, who wears a white baseball cap and white sweat shirt with the words "Catholic Dogs Gone Bad" emblazoned over a cartoon of three fornicating pooches, says that Levi's diet includes chicken backs, necks and feet, turkey necks and beef bones. She's here not just for the meat, but also to sell T-shirts and sweat shirts, like the one she's wearing, to benefit a local animal nonprofit. One T-shirt displays two doggies kissing and says: "Don't Ask. Don't Tell."
The freezer back home at Levin-Yarlick's place is stuffed with raw food for Levi. "It's his freezer," she says. "I have nothing in it but ice cubes." But Levi's choice repast is not limited to flesh. It also includes a veggie mash that his doting owner makes out of broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, red chard, parsley, garlic, ginger, kelp, alfalfa, zucchini or squash, but never bananas or avocado.
Levin-Yarlick attests that switching her border collie from kibble to this homemade meat- and vegetable-rich diet has given him a lustrous coat and cleared up his bad skin. Since she started making her dog's meals, he's had more energy, better teeth, and even, she says, "his poop is nicer -- it's harder and smaller." But as passionate as Levin-Yarlick is about Levi's transformation on his homemade fare, she doesn't talk about Levi's diet with her vet. "She doesn't agree with the raw diet, so we don't discuss it."
Levin-Yarlick contends that raw food is a natural way to feed dogs. "When they evolved in the wild, nobody cooked their food for them," she says. "They killed their prey and they ate it."
Her view is supported by one of the gurus of raw feeding, Dr. Richard Pitcairn, a University of California at Davis-trained vet who is the author of "Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats," which has sold more than 400,000 copies since it was first published more than 20 years ago. "A lot of this is common sense," Pitcairn says. "How have animals eaten for hundreds of thousands of years? Why should we think that the processed foods that we're feeding them are any better?"
At the heart of raw feeding is the conviction that the rise of the pet food industry over the last 60 years has weaned dogs and cats from the foods most natural to them. Instead, it's hooked them on a bunch of low-quality processed junk food that has a long shelf life, making it cheap and convenient for humans but not good for animals.
Raw feeders see the big pet food companies as offshoots of the human food industry, providing a market for all the waste not deemed fit for people. Say a chicken in the slaughterhouse has a cancerous growth on its wing. That goes into pet food, while the rest of the chicken is slated for human consumption, Pitcairn attests. The pet food trade association dismisses the allegation. Other goodies in pet food? Animals that died on the way to the slaughterhouse and even road kill, Pitcairn claims.
Turning that mishmash into kibble, he says, produces food that is overloaded with too many carbohydrates that dogs and cats, especially cats, don't need. In fact, some vets have experimented with treating feline diabetes by putting diabetic cats on a high-protein, low-carb diet, known, of course, as the "Catkins" diet.
Advocates of raw feeding say most vets receive minimal training in nutrition and simply go along with the nutritional guidelines of pet food companies, even peddling their diets in their offices. Many of the chronic health problems common in today's dogs and cats -- the kind of problems that constitute vets' bread-and-butter -- clear up with a more natural diet, according to Dr. Pitcairn.
"Sixty years ago, there was no such thing as commercial kibble," says Kasie Maxwell, founder of the San Francisco Raw Feeders, who spends about $300 a month feeding her two 7-year-old Great Danes and recently rescued 15-year-old Labrador retriever. Before she started this meat market for pets, Maxwell, a vegan, used to shop for her dogs at Whole Foods. She'd pick up chicken, turkey, beef and lamb -- "whatever they had that looked good, organic, hormone-free and antibiotic-free" -- to the tune of $500 a month.
Most of the raw feeders are casually dressed in jeans, and some, in suits, obviously cut work early to make the pickup. Maxwell, 34, is thin and pale, with red streaks in her dark hair. She wears a black knit cap, black pants and a red plaid jacket. She used to be a veterinarian tech, horse trainer, and information technology manager, but now works at home making her own line of doggie herbal treatments and remedies.
Maxwell read Dr. Pitcairn's book in the early '90s and tried the recipes in them with a 9-year-old kitty named Gem that was suffering from multiple health problems. Maxwell attests that the diet didn't just make Gem feel better, it changed her personality: "Upon switching her to raw, she became like a completely different cat," Maxwell says. "I caught her as a feral cat, and she was a little bit feisty and skittish. But she became really outgoing, really pleasant to be around, really sweet." The cat also lost weight, her arthritis went away, her teeth and overall health improved. Gem lived to be 22.
While Maxwell advocates raw food for dogs, she is especially enthused about it for cats. "In some animals it will fix everything," she says. "I'm talking not only about physical ailments but misbehaviors." Cats, she explains, are very particular. "They won't eat decomposing meat or carrion or fecal matter. They hunt, kill, consume and move on. They're not meant to have kibble sitting out in a bowl all day. I can tell that a kibble-fed cat is a kibble-fed cat just by looking at it. Their systems are designed to eat fresh raw meat at a sitting, and then have no food. They're not meant to be eating grain."
While raw feeders maintain that dogs and cats should eat a diet closer to what their wild cousins eat, and wild ancestors once ate, just what that might be, and how best to approach it, is a subject of hot debate within the raw community. Books like "Raw Meaty Bones" and "Give Your Dog a Bone" represent various permutations. Should you feed a dog grains? No grains? Dairy? No dairy? Vegetables and meat, or just meat? Grind up the bones, or let the dog chew them? What about nutritional supplements?
The debates take arcane turns. If you are a raw feeder who believes wolves do not consume the roughage in their ruminant prey's stomach, then you might feed your dogs meat and bones and no veggies. Depending on which breed of raw feeding is your fancy, Fido's menu can look very different. You might prepare a measured concoction of raw beef, pulped seasonal vegetables and nutritional supplements. Or you might go for the "whole prey" model and just throw a whole rabbit carcass in the backyard for the hungry mutt to tear apart. One approach is known as BARF, which can either stand for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods" or "Bones and Raw Food."
But it can take a bloody lot of effort -- meat grinder, anyone? -- to prepare many of these diets. Some companies now market commercial products to make raw feeding convenient. They sell packaged raw dinners, just thaw and serve for Rex and Tabby. There's Grandad's Pet Foods, the Honest Kitchen, Bravo! the Diet Designed by Nature, and Steve's Real Food for Pets. Nature's Variety markets its products with a photo of a lion and the caption: "He hunts his breakfast, and he's not looking for cereal."
At Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods in San Francisco, the store's motto is "Feed 'em Raw." Among the wares sold here: Dr. Pitcairn's DVD titled "Eat, Drink, and Wag Your Tail," a bit of raw-diet marketing evangelism circa 2004, in which "Master Dog Chef" Micki Voisard, a cancer survivor who says changes in her diet arrested the disease, tells of turning to homemade meals to treat her three cancer-stricken dogs. "So, you wanna be a dog chef?" she asks, before pushing a grocery cart through a supermarket, instructing acolytes how to shop for spinach, celery, parsley, zucchini, garlic, carrots, unsalted butter, eggs and plain yogurt for hungry hounds.
Lynnet Spiegel, the proprietor of Jeffrey's, is a third-generation San Franciscan, who is so confident in the quality of her products that during my visit she popped a cat treat, a piece of freeze-dried chicken, into her mouth and ate it, while inviting me to do the same. I declined.
One customer who swears by the raw meals sold at Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods is Keegan Walden, 30, an interface designer for Wells Fargo Bank. The raw meals he gives his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks consist of free-range chicken, beef parts and a bit of vegetables. "It sounds really disgusting, I know," says Walden. He adds to it Sojos, a mix of oats and walnuts, for roughage.
Walden says that there is no comparison between these ingredients and what's in off-the-shelf kibble: "It's not like you're getting filet mignon in beef kibble. It's skin, it's hoof, it's nail, it's intestine, it's garbage. Dogs can live on it, but it's garbage to begin with, and then it's rendered into dog food, so it's double garbage." He decries the preservatives that are used to make kibble last on the shelf for months and recites the horror stories about dead strays being found in pet food. "There's a lot of evidence to suggest that in the big industrial kibbles, there are other dead dogs," Walden says. "They've analyzed the ingredients, and they've found traces of phenobarbital, which is what they used to put animals to sleep."
Stephen Payne, vice president of communications for the Pet Food Institute, an industry group, says that there are no ground-up dogs and cats in pet food; he maintains it's an urban legend, which no amount of protestation from the industry has been able to quash. But Dr. Rodney Noel, state chemist for Indiana, the state agency that regulates pet food, and a member of the Association of American Feed Control Officials, says that in the past dead strays have been rendered into pet food, but that this hasn't happened for years. One reason: Pet food companies fear the bad publicity.
Commercial pet food is regulated federally by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as on a state-by-state basis, typically under the Department of Agriculture, with guidance from the Association of American Feed Control Officials.
Yet it's the raw diets, not the kibble and canned ones, that vets have special concerns about. Dogs choke on the bones, they report, and suffer obstructions in their digestive tracts that require surgery. The FDA has taken note of the health risks posed for people who feed their pets raw meat, fearing they could contact salmonella and e-coli. With the practice growing in popularity, the agency has issued guidelines for companies marketing raw meat to pets: "FDA does not believe raw meat foods for animals are consistent with the goal of protecting the public from significant risks, particularly when such products are brought into the home and/or used to feed domestic pets."
Julie Churchill is an assistant clinical professor in companion animal nutrition at the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine. She is not a fan of the raw diets. In general, people handle raw meat or chicken for only a few minutes before tossing it on the grill. But raw feeding exposes us to potential pathogens longer and in different ways. "Even if the animal is not sick, people could get sick from handling the food bowls, handling the food or petting their animals," Churchill says. Just letting your dog lick your face could make you ill, even if your dog is healthy. Such animals are known as "silent shedders," as pathogens escape from their feces, coats or mouths.
Pitcairn believes that risk is overblown. "I've never had an instance to my knowledge over the last 25 years or so where a family has become ill from that," he says. "I don't think that it's very common."
If you must feed your dog fresh beef or chicken, please cook it, recommends Jeffrey T. LeJeune, a veterinarian and assistant professor in the Food Animal Health Research Program at Ohio State University. LeJeune wrote a 2001 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Association, "Public Health Concerns Associated With Feeding Raw Meat to Dogs," which cautioned vets to "not recommend the feeding of raw meat to dogs."
Dr. Rachel Strohmeyer, a vet in Kingston, Wash., who also holds a master's degree in clinical sciences and epidemiology, agrees. After conducting research into an outbreak of salmonella at a greyhound breeding farm in Colorado, and investigating pathogens in commercially available raw pet food diets, she says: "I don't have a problem with people who want to make their animal's own food, but I don't understand why you can't cook it. If you cook it, you're going to kill a lot of the potential hazards. Just cook the food."
But supporters of raw feeding believe it's not just the freshness and quality of the ingredients that helps their animals. They believe the heat robs the protein of some of its nutritional value. Molly Rice, a holistic vet who practices at San Francisco Veterinary Specialists in San Francisco, says that about a third of her clients feed raw meat to their pets. Serving it raw, she says, preserves enzymes, vitamins and amino acids. She does, however, advise clients to freeze the food for 72 hours to cut down on bacteria and parasites, and to clean feeding bowls at every feeding.
The Association of American Feed Control Officials, which produces guidelines that states use to determine what's in pet food and how it's sold in the U.S., doesn't have special rules for raw food.
"There are no regulatory measures on raw," says Matt Koss, a chef trained in French and Mediterranean cooking, who now makes food for dogs and cats at Primal Pet Foods. "The guidelines are only geared to regulate kibble, canned and treats. As raw grows, there will be a need for some type of regulation because we can't have people making it out of their garage and potentially jeopardizing the welfare of animals, which will in turn jeopardize the industry." However, he says, the nascent raw food pet industry recently formed the North American Raw Pet Food Association, which will pool resources, create industry standards and conduct scientific research on the nutritional value of raw food.
But even Koss says that the health benefits of feeding raw meat to pets are purely anecdotal, based on the experiences of individual practitioners and holistic and alternative vets. "Most vets think it's dangerous because of bacteria, and they're really unsure what the benefits are nutritionally," he says.
Churchill, the veterinary nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, says it's much harder to create a balanced diet for your pet than you might think. When clients bring her pet recipes plucked from the Internet or books, "it always has some nutritional problems with it," she says. She asks owners to be as skeptical of the people selling raw pet food or recipes as they are of the veterinary establishment. "Are they funding scientific research? Do they have data to show that their product is scientifically based? What are the credentials of whoever is giving you the advice?"
She takes a dim view of the suspicion that vets have been snookered by the pet food industry. "I have not been bought off by a pet food company," she says. "Most vets get a free mug at their national meeting; they're not getting huge financial kickbacks."
Even the holistic or alternative vets who recommend a raw diet say it's not for every dog or cat. "The raw food diet, even though it's a great diet, it's not really great for everybody," says Sara Skiwski, a vet at the Western Dragon in San Jose. "I get irritated not only with vets, but also with some of my clients who feed raw food and are fanatical about it. I really believe that the worst diet in the whole world is a homemade raw food diet that's not properly nutritionally balanced." Just as you wouldn't eat chicken and broccoli every day for the rest of your life, she says, you shouldn't feed your dog or cat the same diet of raw meat every day.
Finally, some animal experts are flabbergasted by the raw feeding debate. Katie Merwick, who rehabilitates wolves at Second Chance Ranch animal rescue sanctuary in Washington state, believes that many of the cures cited by raw feeders -- skin infections, allergies, ear infections -- can be gained by feeding pets a higher quality of kibble. Oh, and that glossy coat raw feeders brag about? That's from all the fat in the meat, she says, which can cause other health problems like pancreatitis. As someone who has seen malnutrition and disease in wolves firsthand, she cautions pet owners against making a fetish out of what animals eat in the wild. "Our dogs are privileged to have formulated food," she says. After all, "we don't eat like cavemen anymore."
Are You My Sperm Donor? Few Clinics Will Say
By AMY HARMON
As soon as she gave birth to healthy triplets, Raquel Villalba knew she wanted them to meet the woman whose donated eggs had made it possible. The donor, Marilyn Drake, was just as eager to meet the babies.
But the fertility clinic did not think it was a good idea. Ms. Drake had grown "overly maternal," the counselor warned Ms. Villalba. Ms. Drake, in turn, was told that Ms. Villalba would blame her if anything went wrong with the triplets, so it was best to stay away.
Largely unregulated, fertility clinics have long operated under the assumption that preserving anonymity is best for all parties. But as the stigma of infertility fades, the secrecy of the process is coming under attack, both from parents like Ms. Villalba and from the growing number of adults who owe their lives to donors.
"I don't understand why these clinics are being so difficult," said Ms. Villalba, who finally prevailed on the clinic to let her contact Ms. Drake.
Critics say the industry's preference for anonymity allows it to escape accountability. How would anyone know if a sperm donor advertised as a Ph.D. who does not smoke is really a chain smoker with a high-school diploma, for instance? Or how many offspring a donor might have? With neither party in a position to verify the number, there may be little incentive for sperm banks to impose limits on their best sellers - whose offspring might number more than 100 - leaving children at risk of unwitting incest.
Many also complain that they are at the mercy of the fertility industry for important information - for instance, that a donor developed diabetes in later life - that might signal health risks. And some critics are pondering the larger question of whether anybody, having already decided that one's children will never know where they came from, has the right to bring them into the world. Many children born from donors are haunted by questions of identity, for which they blame companies that require anonymity as a condition of buying their sperm and eggs.
With ever more exotic reproductive technologies looming, like cloning and the engineering of traits like eye color and intelligence, some advocates for more regulation say there is a growing urgency to protect these children from what they call "genetic bewilderment." Guaranteeing children access to their genetic heritage, they say, could be the cornerstone of an industry ethics code.
"We need to get it right for donor conception," said Rebecca Hamilton, a law student at Harvard who created a documentary about searching for her donor father in New Zealand, "and use it as the basis for the million weird and wacky decisions coming our way."
The documentary helped rally support for a law there prohibiting anonymous donation. Several European countries have already begun to ban anonymous donation of genetic material. Britain, for instance, began requiring fertility clinics last April to register donor information, including names, in a database that offspring can view when they reach 18.
But those regulations have resulted in a steep decline in donors, which has made sperm banks and fertility clinics here more determined to oppose mandatory identity disclosure.
"If that was required, it would devastate the industry," said William W. Jaeger, vice president of the Fairfax Genetics & I.V.F. Institute in Virginia, one of the nation's largest fertility clinics, which routinely turns down offspring who ask if their donor might be open to contact. "The agreement we have is that the donor is forever anonymous."
Unlike adoption, which requires judicial action to create a relationship between the adoptive parent and child, parenthood via assisted reproductive technology is mediated entirely by the private agencies that supply the genetic material.
While the Food and Drug Administration requires donor agencies to screen for several communicable diseases, including H.I.V. and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it has allowed the fertility industry to set its own rules regarding just about everything else. About 40,000 children are born each year through donor eggs and sperm, according to rough industry estimates.
Some fertility experts say they advocate anonymity to protect both donors and customers from being caught up in the murky issues of custody and liability. They point out that there is little established case law on the subject and that states interpret parental rights differently.
But critics say such policies are as much a shield for the booming fertility industry, which might suffer from high-profile legal battles or scandals like one case in the early 1990's when a fertility doctor in Virginia was found to have fathered as many as 75 children by inseminating patients with his own sperm.
Pressure from a growing customer base of lesbian couples and single women, who have to explain the absence of a father to their children, has led many sperm banks to begin charging more for sperm from donors who agree to be contacted by adult offspring.
Still, perhaps because assisted reproduction is viewed as a medical procedure for adults, critics say the children are often forgotten. Unlike adoptees, who have gained the right to their original birth certificates, some donor-conceived offspring still do not know how they came to be. One reason for the pressure on the industry now is that more parents are telling their children about the method of their conception.
"Fertility clinics present themselves as simply providing treatment for people who are infertile, and they make lots of money doing it," said Joan Hollinger, a leading scholar on adoption law at the University of California, Berkeley. "There isn't anyone at the table assigned to think about the needs of any resulting children."
When Eric Schwartzman and his wife were considering accepting donor sperm in 2001, no one suggested that their children might be interested in contacting the donor. Now, having listened to the yearning expressed by some donor-conceived offspring, they want their young son and daughter to have the option.
"At a minimum, they should be recording the live births and making it public," said Mr. Schwartzman, 41, a tax lawyer in Manhattan who has formed a committee to draft a model set of rules for sperm banks, which might include testing for common genetic diseases, keeping health records and providing more biographical information, rather than charging extra for pictures of a donor or a tape recording of his voice, as is now standard practice.
Critics of donor anonymity do not expect further regulation of the industry's policies any time soon, but they say they hope market pressure and public opinion will persuade the institutions to be more open.
Ellen Glazer, a social worker who arranges meetings between egg donors and recipients, says both parties often defer to the donor agencies for guidance. The meetings are often supervised by the agency.
"They'll say, 'This is great, let's go out to lunch' and then they'll look at me and say, 'Are we allowed?' Ms. Glazer said. "And I'll say, 'You two are engaging in some of the most intimate connection that two women have, why wouldn't you want to go out to lunch?' "
Ms. Villalba, who told her triplets from the beginning that she had needed a "helper" to have them, said she wanted them to be able ask Ms. Drake whatever questions might arise. Ms. Drake, who has two children of her own, says she feels like an aunt to the children.
The women said the clinic, the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco, initially insisted that they correspond only through its counselors, who censored identifying information out of their letters. When the triplets, now 3, were infants, Ms. Villalba asked to be contacted when Ms. Drake came to donate again, only to find that she had returned to Southern California. Finally the clinic set up a phone counseling session with both of them and agreed to disclose Ms. Drake's address. A letter with pictures arrived a few days later.
The center did not return repeated calls asking for comment, but experts say many fertility centers follow similar guidelines, under the presumption that anonymity is the most compassionate approach for a couple already grappling with infertility.
"We want the recipient to feel she's getting genetic material from the donor with which she can make a baby that is very much hers," said Dr. Brian M. Berger, director of the donor egg program at Boston I.V.F. "If you then try to create a personal relationship between donor and recipient, it becomes more murky. The donor has an investment which we'd rather they didn't have."
Some fertility experts say there are more pragmatic reasons, too.
"Frankly I think it's just easier for the industry to do it anonymously," said Hilary Hanafin, a psychologist in Los Angeles who frequently consults with infertile couples. "If you're in total control of the information, it's more efficient and less work."
A few sperm donor offspring have circumvented the system, finding their biological fathers through ad-hoc Internet registries and long-shot DNA tests, using the shards of biographical information provided by the sperm banks or clinics. On e-mail lists like DonorMisconception and an international group called Tangled Web, they argue that an institutional change is required.
Even some donors who initially coveted anonymity have said they now feel the tug of genetic bonds. They, too, have begun to petition donor agencies to open their records.
"I have this overwhelming desire to meet my genetic offspring," said John Allison, 46, a software engineer in Tucson who donated sperm for easy money as a graduate student in the mid-1980's and never had children of his own. "We'd rent a boat, we'd go fishing. I'd answer anything they had to say."
Mr. Allison wrote to the sperm bank, Idant Laboratories in New York, several months ago expressing his willingness to meet, but he never received a reply.
It's so stupid. Obviously, if both donor and donee (or donor's donated kids) want to meet, or not be so private, it should be allowed.
Oh, hey, it's by Amy Harmon. Dear God. It seems like every other article I really like turns out to be by her. I'm turning into a fangirl. So embarassing.
NY is pushing for better food options in poorer neighborhoods.
New York Pushing Better Diet in Poorer Neighborhoods
By MARC SANTORA
Look in just about any bodega in the city's poorer neighborhoods and it is easy to find shelves well-stocked with potato chips, sodas and doughnuts. But just try to find something healthier like fruits or vegetables.
For many low-income city residents, such bodegas are more common shopping options than supermarkets with a much larger roster of healthy items.
So in an effort to provide healthier food choices, city health officials have enlisted bodega owners in an effort to encourage the sale of low-fat milk.
The program, which health officials hope to extend to items like fruits and vegetables if it proves successful, is an attempt to combat the city's obesity epidemic. As the rate of obesity in the city continue to rise, so do associated chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes.
The milk program follows studies indicating that healthy food is scarcer and more expensive in poorer neighborhoods. Many of those communities are served primarily by bodegas in which, compared with supermarkets, the sale of fresh fruit is limited, unhealthy foods are heavily promoted and vegetables are almost nonexistent.
Besides announcing the milk program yesterday, the Health and Mental Hygiene Department released the results of its survey of the availability of various healthy foods in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
The agency found that only one in three bodegas there sold reduced-fat milk, but that 9 out of 10 supermarkets in the neighborhoods did. More than 80 percent of the 373 food stores surveyed in the two neighborhoods were bodegas.
The department is beginning the milk program in three areas with similar food problems: central Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem. Those areas have some of the city's highest obesity rates. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, 30 percent of adults are obese, though the citywide rate is 20 percent.
For several months, the two dozen bodegas that have signed up for the milk program will offer customers discounts on low-fat milk and pass out fliers provided by the health department. There is no financial incentive for the bodegas to participate, but health officials said they have received a positive response.
"Bodegas are essential food providers in our communities, but healthy options are often unavailable," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner. "Cutting down on unnecessary calories and saturated fat can prevent diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. Most people want to be healthier, and even small lifestyle changes - like switching to 1 percent milk, eating more fruits and vegetables and increasing physical activity - can make a big difference over the long term."
The department's survey in the two Brooklyn neighborhoods found that a scarcity of low-fat milk was just one of many obstacles to healthier eating.
The most common products advertised by bodegas, the survey found, are sugar-laden sodas and sports drinks. Nearly half the stores also advertised cigarettes.
"A typical school has five stores advertising cigarettes within a three-block radius," according to the report.
Bodegas are also much less likely than supermarkets to stock fruits and vegetables, it said. While the majority of bodegas and supermarkets carry some kind of fresh fruit, only 21 percent of the bodegas in Bedford-Stuyvesant offered apples, oranges and bananas. Supermarkets were four times more likely to carry all three.
Leafy green vegetables like spinach and kale were found in only 6 percent of the bodegas surveyed. Bodega owners said an important reason they did not carry healthier foods was that they are not very popular.
Even when healthy food is available, bodegas often charge more for it than supermarkets do. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the average cost of a gallon of milk was 79 cents more in a bodega than in a supermarket.
In order to compile the report, health department workers visited all food stores within a five-mile radius in central Brooklyn. In the bodegas and supermarkets, they recorded both the availability of certain types of food as well as the prices. They also examined the restaurants in the same area.
While national fast-food chains like Burger King and KFC accounted for 13 percent of 168 restaurants surveyed, three out of four restaurants sold only takeout food. The most common categories in the survey were Chinese, Latin American and pizza.
Health officials concede that it is hard to get people to change their eating habits, but they believe they can make a start by heavily promoting good habits and making nutritious food more available.
At a bodega in Harlem, where the milk program was starting yesterday, children at nearby Public School 57 were happy to try low-fat milk. As crossing guards passed out the department's fliers on the product's health benefits, Tiffany Rodriguez, 11, said that she had drunk only whole milk before but that she liked her first sip of the low-fat alternative.
"I think this tastes better than the regular milk," she said.
Transit workers reject deal that ended strike. Well, fuck.
N.Y. Transit Workers Reject Deal That Ended 3-Day Strike
By SEWELL CHAN
In an extraordinarily close vote, the New York City transit workers' union today rejected the contract settlement its leaders reached last month with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, scuttling the deal that ended a three-day citywide strike and raising anew the prospect of continued labor unrest.
Of 22,461 votes cast by the deadline at noon today, 11,227 workers voted to ratify the contract and 11,234 voted to reject it, a margin of just 7 votes - or 0.03 percent. The rejection was a stunning defeat for Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, which represents 33,700 subway and bus workers at the authority.
Mr. Toussaint had urged his membership to accept the agreement.
The decision leaves open several possibilities, including that of another walkout. Negotiators from both sides might resume direct bargaining or call for mediation, but both approaches might be fruitless because the authority is unlikely to offer new concessions.
Either side could also petition for binding arbitration - an option that the authority supports but that Mr. Toussaint has adamantly rejected.
Looking grim and tired, Mr. Toussaint said he was disappointed "to go back to the drawing board" but gave no indication of his plans. He accused Gov. George E. Pataki, union dissidents and the authority's negotiators of dampening support for the vote.
"The net effect was that members came to doubt that the key benefits of the deal were forthcoming," he said.
The settlement rejected today was nearly identical to a contract proposed by three state mediators who helped to end the strike, which lasted from Dec. 20 - 22, by persuading both sides to resume negotiations while union members returned to work.
The settlement was announced on Dec. 27. It required ratification by a majority vote of union members and then approval by the authority's board, which is scheduled to meet on Wednesday.
"We proposed terms and conditions that we believed the negotiating teams could find acceptable," said the chief mediator, Richard A. Curreri, who is director of conciliation at the state's Public Employment Relations Board. "The rejection obviously complicates matters."
In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the vote as "disappointing news to all New Yorkers" and urged that both sides "work together on an amicable resolution to their contract dispute."
Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for the governor, was equally noncommittal, saying only that both sides should "engage in good-faith negotiations" and "expeditiously resolve their differences."
The strike cost businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue in the week before Christmas. Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, the city's largest association of business leaders, said she was astonished by the close outcome.
"Clearly, everything we've been hearing about chronic labor-management problems is coming home to roost," she said. "Second, it's a sign of substantial problems between union leaders and members. From the standpoint of the business community, nothing is worse than uncertainty, and this casts another pall over the reliability of the city's transit system."
The new contract would have given workers raises of 3 percent, 4 percent and 3.5 percent over the next three years . But it also would have required them for the first time to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care premiums.
Loosely on threats to media in Iraq
Fear and loathing in Baghdad
For the few Western reporters left in Iraq, Jill Carroll's kidnapping is their worst nightmare.
By David Axe
Jan. 20, 2006 | Last summer in the town of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq, I was accompanying British diplomat Karen McClusky in the downtown market, interviewing residents, when one of McClusky's guards abruptly said, "We have to leave now." We left immediately, no questions asked. The guard later explained he'd sensed hostility in the crowd: dark looks, unintelligible muttering.
Perhaps it was no more than a fleeting specter -- but across Iraq these days and particularly in Baghdad, angry looks and whispered words can be a prelude to death. Westerners, including those working for the media (along with anyone helping them), have continued to be targets for abduction, torture and murder at the hands of insurgents.
The abduction in Baghdad on Jan. 7 of 28-year-old freelance reporter Jill Carroll, who was on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, is the latest example of how difficult conditions have become. Her respected translator, Alan Enwiyah, was murdered at the time of the kidnapping; Carroll's fate remains unknown. On Jan. 17, Carroll's captors issued a statement demanding that the United States free all female Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody, threatening to kill Carroll if their demand was not met within 72 hours.
According to veteran war reporters, the security threat to journalists in Iraq today is as bad as ever. The growing danger and increasingly prohibitive cost of security measures have sharply limited their ability (and in some cases their willingness) to move around and provide accurate, comprehensive coverage of Iraq. Increasingly, they must rely on the U.S. military for protection and access. The remaining handful of non-embedded reporters in Baghdad are mostly holed up in a few besieged hotels, which, according to one source, are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Western reporters rarely venture out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories.
Since the beginning of the war, 60 journalists have been killed in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 37 have been abducted, several of whom were found dead. Carroll is the first American woman abducted.
Veteran war correspondent John F. Burns, the New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad, says "hotel journalism" has become the norm rather than the exception, although he adds that his own bureau has worked hard to keep its reporters on the streets. Very few Times employees have decided to leave because of the hazards they face, Burns says. Nonetheless, the security situation has been "woeful for really quite some time now," he says. "There are levels of risk that often seem beyond reason."
Journalists here are concerned and deeply sympathetic about Carroll's situation, while remaining resolute about their work. "People are realistic ... they know that these things can happen. They're more likely if you have no protection," Burns says.
Other veteran correspondents declined to talk about conditions in Iraq. Some agreed only on the condition that they were not identified. "Baghdad is ridiculously dangerous for a Westerner to move around in," said one longtime freelance war correspondent in an email. "Large news organizations like Time magazine and the New York Times still send some people around, followed at all times by chase cars filled with dudes with AK-47s. And then they sprint in, do some quick interviews, snap some pictures, and sprint back home. Not really good journalism in my book, but it's the only way to work." Carroll remained one of few who were still willing to venture out on their own with only nominal security, he said.
According to Burns and other reporters, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, journalists could more or less move freely throughout much of Iraq, including Baghdad. Then the insurgency began to flare up in summer 2003, and travel became more difficult. Local conditions varied -- hot spots included Fallujah and Najaf -- but everywhere the danger increased.
Burns says it was evident even back then that Iraq had become a "360-degree conflict," as U.S. commanders had begun describing it. He says the major insurgent attacks on the U.N. headquarters and International Red Cross in Baghdad in 2003 were a turning point. "I came to the conclusion walking through the rubble that we would have to adapt measures for our security that were quite remarkable," he says.
Soon thereafter, entire provinces like Al Anbar in the west essentially became off limits. Baghdad closed itself off to reporters "neighborhood by neighborhood," according to one correspondent. By 2005, only a few reporters would risk pursuing all but the biggest stories without taking serious, "very expensive" precautions, including heavily armed escorts.
Even with extensive security measures -- perhaps still only affordable for the largest media organizations today -- staying in business also requires "a measure of good judgment and good luck," Burns says. "With all the precautions in the world, we're still part of the inshalla brigade." ("Inshalla" means "God willing" in Arabic.)
Asked why insurgent groups would target journalists, public affairs officer Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, chief of the Army's Baghdad press center, says that it boils down to trying to influence the media environment. "Insurgents count on the media to carry their story." That story is about fear, death and destruction, he says, and "that's certainly one way to get attention away from progress [in reconstruction efforts]." Johnson also acknowledges Iraq today is "a very dangerous, hazardous place" for journalists. They usually travel predictable routes, stay in known locations, and are a "fairly available target," he says. He declined to comment about Carroll's case.
The worsening security situation means that options for journalists, other than embedding with the U.S. military, are almost nonexistent. This state of affairs raises concerns among reporters. One is that it could fuel the perception among Iraqis that Western media are in bed with the military occupiers, further stoking hostility. It also leaves reporters -- and perhaps their audiences -- wondering whether coverage from Iraq is increasingly in the hands of the military, as it wields greater influence over journalists' protection and access.
Insists Burns, "We are not an outpost of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq." But increasingly, relying on military transport and security is the only safe and cost-effective way to report on Iraq, and the Times bureau is no exception to that, he says.
Even Lt. Col. Johnson acknowledges that embedding can shape a reporter's work.
On PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on Wednesday, CBS News reporter Lara Logan spoke about just how constrained the media, especially television crews, are now: "The big complaint about this war coming from the American military and the Bush administration is that the media aren't telling the 'real story.' They don't talk about all the good things that are happening, and I frequently say to American military officers and soldiers on the ground: 'Look, you want us to risk the lives of all our team to come and film the opening of a bridge that was intact before it was bombed in this war anyway, or a school that's had new windows put in and been painted? I mean, those are just not reasons to risk the lives of all the people that are involved in trying to tell the story.'"
Logan reiterated how little freedom of movement there is in Baghdad and beyond. "We used to be able to drive to Fallujah," she said. "I want to go down to Najaf and interview Moqtada al-Sadr, I can't do that anymore. It has a huge impact on your ability to tell the story."
After numerous kidnappings and killings of journalists, some French and Italian agencies decided simply not to send their reporters back to Iraq. But grim as the conditions may be, Burns says that the New York Times bureau continues to adapt to the security threat and will stay in Iraq. And he believes other big media will do the same. "What's the alternative?" he asks. "The American press can't leave, because it's an American war."
On illegal spying, and Democrats, and... gah.
Fear of spying
Democratic strategists say opposing Bush on NSA spying makes the party look weak. Of course, that's what they said about Iraq.
By Walter Shapiro
Jan. 20, 2006 | What does Dick Cheney have in common with Democratic campaign consultants?
This is not a trick question built around hairline, health or hard-nosed philosophy of government. Instead, what unite the vice president and the opposition-party operatives are their fears of the fallout from the National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal. Cheney, of course, is not talking, so his views have to be inferred at a distance. But the Democratic consultants are outspoken about their political concerns over the warrantless wiretapping furor, as long as their identities are protected by don't-use-my-name-in-print anonymity.
Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the "Big Brother is listening" issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, "The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats -- that we're weak on defense and weak on security." To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore's fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president's contempt for legal procedures.
A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?
Recent polling data reinforces skepticism about the size of an untapped civil liberties vote. In a survey conducted in the first week of January, after the eavesdropping scandal hit the headlines, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the electorate evenly split on the issue. (For those who love the precision of polling questions, 48 percent said it was "generally right" to monitor Americans suspected of terrorist ties "without court permission," and 47 percent said it was "generally wrong.") This division should not be surprising, since voters are evenly split on virtually every public issue aside from declaring war on Canada.
It is a truism of political discussion that everyone loves to refer vaguely to an entity known as "the polls," but no one likes to read clotted paragraphs filled with numbers. So trust me when I say that Pew and other pollsters have repeatedly found that fears of terrorism trump a concern for civil liberties. (Here are the details, if you really must know: In the same January poll, Pew found that 46 percent of the electorate worry that the government "has not gone far enough" in fighting terrorism, while only 33 percent said that the government "has gone too far in restricting civil liberties." Those numbers have remained consistent since Pew first asked this question in mid-2004.)
Asked to put the survey results in 2006 campaign terms, Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Center, said, "If I were a Democratic consultant, this issue wouldn't be a top one that I would take to swing voters. I would use it to rally the base. But I think overall the Democrats have better issues." Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, sounded a similar theme: "I don't think that the eavesdropping issue will be a big negative for the Democrats, but I don't think it will be a positive either."
These assessments were all made before Osama bin Laden released his latest tape threatening new attacks on America. Even card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union may have felt a momentary shiver of fear that (to quote an ad for a "Jaws" sequel) "this time it's personal." But more than four years after the horrors of Sept. 11, ingrained American political attitudes are unlikely to significantly change either way because of the broadcast of a menacing videotape on Al-Jazeera.
The larger question hovering over the Democrats, like any other out-of-power party, is how to strike the right balance between conviction and expediency. Rich Galen, a Republican strategist, expressed the consultants-know-best argument in the most bipartisan tone he could muster: "As we Republicans learned with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition, those on the ideological edges are willing to lose an election on the grounds of doctrinal purity. Consultants don't do that. Consultants are in the business of winning elections."
But Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ("Primary Colors") will argue in a new book coming out this spring, "Paradise Lost," that misjudgments by Democratic consultants have played a major role in leaving the party without a power base more influential than the state of Illinois. And from my own vantage point, the Democrats' positioning on the eavesdropping issue invites comparisons to their fetal crouch in the run-up to the Iraqi War. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bush's go-to-war resolution -- including John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- at least partly because the pollsters insisted that it was the only politically safe position, a ludicrous and self-destructive notion in hindsight.
The problem with a consultant-driven overreliance on polling data is that it is predicated on the assumption that nothing will happen to jar public opinion out of its current grooves. As Elaine Kamarck, a top advisor in the Clinton-Gore White House and a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued, "These guys [the consultants] just don't get it. They don't understand that in politics strength is better than weakness. And a political party that is always the namby-pamby 'me too' party is a party that isn't going to get anyplace."
Kamarck also shrewdly pointed out that if leading Democrats follow the consultants and abdicate the field on the NSA spying issue (Hillary Clinton, please call your office), "They're going to leave the critique open to the far left. And that will exacerbate two problems the Democrats have: one, that they look too far out of the mainstream, and the other, that they don't believe in anything."
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on illegal eavesdropping, scheduled to begin Feb. 6, come at a time of intense soul-searching by the lost-in-the-wilderness Democrats. Having failed to mount a coherent and consistent opposition to Samuel Alito -- the long-feared judicial nominee who would destroy the balance on the Supreme Court -- the party's leadership may be tempted to drop the wiretap issue if the first few days of hearings do not deliver any vote-getting revelations. But politics sooner or later becomes a test of character and not merely a paint-by-numbers exercise in low-risk electioneering. These are key weeks for the Democrats to decide whether they believe in anything other than polls and the frail hope that the Republicans will self-destruct.
On raw food for pets
The beef over pet food
Bowser gets raw meat because wolves eat it in the wild. Tabby gets raw chicken because lions don't eat kibble. But vets say the recent trend of raw feeding is dangerous to pets and people.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Jan. 19, 2006 | On a recent winter afternoon in San Francisco's well-heeled Marina district, there's blood on the sidewalk.
Spilling out of the garage of a neat yellow house, dozens of cardboard boxes overflow with a smorgasbord of frozen raw meat and bones sealed in plastic bags. There's pork and beef from Niman Ranch, and whole quail from Cavendish Game Birds of Vermont. It looks like an upscale butcher has been pillaged by a modern-day Robin Hood, who left the spoils for the taking: lamb, chicken, goat, turkey, rabbit, buffalo -- a veritable Noah's Ark of high-quality protein plunder.
Straining at his leash, a golden retriever is overcome by lust, sniffing frantically at the inside of a box, drinking in the lingering scent of flesh and blood. Not to worry; this dog surely will get more than a nose-full later because the thousands of pounds of meaty carnage piled up here is all for dogs and cats.
It's monthly delivery day for San Francisco Raw Feeders, a buyers group with some 350 human members who strive to feed their animals a diet rich with raw meat -- and not just any meat, but sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms.
Joyce Chin is here to get chow for her eight greyhounds. She looks at the haul and stifles a laugh. "If my mother only knew the stuff that I feed my dogs, she would be horrified because a lot of this would go to feed people in China," she says. "People in America don't even eat a lot of these cuts."
That's true of the pork neck bones and feet, as well as the green tripe with trachea and gullet. Here's 5 pounds of beef hearts for $13.20, 12 pounds of beef livers for $25.80, and a 10-pound case of lamb breast bones for $20.
Tina Maria van der Horst, a tall blonde wearing a blue fleece jacket and jeans, is loading up her trunk with Niman Ranch pork neck bones and beef ribs. She's driven three hours in traffic from Grass Valley, Calif., to make the monthly pickup for her three Rhodesian Ridgebacks. She's been feeding them a raw diet for almost four years.
"I was a kibble person before that, and never again," says van der Horst. "All the little problems they had were instantly solved with the raw diet -- tooth problems, inflammatory bowel disease, ears that accumulated wax. They even smell better. It's like a car that's running well." Van der Horst spends $180 a month to feed her dogs (a 50-pound bag of kibble costs $21). But she thinks the price comes out in the wash. "You're sure to save in the end because you're not going to be running to the vet all the time with allergies, ear infections and teeth cleaning," she says.
Yes, the organic, sustainable, locally grown food craze has migrated off the dinner plate and into the dog dish and cat bowl. In recent years, dozens of raw feeding groups and co-ops have sprung up around the country. Pet owners from Texas to Kansas to Pennsylvania and Washington are trading treasured recipes as well as tips on the best source for whole rabbit.
Pet food companies aren't standing by and watching the customers most willing to spend money on their pets negotiate directly with farmers and ranchers. People annually spend $13 billion on dog and cat food, and pet companies are chomping at the bit to cater to organic customers. So far the Purinas haven't entered the fray but start-ups like Primal Pet Foods offer pre-mixed grinds of raw pet diets for sale at Whole Foods Market and boutique pet stores. Primal sells 65,000 pounds of frozen meals per month in 15 states including Illinois, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods, with two locations in San Francisco, pulls in $300 a day in raw food sales at one of its neighborhood stores.
Although many San Francisco raw feeders say they are vegetarians, they see no contradiction in buying gore by the case for their animals. They view their dogs and cats as domesticated carnivores that should be powered by raw protein, not by packaged, processed, preservative-laden kibble made out of who knows what.
Just over a week ago, their suspicions about commercial pet food got some grisly confirmation when 100 dogs in the United States died from contaminated pet food sold under the Diamond, Country Value and Professional brands, now under recall. The food was contaminated with a toxin that wastes the liver, causing vomiting, orange-colored urine and jaundice. The toxin occurs naturally in corn crops that experience wet conditions following a drought. Diamond states that last summer it was rejecting one or two shipments per week of corn because of high levels of the toxin, but some slipped by. Meanwhile, the Pet Food Institute, which represents pet food manufacturers, issued a statement to reassure the public that most pet food is safe.
Raw feeders are not reassured. They insist their pet diets are safer than supermarket brands of pet food, and that dogs and cats get more vitamins and nutrients out of a raw piece of flesh than processed kibble or canned food, largely because "raw" is more natural.
The veterinary establishment is not sold. Neither the American Veterinary Association nor the British Veterinary Association endorses the health benefits of raw food. Both organizations caution that animals fed raw meat run the risk of contracting food-borne illnesses. The British veterinary group declares that "there is no scientific evidence base to support the feeding of raw meat and bones," and warns humans they risk exposing themselves to bacteria like salmonella.
The raw feeders find the dire warnings laughable.
Joanie Levin-Yarlick, a dog trainer, arrives at San Francisco Raw Feeders with her 12-year-old border collie, Levi. "He eats better than I do," she says. The dog sticks out his tongue, happily panting. "You eat better than I do," she coos.
Levin-Yarlick, who wears a white baseball cap and white sweat shirt with the words "Catholic Dogs Gone Bad" emblazoned over a cartoon of three fornicating pooches, says that Levi's diet includes chicken backs, necks and feet, turkey necks and beef bones. She's here not just for the meat, but also to sell T-shirts and sweat shirts, like the one she's wearing, to benefit a local animal nonprofit. One T-shirt displays two doggies kissing and says: "Don't Ask. Don't Tell."
The freezer back home at Levin-Yarlick's place is stuffed with raw food for Levi. "It's his freezer," she says. "I have nothing in it but ice cubes." But Levi's choice repast is not limited to flesh. It also includes a veggie mash that his doting owner makes out of broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, red chard, parsley, garlic, ginger, kelp, alfalfa, zucchini or squash, but never bananas or avocado.
Levin-Yarlick attests that switching her border collie from kibble to this homemade meat- and vegetable-rich diet has given him a lustrous coat and cleared up his bad skin. Since she started making her dog's meals, he's had more energy, better teeth, and even, she says, "his poop is nicer -- it's harder and smaller." But as passionate as Levin-Yarlick is about Levi's transformation on his homemade fare, she doesn't talk about Levi's diet with her vet. "She doesn't agree with the raw diet, so we don't discuss it."
Levin-Yarlick contends that raw food is a natural way to feed dogs. "When they evolved in the wild, nobody cooked their food for them," she says. "They killed their prey and they ate it."
Her view is supported by one of the gurus of raw feeding, Dr. Richard Pitcairn, a University of California at Davis-trained vet who is the author of "Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats," which has sold more than 400,000 copies since it was first published more than 20 years ago. "A lot of this is common sense," Pitcairn says. "How have animals eaten for hundreds of thousands of years? Why should we think that the processed foods that we're feeding them are any better?"
At the heart of raw feeding is the conviction that the rise of the pet food industry over the last 60 years has weaned dogs and cats from the foods most natural to them. Instead, it's hooked them on a bunch of low-quality processed junk food that has a long shelf life, making it cheap and convenient for humans but not good for animals.
Raw feeders see the big pet food companies as offshoots of the human food industry, providing a market for all the waste not deemed fit for people. Say a chicken in the slaughterhouse has a cancerous growth on its wing. That goes into pet food, while the rest of the chicken is slated for human consumption, Pitcairn attests. The pet food trade association dismisses the allegation. Other goodies in pet food? Animals that died on the way to the slaughterhouse and even road kill, Pitcairn claims.
Turning that mishmash into kibble, he says, produces food that is overloaded with too many carbohydrates that dogs and cats, especially cats, don't need. In fact, some vets have experimented with treating feline diabetes by putting diabetic cats on a high-protein, low-carb diet, known, of course, as the "Catkins" diet.
Advocates of raw feeding say most vets receive minimal training in nutrition and simply go along with the nutritional guidelines of pet food companies, even peddling their diets in their offices. Many of the chronic health problems common in today's dogs and cats -- the kind of problems that constitute vets' bread-and-butter -- clear up with a more natural diet, according to Dr. Pitcairn.
"Sixty years ago, there was no such thing as commercial kibble," says Kasie Maxwell, founder of the San Francisco Raw Feeders, who spends about $300 a month feeding her two 7-year-old Great Danes and recently rescued 15-year-old Labrador retriever. Before she started this meat market for pets, Maxwell, a vegan, used to shop for her dogs at Whole Foods. She'd pick up chicken, turkey, beef and lamb -- "whatever they had that looked good, organic, hormone-free and antibiotic-free" -- to the tune of $500 a month.
Most of the raw feeders are casually dressed in jeans, and some, in suits, obviously cut work early to make the pickup. Maxwell, 34, is thin and pale, with red streaks in her dark hair. She wears a black knit cap, black pants and a red plaid jacket. She used to be a veterinarian tech, horse trainer, and information technology manager, but now works at home making her own line of doggie herbal treatments and remedies.
Maxwell read Dr. Pitcairn's book in the early '90s and tried the recipes in them with a 9-year-old kitty named Gem that was suffering from multiple health problems. Maxwell attests that the diet didn't just make Gem feel better, it changed her personality: "Upon switching her to raw, she became like a completely different cat," Maxwell says. "I caught her as a feral cat, and she was a little bit feisty and skittish. But she became really outgoing, really pleasant to be around, really sweet." The cat also lost weight, her arthritis went away, her teeth and overall health improved. Gem lived to be 22.
While Maxwell advocates raw food for dogs, she is especially enthused about it for cats. "In some animals it will fix everything," she says. "I'm talking not only about physical ailments but misbehaviors." Cats, she explains, are very particular. "They won't eat decomposing meat or carrion or fecal matter. They hunt, kill, consume and move on. They're not meant to have kibble sitting out in a bowl all day. I can tell that a kibble-fed cat is a kibble-fed cat just by looking at it. Their systems are designed to eat fresh raw meat at a sitting, and then have no food. They're not meant to be eating grain."
While raw feeders maintain that dogs and cats should eat a diet closer to what their wild cousins eat, and wild ancestors once ate, just what that might be, and how best to approach it, is a subject of hot debate within the raw community. Books like "Raw Meaty Bones" and "Give Your Dog a Bone" represent various permutations. Should you feed a dog grains? No grains? Dairy? No dairy? Vegetables and meat, or just meat? Grind up the bones, or let the dog chew them? What about nutritional supplements?
The debates take arcane turns. If you are a raw feeder who believes wolves do not consume the roughage in their ruminant prey's stomach, then you might feed your dogs meat and bones and no veggies. Depending on which breed of raw feeding is your fancy, Fido's menu can look very different. You might prepare a measured concoction of raw beef, pulped seasonal vegetables and nutritional supplements. Or you might go for the "whole prey" model and just throw a whole rabbit carcass in the backyard for the hungry mutt to tear apart. One approach is known as BARF, which can either stand for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods" or "Bones and Raw Food."
But it can take a bloody lot of effort -- meat grinder, anyone? -- to prepare many of these diets. Some companies now market commercial products to make raw feeding convenient. They sell packaged raw dinners, just thaw and serve for Rex and Tabby. There's Grandad's Pet Foods, the Honest Kitchen, Bravo! the Diet Designed by Nature, and Steve's Real Food for Pets. Nature's Variety markets its products with a photo of a lion and the caption: "He hunts his breakfast, and he's not looking for cereal."
At Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods in San Francisco, the store's motto is "Feed 'em Raw." Among the wares sold here: Dr. Pitcairn's DVD titled "Eat, Drink, and Wag Your Tail," a bit of raw-diet marketing evangelism circa 2004, in which "Master Dog Chef" Micki Voisard, a cancer survivor who says changes in her diet arrested the disease, tells of turning to homemade meals to treat her three cancer-stricken dogs. "So, you wanna be a dog chef?" she asks, before pushing a grocery cart through a supermarket, instructing acolytes how to shop for spinach, celery, parsley, zucchini, garlic, carrots, unsalted butter, eggs and plain yogurt for hungry hounds.
Lynnet Spiegel, the proprietor of Jeffrey's, is a third-generation San Franciscan, who is so confident in the quality of her products that during my visit she popped a cat treat, a piece of freeze-dried chicken, into her mouth and ate it, while inviting me to do the same. I declined.
One customer who swears by the raw meals sold at Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods is Keegan Walden, 30, an interface designer for Wells Fargo Bank. The raw meals he gives his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks consist of free-range chicken, beef parts and a bit of vegetables. "It sounds really disgusting, I know," says Walden. He adds to it Sojos, a mix of oats and walnuts, for roughage.
Walden says that there is no comparison between these ingredients and what's in off-the-shelf kibble: "It's not like you're getting filet mignon in beef kibble. It's skin, it's hoof, it's nail, it's intestine, it's garbage. Dogs can live on it, but it's garbage to begin with, and then it's rendered into dog food, so it's double garbage." He decries the preservatives that are used to make kibble last on the shelf for months and recites the horror stories about dead strays being found in pet food. "There's a lot of evidence to suggest that in the big industrial kibbles, there are other dead dogs," Walden says. "They've analyzed the ingredients, and they've found traces of phenobarbital, which is what they used to put animals to sleep."
Stephen Payne, vice president of communications for the Pet Food Institute, an industry group, says that there are no ground-up dogs and cats in pet food; he maintains it's an urban legend, which no amount of protestation from the industry has been able to quash. But Dr. Rodney Noel, state chemist for Indiana, the state agency that regulates pet food, and a member of the Association of American Feed Control Officials, says that in the past dead strays have been rendered into pet food, but that this hasn't happened for years. One reason: Pet food companies fear the bad publicity.
Commercial pet food is regulated federally by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as on a state-by-state basis, typically under the Department of Agriculture, with guidance from the Association of American Feed Control Officials.
Yet it's the raw diets, not the kibble and canned ones, that vets have special concerns about. Dogs choke on the bones, they report, and suffer obstructions in their digestive tracts that require surgery. The FDA has taken note of the health risks posed for people who feed their pets raw meat, fearing they could contact salmonella and e-coli. With the practice growing in popularity, the agency has issued guidelines for companies marketing raw meat to pets: "FDA does not believe raw meat foods for animals are consistent with the goal of protecting the public from significant risks, particularly when such products are brought into the home and/or used to feed domestic pets."
Julie Churchill is an assistant clinical professor in companion animal nutrition at the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine. She is not a fan of the raw diets. In general, people handle raw meat or chicken for only a few minutes before tossing it on the grill. But raw feeding exposes us to potential pathogens longer and in different ways. "Even if the animal is not sick, people could get sick from handling the food bowls, handling the food or petting their animals," Churchill says. Just letting your dog lick your face could make you ill, even if your dog is healthy. Such animals are known as "silent shedders," as pathogens escape from their feces, coats or mouths.
Pitcairn believes that risk is overblown. "I've never had an instance to my knowledge over the last 25 years or so where a family has become ill from that," he says. "I don't think that it's very common."
If you must feed your dog fresh beef or chicken, please cook it, recommends Jeffrey T. LeJeune, a veterinarian and assistant professor in the Food Animal Health Research Program at Ohio State University. LeJeune wrote a 2001 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Association, "Public Health Concerns Associated With Feeding Raw Meat to Dogs," which cautioned vets to "not recommend the feeding of raw meat to dogs."
Dr. Rachel Strohmeyer, a vet in Kingston, Wash., who also holds a master's degree in clinical sciences and epidemiology, agrees. After conducting research into an outbreak of salmonella at a greyhound breeding farm in Colorado, and investigating pathogens in commercially available raw pet food diets, she says: "I don't have a problem with people who want to make their animal's own food, but I don't understand why you can't cook it. If you cook it, you're going to kill a lot of the potential hazards. Just cook the food."
But supporters of raw feeding believe it's not just the freshness and quality of the ingredients that helps their animals. They believe the heat robs the protein of some of its nutritional value. Molly Rice, a holistic vet who practices at San Francisco Veterinary Specialists in San Francisco, says that about a third of her clients feed raw meat to their pets. Serving it raw, she says, preserves enzymes, vitamins and amino acids. She does, however, advise clients to freeze the food for 72 hours to cut down on bacteria and parasites, and to clean feeding bowls at every feeding.
The Association of American Feed Control Officials, which produces guidelines that states use to determine what's in pet food and how it's sold in the U.S., doesn't have special rules for raw food.
"There are no regulatory measures on raw," says Matt Koss, a chef trained in French and Mediterranean cooking, who now makes food for dogs and cats at Primal Pet Foods. "The guidelines are only geared to regulate kibble, canned and treats. As raw grows, there will be a need for some type of regulation because we can't have people making it out of their garage and potentially jeopardizing the welfare of animals, which will in turn jeopardize the industry." However, he says, the nascent raw food pet industry recently formed the North American Raw Pet Food Association, which will pool resources, create industry standards and conduct scientific research on the nutritional value of raw food.
But even Koss says that the health benefits of feeding raw meat to pets are purely anecdotal, based on the experiences of individual practitioners and holistic and alternative vets. "Most vets think it's dangerous because of bacteria, and they're really unsure what the benefits are nutritionally," he says.
Churchill, the veterinary nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, says it's much harder to create a balanced diet for your pet than you might think. When clients bring her pet recipes plucked from the Internet or books, "it always has some nutritional problems with it," she says. She asks owners to be as skeptical of the people selling raw pet food or recipes as they are of the veterinary establishment. "Are they funding scientific research? Do they have data to show that their product is scientifically based? What are the credentials of whoever is giving you the advice?"
She takes a dim view of the suspicion that vets have been snookered by the pet food industry. "I have not been bought off by a pet food company," she says. "Most vets get a free mug at their national meeting; they're not getting huge financial kickbacks."
Even the holistic or alternative vets who recommend a raw diet say it's not for every dog or cat. "The raw food diet, even though it's a great diet, it's not really great for everybody," says Sara Skiwski, a vet at the Western Dragon in San Jose. "I get irritated not only with vets, but also with some of my clients who feed raw food and are fanatical about it. I really believe that the worst diet in the whole world is a homemade raw food diet that's not properly nutritionally balanced." Just as you wouldn't eat chicken and broccoli every day for the rest of your life, she says, you shouldn't feed your dog or cat the same diet of raw meat every day.
Finally, some animal experts are flabbergasted by the raw feeding debate. Katie Merwick, who rehabilitates wolves at Second Chance Ranch animal rescue sanctuary in Washington state, believes that many of the cures cited by raw feeders -- skin infections, allergies, ear infections -- can be gained by feeding pets a higher quality of kibble. Oh, and that glossy coat raw feeders brag about? That's from all the fat in the meat, she says, which can cause other health problems like pancreatitis. As someone who has seen malnutrition and disease in wolves firsthand, she cautions pet owners against making a fetish out of what animals eat in the wild. "Our dogs are privileged to have formulated food," she says. After all, "we don't eat like cavemen anymore."
no subject
I'm for frozen-and-thawed raw meats as a strong supplement to a pet's diet...NOT COOKED (which does destroy some nutrients, and if bones are left in they become hard and brittle). There's a reason why cooked table scraps are generally not good for pets.
See how "convenience foods" have made us? Americans are more prone to be overweight now, with big hype to take vitamin supplements, and still we have dietary deficiencies. Now most people in this country don't know what it's like to eat a very tasty whole organically grown raw vegetable. I know I was healthier when I had more access to it (my parents grow organic veggies in a little garden; I don't get much of it anymore), probably indeed partly because of it.
I remember a science project I did for school that showed our compost soil supplement was more beneficial to the growth of bean plants than some of the best commercial fertilizer. It surprised my teacher, but (partly because of my stubbornness and general skepticism of human agendas) it didn't surprise me that "helping nature do its job" for our garden produced better results.
I don't see why a well-rounded raw diet would be harmful, unless a particular pet's dietary needs indicated something more formulated...and of course you'll pay more for better feed, but chances are that it IS better than cheap by-product-and-grain stuff (always check that label though).
no subject
I'm for frozen-and-thawed raw meats as a strong supplement to a pet's diet...NOT COOKED (which does destroy some nutrients, and if bones are left in they become hard and brittle). There's a reason why cooked table scraps are generally not good for pets.
See how "convenience foods" have made us? Americans are more prone to be overweight now, with big hype to take vitamin supplements, and still we have dietary deficiencies. Now most people in this country don't know what it's like to eat a very tasty whole organically grown raw vegetable. I know I was healthier when I had more access to it (my parents grow organic veggies in a little garden; I don't get much of it anymore), probably indeed partly because of it.
I remember a science project I did for school that showed our compost soil supplement was more beneficial to the growth of bean plants than some of the best commercial fertilizer. It surprised my teacher, but (partly because of my stubbornness and general skepticism of human agendas) it didn't surprise me that "helping nature do its job" for our garden produced better results.
I don't see why a well-rounded raw diet would be harmful, unless a particular pet's dietary needs indicated something more formulated...and of course you'll pay more for better feed, but chances are that it IS better than cheap by-product-and-grain stuff (always check that label though).