Pennsylvania

Energy. Environment. Economy.

Dead Calves and Hairless Puppies

January 19, 2012 | 10:00 AM
By Susan Phillips

Kim Payn­ter / WHYY

A drill site looms above a cow pas­ture in north cen­tral Pennsylvania.

Two sci­en­tists have tracked the impacts of shale gas drilling on ani­mals and recently pub­lished  an arti­cle in New Solu­tions: A Jour­nal of Envi­ron­men­tal and Occu­pa­tional Health Pol­icy. The piece details farm­ers’ expe­ri­ences when their live­stock and pets came in con­tact with drilling waste water. In “Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Ani­mal Health,” Michelle Bam­berger and Robert Oswald con­clude the most com­mon health impacts involve repro­duc­tion, includ­ing still­born calves and hair­less puppies.

Bam­berger and Oswald write that ani­mals pro­vide the best pre­dic­tions on what may also occur when humans come in con­tact with the tox­ins used in gas drilling.

 “Because ani­mals often are exposed con­tin­u­ally to air, soil, and ground­wa­ter and have more fre­quent repro­duc­tive cycles, ani­mals can be used as sen­tinels to mon­i­tor impacts to human health.”
In other words, cows graz­ing on the bucolic land­scape of Brad­ford County may be Queen Shale’s ver­sion of the canary in a coal mine. A cruel real­ity in a world where sci­ence is play­ing catch up to the shale gas boom.  But what’s more inter­est­ing about this study is not so much what the two sci­en­tists doc­u­mented, as what they didn’t document.

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“This study is not an epi­demi­o­logic analy­sis of the health effects of gas drilling, which could pro­ceed to some extent with­out knowl­edge of the details of the com­plex mix­tures of tox­i­cants involved. It is also not a study of the health impacts of spe­cific chem­i­cal expo­sures related to gas drilling, since the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion can­not be obtained due to the lack of test­ing, lack of full dis­clo­sure of the Inter­na­tional Union of Pure and Applied Chem­istry (IUPAC) names and Chem­i­cal Abstracts Ser­vice (CAS) num­bers of the chem­i­cals used, and the industry’s use of nondis­clo­sure agreements.”
For more infor­ma­tion on why Bam­berger and Oswald had such a tough time learn­ing about the spe­cific chem­i­cals used, read our piece on the so-called “Hal­libur­ton Loop­hole.” State Impact recently reported on how Penn­syl­va­nia Gov­er­nor Tom Cor­bett has slashed fund­ing for Mar­cel­lus Shale research, much of it on the impact to wildlife.
Even with­out detailed infor­ma­tion on the tox­ins result­ing from gas drilling, the authors of the study say they have no doubt nat­ural gas drilling oper­a­tions killed or injured the ani­mals they ref­er­ence. And, they say the gaps in their research should serve as its own canary when it comes to good sci­ence on the pub­lic health impli­ca­tions of shale gas development.
“…our study illus­trates not only sev­eral pos­si­ble links between gas drilling and negative
health effects, but also the dif­fi­cul­ties asso­ci­ated with con­duct­ing care­ful studies
of such a link.”
The study points out another research obsta­cle. Ani­mal own­ers who have reached a finan­cial set­tle­ment with an energy com­pany often have to sign a non-disclosure state­ment, which pre­vents them from dis­cussing the case. Their con­clu­sion? Halt drilling until more data can be col­lected, and the health impacts could be bet­ter documented.

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