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Cow fattening out of control

Traders cut long process short with help of harmful drugs

Pinaki Roy with Ahmed Kabir Topu
Abdul Mannan, a poor farmer from Kazuria village in Pabna, bought a bull forTk 26,000 four months ago.
He then planned to fatten it up as much as possible, and make some quick bucks by selling it before the Eid-ul-Azha.
Like many of his neighbours, he started feeding the bull "small white drugs", locally known as "vitamins". Soon, the bull gained weight substantially and buyers offered almost double the price he bought it with.
But Mannan wanted more.
“It looked healthy and a trader offered Tk 50,000 for it. But my husband decided to
wait for a few more days, and he gave it injections [steroid] to make it look fatter still," Mannan's wife Mazeda Khatun told The Daily Star correspondents, who visited her house last week.
But the poor bull couldn't survive the impacts of drug overdose and died a few days later.
Though Mannan's taking the shortcut to make excessive profits ended in a fiasco, hundreds of others are making a bundle this way ahead of the Eid-ul-Azha, when Muslimssacrifice cattle.
Visiting different villages in Bera, Santhia and Ataikula upazilas of Pabna, and Shahjadpur and Baghabari areas in Sirajganj, these correspondents found that almost every household was using steroids, antibiotics and other chemicals for months in blatant violation of law. Everyone -from cattle farm owners to landless farmers - wanted to take full advantage of this.
These cattle-fattening drugs are also widely used in Chuadanga, Jhenidah, Nilphamari, Barisal, Faridpur, Manikganj and some other districts.
Consumption of meat of these animals poses serious health risks for humans, according to experts.
Pabna and Sirajganj are known for dairy farming and cattle-fattening practices for decades, thanks to vast grazing fields in the Chalan Beel and char areas. There are 13,480 dairy farms in Sirajganj alone.
Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute (BLRI) officials prescribe a mixture of straw, molasses, urea fertiliser and lentils as a safe fattening diet for cattle.
"This year, a total of99,876 cows are
being fattened in Sirajganj. The number was around 1.25 lakh last year," said Mazharul Islam Akand, district livestock officer.
Save for a "negligible number", all these animals are being fattened in natural ways, he claimed.
But the reality is completely different. Cattle-fattening drugs and chemicals are widely available in drugstores there at cheap prices.
Steroids of Dexamethasone group such as Decason, Dexamet, Paradexa, Oradexason and Predexanol; intravenous drugs of Butaphosphan group like Catophos and Catasol; digestion and appetite enhancers such as Digimax and Potash; and other vitamin additives are sold at these shops.
These drugs, mostly smuggled from India, are sold openly in the absence of monitoring by government agencies.
Though law prohibits advertisement of medicines, numerous posters of the so-called cattle-fattening chemicals were found at the shops.
Md Abdullah, owner of a small medicine shop at Baghabari, said he sells 10 to 12 packets of steroid tablets everyday.
Another drugstore owner from Kashinathpur said that this season he
already sold around 200 kilograms of Indian vitamin additive “Super Growth" that fattens cattle very fast.
Visiting some shops, these correspondents found that the shop owners not only sold the drugs, but also suggested doses of those.
At a number of cattle farms, many empty bottles and wrappings of fattening chemicals were found lying around.
Shahidur Rahman, manager of a farm at TR-Bandh village in Shahjadpur, admitted that they were using the drugs, but claimed none of those were harmful.
"We sold three bulls fattened with these drugs for Tk 2.5 lakh last week. We do not use any toxic chemical," he claimed.
Cattle trader Khan Asaduzzaman Bipu came to Shahjadpur from Barisal to buy some healthy cattle. But he was struggling to find those fattened naturally.
Asked how he could differentiate between the two, Bipu said cattle fattened with chemicals would look healthy but would be very slow in movement. "For example, if you poke a cow fattened through steroids, its response will not be as quick as the one
fattened naturally."
A study published in Bangladesh Animal Journal in 2012 shows 63.7 percent farmers in the country use cattle-fattening tablets.
The Animal Feed Act 2010 prohibits the use of antibiotics, growth hormones, steroids or other harmful chemicals in animal feed. For violating this law, a person might face up to one year's imprisonment or up to Tk 50,000 in fine or both.
When these correspondents conveyed the findings to the district livestock officer, he ruled out the fact that cattle-fattening chemicals were widely used.
"People have become aware of the harmful effects of these drugs. They don't take the risk of using them," he claimed.
But the fact is that farmers often opt for the relatively fast but extremely hazardous way to fatten cattle, as it takes around six months to fatten those naturally. Steroids cause accumulation of fluid in cattle body, making them look fatter, say experts.
"We ask farmers not to use harmful drugs. But some farmers want to fatten their animals faster," said Dr Humayun Kabir, scientific officer at
the BLRI in Shahjadpur.
Experts say steroid variants like Decason, Oradexon, Prednisolon, Betnenal, Cortan, Steron and Adam-33 are usually used as life-saving drugs for critical patients. But when fed to cattle, these drugs damage their heart, kidney and liver, and eventually cause death.
As cattle farmers often use higher doses of antibiotics and steroids, meat of these animals contain remnants of the chemicals.
"If someone consumes the meat of cattle fattened with such drugs, it will surely have negative impact on his health. It may even cause cancer and kidney failure," said Abdus Samad, professor at Bangladesh Agricultural University.
No specific research on this has been conducted in Bangladesh, but the adverse effects of these chemicals on humans are well-known. The impacts would not be visible in an adult as early as in a child or an elderly person for consuming meat of cattle fattened with drugs, he added.
In the wake of public health concern, member states of the European Union banned imports of steroid-treated meat in 2010. RELATED STORY ON PAGE 13