Some of America’s meat producers aren’t keen on having these emerging diseases publicized. It’s bad for business. Taking aim at Winfrey, with the huge public following she commands, is a key component of their strategy to shut down media attention.

The Texas cattlemen’s lawsuit is a response to an “Oprah” broadcast in April 1996 that sent beef prices into free-fall for nearly two weeks. The show featured Howard Lyman, a former fourth-generation Montana cattle rancher, who once raised thousands of cattle a year. Today he spends nearly all his time crisscrossing the U.S. touting the benefits of vegetarianism. Also, in the interests of full disclosure, he wrote the foreward to my book, “Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating.”

On the show, Lyman stated that mad cow disease, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 10 people in Britain and led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cows there, could also appear in the U.S. Despite the insistence of the American cattle industry that there was no sign of mad cow disease in U.S. herds, Lyman suggested that some early signs were visible, that the disease “has the potential to affect thousands” of people, and could be as infectious as the AIDS virus.

While there is still some dispute, it is widely believed that mad cow disease infects cattle via “protein concentrates,” which are derived from the discarded brains, spinal cords, blood and organs of slaughtered cattle. In Britain, the rendering process used to turn dead organs into protein concentrates failed to destroy the harmful “prions” that scientists think cause mad cow disease. American ranchers, like their British counterparts, were feeding millions of pounds of rendered cow flesh back to their cattle every year (the practice has since been banned in the U.S.), although they insist that the safety procedures were much stronger.

Few Americans knew anything about rendering until Lyman appeared on “Oprah.” While Oprah herself challenged Lyman at one point about whether some of his statements were “extreme,” she said Lyman’s presentation “has stopped me cold from eating another hamburger!” The audience applauded wildly.

Many ranchers also went wild, for a different reason. Contrary to their gritty, freedom-loving image, they generally have a cushy life, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. All across the American West, ranchers are allowed to graze their cattle on federal land at bargain-basement prices. They pay just $1.35 to graze a steer on federal land for an entire month; that’s less than it costs to feed a house cat. The fees don’t even begin to cover the costs of fences, water tanks and dozens of other amenities the government builds for ranchers on federal lands. “Ranch owners are the original welfare kings,” says rangeland historian Lynn Jacobs. “Every step of the way, the government has given them a free ride.”

Some ranchers don’t take kindly to those who would threaten their gravy train. Jacobs, who has repeatedly
criticized government handouts to ranchers, has endured a number of threatening acts from anonymous sources. On two occasions, the lug nuts on his van’s tires were loosened, causing him to lose control at high speeds while his children were in the vehicle. After his dog Mishka went missing, Jacobs found the animal’s skinned body by the side of the road near his house. Across the Western United States, federal employees have received
warnings to stay off government land where ranchers graze illegally.
“There are some places we won’t go into anymore,” says one Nevada Bureau of Land Management official.

With Oprah Winfrey, the chosen cudgel is the so-called food disparagement” law, currently on the books in various forms in Texas and 12 other states. The laws grew out of the disputed Alar chemical scare around apples in the late 1980s. The laws’ supporters claim that they are needed to protect against baseless, wrong or unjustified claims about food dangers that threaten the livelihood of ranchers and farmers.

Initially, Texas cattlemen, outraged at Winfrey, tried to get the state to press charges (and pay all the legal costs). But the attempt failed when state Attorney General Dan Morales refused to file suit, telling the cattlemen Texas would not foot the bill for what looked like a ridiculously weak case, and advising the cattlemen to drop it. Under the state’s food
disparagement law, prosecutors must prove that the defendant knowingly presented untruths. While Lyman’s fears may not ultimately come to pass, nothing he said could be shown to be untrue. Lyman never claimed that mad
cow disease would definitely kill Americans; rather he
asserted that there were risks from cattle-to-cattle
feeding, which is true. The basis for suing Winfrey was even shakier, since all she did was interview Lyman, reveal her disgust with rendering practices and, like millions of other Americans, decide to swear off hamburgers.

But Paul Engler, a millionaire feedlot owner, insisted on pursuing the case and filed a $12 million suit in rural Amarillo. Why there, and not a major Texas city
like Dallas, Austin or Houston? Perhaps because Amarillo is in the heart of cattle country, making it somewhat easier to find a jury that sees eye-to-eye with the ranchers.

So far, the ranchers’ attorneys have been quite effective in
keeping the details of the trial from becoming public. At the behest of rancher attorneys, U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson has issued a gag order on both parties. Last Friday, they filed a motion alleging that Winfrey had
breached the order. The supposed infraction: Her office had
sent a local Amarillo newspaper two publicity photographs in response to the paper’s request.

Despite the absurdity of their case, the ranchers’ chances with a local jury should not be underestimated. A victory in Amarillo would give farmers and ranchers all over the country a green light to file similar suits against pesky journalists and whistle-blowers raising questions about the safety of the nation’s food supply.

Besides, even if the Texas ranchers fail this time, so long as such “food disparagement” laws exist, there’s always a next time.

I’m not equating chickens with people. Chickens can’t learn calculus, write plays or compose music. But they tremble with fear as they go to their death. And, like people, they show great motivation in avoiding pain. Now, 3 million pounds of them lies rotting in Hong Kong landfills, the victims of a horrific and senseless slaughter.

In terms of numbers, though, Hong Kong’s emergency action doesn’t compare to what the U.S. egg industry does on a daily basis: It kills more than half a million male chicks almost as soon as they poke their way through their shell.

A newly hatched chick, if you’ve ever held one, is as affectionate as a kitten. They hatch with their eyes open and can hop around almost immediately. Watch a chick hatch from his shell and sit with him and he’ll bond with you almost immediately, pecking food from your hand and seeking out your warmth and the rhythm of your heartbeat.

But if it’s a male chick at an egg farm, he will die before he takes a bite of seed or a drink of water. The reason is that in the U.S., there are two breeds of chickens — “layers,” to produce eggs, and “broilers,” to produce meat. U.S. growers produce 76 billion eggs each year. To produce that many, farmers require about 200 million new female layer chickens each year.

An unwelcome thing happens when egg producers breed 200 million female layer chicks: They also get 200 million male layer chicks, which, to the egg industry, are worthless. They can’t lay eggs and they won’t grow enough flesh to be worth raising as broilers. So they’re killed. The egg industry employs “sexers” — people who do nothing all day but examine the birds’ feather patterns to determine their sex. The males are tossed into discard containers. The more fortunate ones are gassed. Many are dropped alive into grinders, to be ground into fertilizer.

Such waste and needless suffering doesn’t end at 1.3 million Hong Kong birds or 200 million American chicks. It extends to 9 billion animals killed each year in awful ways before being consumed as hamburger, fried chicken or pork chops by the American public. Slaughter lines at chicken factories hum at thousands of birds an hour, the victims hanging upside down with their throats cut. At pig and cattle facilities, the lines move at hundreds of animals an hour, with blood everywhere. Stand outside a goat slaughterhouse; the screams you hear can be mistaken for those of children.

From a public health standpoint, we would be much better off without it. There is no nutrient in meat, dairy products or eggs that cannot be obtained from vegetarian sources. Vegan foods have no cholesterol and tend to be very low in both total and saturated fat. As a result, heart disease, the No. 1 killer of Americans, is extremely rare among vegans. Dr. Marion Nestle of the American Cancer Society estimates that vegetarians and vegans suffer cancer fatalities at a rate of one-third to one-half less than meat eaters.

Since the meat we’re eating does our health no good, we should consider animals that are killed for meat to have died as pointlessly and cruelly as the 1.3 million birds that were thrown away in Hong Kong. If the slaughter that happens each day in the U.S. received just a fraction of the attention that Hong Kong’s chickens received, we would be on our way to a more vegetarian nation. And a lot of needless suffering, for both humans and animals, would be prevented.