MAD COW DISEASE

EXHIBIT A - NOT FIT FOR A DOG

January 31, 2001- NOT FIT FOR A DOG

Chuck Schroeder, CEO of the National Cattlemen's

Beef Association issued this press release last last night:

"Reports today from the FDA indicate there were very

small amounts of meat-and-bone meal detected in cattle

feed supplements produced by a Purina feed mill in Texas

last week. Purina Mills announced that it is voluntarily

purchasing all 1,222 of the animals held in Texas and the

animals will not enter the food chain.

Purina Mills issued their own press release, They

revealed that over one million pounds of possibly infected

meat will be processed and sold for "non-human" uses.

In other words, cats and dogs of America may be

eating something that will one day cause a wasting

type of encephalitis in their brains.

The entire Texas Mad Cow Disease scare was an

orchestrated event. Mad Cow Disease is difficult to diagnose.

Scientists and regulators know that there is a long

incubation period. No way animals will test positive for mad

cow disease one week after eating tainted meat.

Ralston Purina will not sell the fattened cattle for human consumption. What happened to last week's cattle.

Last months? Is this food on your supermarket's shelf?

One wonders how long Ralston Purina has been serving

up rendered British beef to American cattle. What did you

eat at last year's July 4th barbecue? - Robert Cohen

March 26, 2001 | WASHINGTON Will mad cows kill the Big Mac? Daryl Lindsey (Salon News)

With strict safety measures and new menu options, McDonald's is acting fast to stem losses from disease in Europe, and bracing for a beef scare in the

U.S.

-- Ronald McDonald sat in his Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters in a mental fog. He could barely move, save for a few spastic convulsions. His brain was wasted. The outsize clown and burger peddler was suffering from what flummoxed health experts like to call "Alzheimer's on fast forward." In fact, he was North America's first diagnosed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. ... Not a single case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of BSE (also called mad cow disease) has been linked to the Big Mac. But the recent beef scares have apparently been enough to send Germans and French fleeing to their nearest kebab stands. European sales at McDonald's in January and February fell by 10 percent, no small amount considering the company derives as much as 36 percent of its overall operating income from the continent. The news was greeted with tears on Wall Street, and the stock quickly fell to its lowest in three years -- at $27.55 a share, the price was almost half of its all-time peak of $50 in 1999.