This 1996 televised exchange between Oprah Winfrey and Harold Lyman, a former cattle feedlot operator, led to a series of defamation suits against Winfrey, her production company, and Lyman by cattle owners in Texas and across the US. Texas is one of more than a dozen states in the US to have passed food disparagement laws. The show dealt with Mad Cow Disease.

Lyman: Right now we’re following exactly the same path that they followed in England: ten years of dealing with it as public relations rather than doing something substantial about it. A hundred thousand cows per year in the United States are fine one night, then dead the following morning. The majority of those cows are … ground up and fed back to other cows. If only one of them has Mad Cow Disease, it has the potential to affect thousands.

Winfrey: But cows are herbivores. They shouldn’t be eating other cows.

Lyman: That’s exactly right…We should have them eating grass, not other cows. We’ve not only turned them into carnivores, we’ve turned them into cannibals.

Winfrey: (to the camera): Now doesn’t that concern you a little bit, right here, hearing that? It has me stopped cold from eating another burger. I’m stopped.

Although the defamation suits have had a chilling effect on criticism of the cattle industry, the practice of feeding cattle to cattle is now banned in the US.