For 50 years, a facility in Nebraska has focused on meat-industry improvements, from the eater's perspective: more meat, less fat, safer food. But at the same time, reports the New York Times in a lengthy investigation, the center has provided a site for minimally overseen and sometimes brutal experimentation on animals—even though, as the Times notes, it's not some "rogue operation": It's the government-funded US Meat Animal Research Center. "Most Americans and even livestock producers would be hard pressed to support some of the things that the center has done," says James Keen, a veterinarian who worked there for 24 years. Reporter Michael Moss offers some disturbing examples:
- Pigs normally have eight piglets, but at the center they have up to 14, and hundreds of the weak, crowded animals are killed when their mothers roll over. Some 6,500 animals have starved at the site since 1985.