Below is something I wrote to Dayna Frazier concerning Marshall Farm's recent "code violations"...she urged me to share them with the FML, so here goes... Commenting on the code violations alone: without seeing the exact violations involved, it's a bit hard to comment, but I'll try<g>. Given the bad reputation and publicity surrounding some of the "puppy mills" lately, and the fact that the USDA inspectors are some of the same folk that inspect the mills, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the violations are of the "You're gonna bust us for -=THAT=-!?" type. In other words, out of however many thousand cages, mebbe one or two were slightly tweaked in a non-obvious way? All kinds of companies get code violations all the time. Some are serious, some are petty. Inspectors can get ego trips too...or an inspector might have a need to generate some "tickets" so they don't look too lax to their boss...it's a lot like how traffic cops operate. Mind you, I'm not saying for certain that this is what's going on with Marshall Farms; I only urge people to take tales of "repeated code violations" with a grain of salt. If anyone has details that show the violations to be more serious, I'd love to see them. But where government inspection of any type goes, the scenario I layed out above is more common. [Posted in FML issue 1699]