Eideard

Scottish officials are attempting to persuade American politicians to reverse a 40-year ban on the haggis.

Richard Lochhead, the Scottish Government’s Rural Affairs Secretary, has invited a delegation of American politicians to Scotland in the hope of persuading them to overturn the ban.

The iconic Scottish dish is been barred in the US for more than 20 years because its food safety department prohibits the use of sheep lungs in food products.

The US could provide a highly lucrative market for Scottish haggis producers, particularly in the run up to Burns Night, the traditional celebration of the life and poetry of Robert Burns…

Mr Lochhead said: “We want to capitalise on the diaspora of Scots in the US and many of them would enjoy the opportunity to indulge in authentic Scottish haggis to accompany their neeps and tatties on Burns Night.

“Scotland’s produce is amongst the best in the world and I’ve asked US Department of Agriculture officials to come here to see for themselves the high standards we have in animal health and processing.

This didn’t affect me personally – back when I lived in the Boston area. For all the whining of the Department of Agriculture and the other bureaucrats who march in lockstep against the import of traditional foodstuffs was meaningless when local butchers and meat markets produced their own haggis. I haven’t Googled it; but, I imagine I still could order one online for Burns Night.

This crap goes on and on – whether halting jambon from Spain or prosciutto from Italy, herbs and spices from the Caribbean and Africa, there always is a producer of plastic American food who claims the need for protection – or just good old Xenophobia getting in the way of choices.

Transmission of prion brain diseases such as bovine spongiform enecephalopathy (BSE) – also known as mad cow disease – and human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is generally attributed to the consumption of the brain or organ meat of infected animals but new research demonstrates lambs exposed to milk from prion-infected sheep with inflamed mammary glands can develop prion disease as well. The research…has major implications for human and livestock health.

“Prions cause devastating, ultimately fatal infections in humans,” says corresponding author Christina Sigurdson… “This study is the first demonstration of prions from an inflamed organ being secreted, and causing clinical symptoms in a natural host for prion disease…”

In the new research [.pdf], the team infected sheep with a common retrovirus that causes mastitis, and misfolded prions. They bred the sheep, in order to stimulate the females to produce milk, which they then collected and fed to lambs that had never been exposed to prions. The lambs developed prion disease after only two years, a speed which surprised the researchers, and “suggested that there was a high level of prion infectivity in milk,” says Sigurdson.

The research raises several disturbing possibilities.

A common virus in a sheep with prion disease can lead to prion contamination of the milk pool and may lead to prion infection of other animals.

The same virus in a prion-infected sheep could efficiently propagate prion infection within a flock, through transmission of prions to the lambs, via milk. This might be particularly likely on factory farms, where mastitis may be common, and could occur in goats as well as sheep.

Humans with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) might accumulate prions in inflamed organs, and could also secrete prions.

“This work cannot be directly extrapolated to cattle,” says Sigurdson. She says that BSE prions do not accumulate to detectible levels in lymphoid organs, and thus would not be expected to accumulate with inflammation.

“Nonetheless,” she says, “it would be worth testing milk from cattle with mastitis for prions as there may be other cellular sources for prions entry into milk.”

Since I don’t drink milk, it never occurred to me that it may be a vector for a disease like this. But, of course. It’s a perfectly natural source of infection. It’s just that I live in the land of beef cattle. In fact, with access to beef that is tested and certified BSE-free.

Two Argentinean convicts who escaped from jail reportedly evaded capture by disguising themselves as sheep.

Maximiliano Pereyra and Ariel Diaz dressed in full sheepskin fleeces with realistic looking heads as they tried to evade capture.

Pereyra, 25, and Diaz, 28, who were jailed for robbery, escaped from a maximum security jail in Argentina, reports The Sun.

They stole the sheep hides from a local ranch and used their disguises to fool officials for more than a week despite more than 300 members of the local constabulary searching for them.

The local police have been left embarrassed by the episode after locals reported seeing the pair running through local fields at night.

“They were wearing grey clothes but had full sheepskins, including the sheeps’ heads, over their heads and backs,” said a farmworker at La Almeda.

Police sources said it appeared that identifying the pair among thousands of other sheep was “almost impossible”.

Har!

Australian scientists have said they are hoping to breed sheep that burp less as part of efforts to tackle climate change.

The scientists have been trying to identify a genetic link that causes some sheep to belch less than others. Burping is a far greater cause of emissions in sheep than flatulence, they say.

About 16% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions come from agriculture, says the department of climate change.

Australia’s Sheep Cooperative Research Council says 66% of agricultural emissions are released as methane from the gut of livestock.

“Ninety per cent of the methane that sheep and cattle and goats produce comes from the rumen, and that’s burped out,” John Goopy from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment told ABC.

“Not much goes behind – that’s horses.” [And cows]

The scientists’ goal in the long term is to breed sheep that produce less methane, which produces many times more global warming than carbon dioxide.

Well, we grow burpless peppers in New Mexico. Seems to me we could come up with a burpless sheep.

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER…

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

RTFA. Witty, bright, insightful on many levels – even if Charlie Brooker doesn’t answer all of his own questions.

Despite a greater abundance of food, milder winters and longer summers means that the wild Soay sheep of the St Kilda archipelago are shrinking by 3.5 ounces (100g) a year.

Over nearly a quarter of a century the sheep, one of the oldest breeds in the world and already half the size of a normal domestic sheep, have dropped in weight and height by five per cent.

Researchers believe that the hotter weather means that the weaker, smaller lambs that are usually wiped out by harsh winters are surviving – bringing down the average of the 2,000-strong wild flock.

The milder weather is also allowing younger, smaller mothers to have children early, meaning they give birth to smaller offspring.

Professor Coulson suggests that this is because shorter, milder winters, caused by global climate change, mean that lambs do not need to put on as much as weight in the first months of life to survive to their first birthday as they did when winters were colder.

Although Soay sheep, which can live up to 16 years-old and weigh 100lbs (45kgs), get their name from the small outcrop of rock of the same name, they now inhabit other islands in the St Kilda archipelago.

The scientists led by Professor Tim Coulson, from Imperial College London, chose to study the population on the 1,500 acre island of Hirta which has been uninhabited since 1930.

Over 24 years they have studied the relative size of the flock, capturing, marking and measuring them every summer. Their research, published in the journal Science, shows that over the period the average size of the flock has dropped from 66lbs (30kgs) to 61lbs (28kgs).

Du Hebing, of Xi’an, told Huashang Daily that he shot this picture by chance.

“After visiting Qinling Wild Animal Park, on the way home I saw a group of sheep walking along the road with a man holding a picture following behind them,” he said.

Du said he burst out laughing when he realised it was a picture of a wolf.

“The man was using the wolf picture to scare the sheep and drive them ahead – it was a really funny scene,” he said.

“Maybe he was just trying to save some money by not buying a sheepdog – but he is obviously a talented shepherd.”

Works for me. Even if it’s posed for the camera.

Incidentally, this is the least likely to be bogus of the several versions floating around the web. Though a few reference the name Du Hebing as the photographer – or the farmer driving the sheep – or a zoo worker, only this version notes a newspaper source in China. Which I have not been able to track down in English.