Other "Pet Food" Companies: Contracting With Killers

Isto Technologies, Inc.

Isto hired the contract laboratory in question to conduct cartilage experiments on sheep.

On Thursday, May 30, 2002, a laboratory employee reported that several Isto sheep were pregnant but were subjected to invasive and debilitating surgery anyway. Severing cartilage and wrapping a sheep’s hind leg to his or her body so that the animal is forced to walk on three legs is cruel and inhumane under any circumstances, but doing this to animals who are about to give birth is unconscionable.

Laboratory employee #1: Anyways, surprise, surprise, she can’t get up. The vulva, to me, looks like she’s getting ready to lamb any moment, but because she’s got a bandage tied around her belly, I’m not sure she is going to be able to pop it out. I don’t know what is going to happen to her.

Laboratory employee #2: She might get tired of living.

Laboratory employee #1: Yeah, I think that will do it this time.

Laboratory employee #2: That’d be a bad deal. Have to do a C-section. Can you do that on her?

Laboratory employee #1: I don’t know. You know, her vulva is real swollen. She looks to me like, you know, it’s time now, you know? But [name of laboratory employee] and I were up there just trying to help her stand because she’s been laying on one side so long—the blood flow, it just died off on the leg. She couldn’t even get it straightened out. She was just pawing and everything like that. So anyway, I got her lifted over onto her other side. Now she’s on her bad leg—her operated leg—but at least now she’s got blood flow to her good one that she wants to get up, she can make it work.

Laboratory employee #3: Why’d they decide to operate on her?

Laboratory employee #1: It was not a good decision.

[Break in conversation]

Laboratory employee #3: Do you want some help?

Laboratory employee #1: No, I’m just frustrated. I don’t know what to do for them.

Laboratory employee #1: Oh God, incision’s bleeding. Yeah, she’s about gone [unintelligible]. Keep her head twisted to the side. Is she all right, [name of non-Isto study monitor #2]?

Laboratory employee #2: She’s bleeding a lot on the bottom, there, if you lift up her leg.

Laboratory employee #1: Let’s get her turned over so she’s lying sternal.

Laboratory employee #3 [trying to move the sheep into a sternal position]: Little shit.

Laboratory employee #1: All right, just let her go where she wants.

Laboratory employee #1: I had sheep up over the weekend I didn’t think were going to make it through the weekend, but they made it through. They’re still not 100 percent. That one is just dripping with mucoid [unintelligible] discharge out of the incision ... she’s got edema from her hock to her knee.

Laboratory employee #2: Do they give some kind of, like, antibiotic or something, or anything … after the surgery?

Laboratory employee #1: After the surgery. She is on treatment now. Her treatment was delayed and that’s what got her into such bad shape … She should have been on antibiotics on Wednesday as well; you could tell on Wednesday she was in trouble, but she didn’t get started [on treatment] until Friday … I think she was in septicemia by the end of the weekend. Then, another one was just lying in the corner, and she had watery diarrhea just coming out like somebody turned on a trickle on a faucet … Both of these sheep, 110 and 8, which I have on my [unintelligible] now, had problems on the table during surgery. Surgery was extended longer than it should have been.

Laboratory employee #3: Were these both Jan’s?

Laboratory employee #1: They were Noshi’s. Jan is the better of the two surgeons. Noshi is the one that’s got problems. He did microsurgery on the graft—an hour. We go to take pictures, there’s no graft. He thought he laid the graft in there and hadn’t done it. So he’d done microsurgery on nothing ... he had to cut all the sutures out and place them back in and redo it, so that animal was under anesthesia for an extra hour ... and you know, you wouldn’t think, you know, if an animal’s under an hour, you wouldn’t think another hour would mess them up. Oh man, it messes them up ... those animals need to come out [unintelligible] as soon as possible, especially, I guess, ruminants ... the other one just had thin cartilage herself, so when he tried to sew that graft on, he made a lot of holes in the graft itself, and then, when it was all said and done, there was too many holes so he had to cut it all out … but that one time when he didn’t sew anything on, I was trying really hard to keep a straight face … I’m supposed to be reporting all this stuff, you know, and it was kind of a hush-hush thing, and Jan and Noshi were talking between themselves and everything, and I’m like—I knew something happened … I was telling somebody this morning, it was like the surgeons were just slapping that shit together this time. I’ve got a lot more problems this time than I have, but our study last time was unsuccessful.

Laboratory employee #1: And everybody knew it was a lot [of surgeries], but the surgeons just kind of—it all just rolls off their back, they don’t give a shit … the surgeons—Davis, Penny, and even Jeremy and Ulysses—they come from Isto, but they’re kind of like equivalent to our vet techs, you know? And they just have an attitude because of being overworked, you know? So you got all these attitudes coming in, trying to get the same thing done, and everybody has a different agenda. And they all look at me like I can just change it all, and I’m like, well … the problem is, these animals have been fasting, and they’re ruminants, right … well, I fasted them the day before surgery, but effectively, they’ve been fasting for two days because we feed them in the morning, and they eat and everything. Well then, when they decided not to do surgery on the day they were scheduled, that meant they went three days without food and water, basically, which will just destroy a ruminant. So, I’m just like, ya’ll need to tell me as soon as possible if we are or not going to do these surgeries and when we are going to do them. I need to keep these animals fed. “Oh, we’ll decide at the end of the day.” We can’t decide at the end of the day. If we’re going to do them in the morning, they have to be fasted a minimum of 24 hours … none of it was computing with them, you know? So, some of these animals really went three days without food or water, which, like I said, for a ruminant, can be very bad, and we won’t know the effects of that for another day or two.

Laboratory employee #1: Well, we didn’t have any scrubs. Not enough scrubs to go around because whoever has been doing laundry in 32 is now at the farm or something. Nobody has been doing laundry … then the anesthesia machine/ventilator didn’t work at all. It was like we had an animal, I think, on the table ready for surgery maybe at 9:45 or something [audio cuts out].

Laboratory employee #2: Oh, my gosh.

Laboratory employee #3: Oh, my God.

Laboratory employee #1: [Audio cuts out] running around playing games with the ventilator … basically, [name of laboratory employee] didn’t have scrubs for yesterday. [Name of laboratory president] came over to work on the anesthesia machine. I told [name of laboratory president]—I says, “you need to scrub in” [audio cuts out] … obviously, not scrubbed in [audio cuts out] … and Jan, he’s very angry as well. You know Jan—he always smiles; he didn’t say anything to me, but evidently, he was outside [unintelligible] upset and pissed off, he was.

Joseph Feder
Chair, President, and CEO
Isto Technologies, Inc.
1155 Olivette Executive Pkwy., #200
St. Louis, MO 63132
314-995-6049
314-995-6025 (fax)
info@istotech.com

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