Man Who Killed the Mad Cow Has Questions of His Own:
"On Dec. 9, at Vern's Moses Lake Meats in Moses Lake, Wash., Mr. Louthan killed the only mad cow found in the United States.

Two weeks later, he says, he was dismissed after four years as Vern's slaughterer when he talked to the television crews outside and told them he was sure the cow, ground into hamburger, had already been eaten. The plant's owners did not return calls seeking comment.

'I got a big mouth,' he said in a telephone interview."

Contrary to reports from the federal Department of Agriculture, he asserts that the cow he killed was not too sick to walk. And it was caught not by routine surveillance, he says, but by "a fluke": he killed it outdoors because he feared it would trample other cows lying prostrate in its trailer, and the plant's testing program called for sampling cows killed outside only.

"Mad cows aren't downers," he said. "They're up and they're crazy." The Agriculture Department disputes his account. Dr. Kenneth Petersen, a food safety official, faxed copies of the Dec. 9 inspector's report saying the cow was "sternal," or down on its chest.

Mr. Louthan said he believed the government changed the report on Dec. 23, during the panic at Vern's when a positive test was found. The "smoking gun," he said, is that it is the only one on the page marked "unable to get temp" while other cows' temperatures were recorded. It is easy, he said, to get a rectal temperature from a downed cow but hard from a jumpy one.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/health/03COW.html