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Tula’s little cutie, who I’m just going to refer to as “Heart Puppy” from now on, is doing gloriously well. She’s gained over two ounces, going from 9.3 to 11.6 in just three days.

Tula is the epitome of a good mommy, with a clean, sensible and calm attitude that radiates competency. Her basic attitude when I’m in the room is “Hi, nice to see you. Please don’t touch my puppy or move anything around, and we’ll get along just fine”.

Frenchie moms, even the best of the them, can sometimes be a little bit frantic and overly worried (if they’re not being slack and lackadaisical), so this is a nice change.

There’s a new set of puppy photos over on Flickr, and a new video short at the end of this entry. By the way, I’m taking advantage of the Collections feature on Flickr, which I’ve previously under utilized, and will be cataloging all of Heart’s photo sets into one collection, which you’ll find here.

God, don’t you just love Flickr? It’s pretty much supplanted Gallery and Coppermine for me, no matter that I was once their biggest champion. Flickr just blows them out of the water — not that I don’t worry it might up and disappear someday…

I just finished watching the CBC documentary “Apocalypse Cow“, and was left with a feeling of dread and dismay at how poorly the Canadian government handled the entire situation. Instead of listening to their own scientists when they preached universal testing of all slaughtered cows, they held “We Love Canadian Beef” barbecues. Instead of tightening feeding regulations, they fired the scientists who recommended it. A prevailing attitude of “If we ignore it, it will go away” was rampant then, and continues to be now.

In Japan, every single slaughtered cow is tested for BSE before being processed — a practice that has restored that country’s faith in beef, and has practically gauranteed that BSE infected beef won’t make it into the food chain.

In the US, Kansas Meat Packer Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wanted to give their customers the same kind of assurance, by testing each and every cow they process for BSE.

However, as Kim reports over on Pet Connection, the US government has gone to court to prevent Creekstone from testing their beef. Yes, you read that right — the US government took a meat packer to court, to force them NOT to test their beef for BSE.

Why? Well, because if Creekstone does it, other Meat Packers might look shoddy by comparison for not testing every single cow.The fact that they should look shoddy isn’t considered valid, and yet again another government goes to bat for big business, and against food safety.

Nice work, Department of Agriculture.