Mad cow misstatements

Your March 15 editorial on mad cow (an inflammatory term for bovine spongiform encephalopathy) indicates a complete lack of familiarity with bovines. Cows are not people. They eat live rodents, their own afterbirth and will consume an entire miscarried fetus. Calling feeding practices “gruesome” is ignorant. Feeding practices should be modified because they don’t work, or if they cause problems, not because some city reporter who doesn’t know a cow from a combine has an opinion on the acceptability of the practice.

Also, there is no known “human variant” of the disease; the human encephalopathy has not been proved to carry over from the bovine form. Articles with this sort of misinformation are damaging to the public understanding of the problem.

STAN STEPHENS

Angus Cattle, Seven Springs Farm

Lebanon, Mo.