The Galloping Beaver
Go Canada! Moreover, go Manitoba!
The geniuses who thought feeding animal products to herbivores was a grand idea should be in line for some sort of Darwin award.
[Note to Stephen: this is the sort of thing that puts Canada on The World Stage(tm)]
Actually, the geniuses weren't in a position to know this would be a problem. As ishy as it may sound, feeding rendered animal protein to herbivores isn't inherently dangerous so far as I know.
The reason BSE took off was a positive feedback loop depending on an unknown disease agent not killed, as most other diseases are, by rendering. It took them years to figure out what the problem was.
The loop goes like this: Cow #1 with BSE becomes ill and cannot stand up. Cannot enter the human food chain, so the knacker comes and takes the cow for rendering.
Cow #1's rendered protein, carrying BSE prions, is mixed into a bag of feed and eventually fed to 50 cows, let us say. Ten fall ill. (All proportions approximate).
Cows 2 through 11 fall ill and are turned into cattle feed. As a result, 100 animals fall ill and are rendered in their turn. And so on.
The selective process of moving infected cows directly into more cows' food supply is about the fastest way they could have spread the disease without injections. But they could not have known this would happen. Until BSE came along, prions and their associated diseases were unknown. Yes, the idea of feeding cows to cows was ishy, but they do lots of ishy things to cows that don't spread obscure diseases. You don't want to know what they feed weanling calves.
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