Question: What was found by the USDA inspectors?
About the article "Disney's Animal Kingdom", section "Controversy".

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In 1979, the HMSLA was updated and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors were given the authority to stop the slaughtering line when cruelty was observed.
Officially, slaughtering was not to continue until said cruelty, whether as a result of equipment or of abuses by personnel, was corrected.
However, the USDA eventually stopped authorizing USDA inspectors to stop the line, since doing so incurs considerable cost of time for the industry. 
There have been concerns over the efficacy of safety practices and food industry pressure on U.S. regulators.
A study reported by Reuters found that "the food industry is jeopardizing U.S. public health by withholding information from food safety investigators or pressuring regulators to withdraw or alter policy designed to protect consumers".
A survey found that 25% of U.S. government inspectors and scientists surveyed have experienced during the past year corporate interests forcing their food safety agency to withdraw or to modify agency policy or action that protects consumers.
Scientists have observed that management undercuts field inspectors who stand up for food safety against industry pressure.
According to Dr. Dean Wyatt, a USDA veterinarian who oversees federal slaughter house inspectors, "Upper level management does not adequately support field inspectors and the actions they take to protect the food supply.
Not only is there lack of support, but there's outright obstruction, retaliation and abuse of power."
It was alleged by those that were close to him that Alexander would often keep e-mails and letters from the meat compliance officers mockingly "harassing" him and show them to his secretary, and his mother.
In spite of this, the business did continue to thrive, at least for a time, and this helped to earn the ever hard-working and ambitious Alexander recognition within the local civic and political circles, not much unlike his father.
Perhaps partially inspired by the perceived harassment of the state and USDA inspection practices, Alexander made a failed electoral campaign for San Leandro Mayoral Office in 1998.
Still, with the business still in the black, Alexander did find time to start a romantic relationship with Eve Elder, a 33-year-old insurance claims agent, around 1995.
As the relationship wore on, however, Elder would later see some odd signs of the potentially deadly violent streak in her beau, especially when commenting about the inspectors.
In what had started out as a joke, the couple concocted a series of short stories; one, titled "Sausage Sniffers Found Sauced", painted a description of the inspectors drowning in vats of "secret sauce".
Soon, the tone of Alexander's words would take on a much darker appearance.
As another former girlfriend, Charlotte Knapp, 38, who had been seeing Alexander off and on up until the time of the murders, would later testify during the murder trial, Alexander frequently would use profanities to describe the inspectors and would at times have some choice words ready for them, or for anyone else whom he deemed as "trespassers" that came upon his factory, on occasion wielding a gun, one of the several (perhaps three or four) firearms that he kept in his office desk drawer.
As time went by, Alexander also began to cultivate an increasingly antagonistic and contentious relationship with the four inspectors who were regularly assigned to routinely oversee his business operations in terms of "cooking temperature, cleanliness, and other health concerns".
He felt that these inspectors were harassing him unnecessarily, and "interfering with the way his sausage was best made, and had always been made by his family" by demanding that his linguisa be smoked at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which was a state and USDA requirement; Alexander, who usually smoked the linguisa at 144 degrees, would point that the decreased cooking temperature would shrink the sausage size, thereby reducing the cost at which he could sell them.
There were also requirements about the type of smoker that could be used; his had been deemed antiquated and outdated, and at least two times the inspectors had the factory shut down, only for him to reopen against the state law.
This would also wreak havoc upon his finances; Alexander, who had already been chided by his then girlfriend Eve and mother about his spending habits, was plunging himself deeper and deeper into debt by putting out bank loans in re-opening the factory when the state would shut it down.
This caused the once-thriving, now-illegally operated factory to lose more and more money.
Perhaps coupled with that and his workaholic-like ambitions, this would wear heavily on the romance between Elder and Alexander; by the time of the murder trial proceedings began, Elder, as did Knapp sometime beforehand, had broken off their relationship. 
As originally enacted, the Horse Protection Act was to be enforced by Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a branch of the USDA.
However, a lack of staff and funding meant little success, leading to the 1976 amendment to the Act.
With this amendment, Congress created a Designated Qualified Person (DQP) program.
This program allows non-USDA employees from within the equine community to take training and certification programs run by Horse Industry Organizations (HIOs) and supervised by the USDA; after completing the training, they may complete inspections for violations of the HPA at public events.
The USDA is then able to double check the work of DQP participants by making random inspections at a small number of shows.
One member of the Tennessee Walking Horse world states that this creates "the potential for a "fox guarding the chicken coop" situation", as if the HIO is not fully interested in preventing or detecting the practice of soring, the DQPs may not be fully trained or may deliberately overlook instances of soring.
When APHIS inspectors are present at horse shows, the number of citations for violations increases significantly.
Competitors and trainers at shows, viewing themselves as unjustly persecuted, have been known to leave when they find APHIS inspectors present, rather than allowing the inspectors to see their horses.
In June 2012, the USDA published a new rule requiring violations found by HIOs to have penalties assessed at a rate equal to or exceeding those given by APHIS inspectors.
Previously, HIOs were allowed to set their own penalty rates, resulting in some organizations acting leniently towards violators of the HPA.
For the first decades following passage of the Act, foreign substances applied to the legs, including chemicals, were detected by feel, sight or smell.
Since 2006, the USDA has used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to identify chemicals found on horses' legs at events.
Samples of suspicious substances are swabbed at the show, and sent to a laboratory for analysis; owners and trainers are later informed of the results.
However, this method is only used by APHIS veterinary medical officers at present.
Soring can be also detected by observing the horse for lameness, assessing its stance and palpating the lower legs.
Some trainers evaded detection from inspectors by training horses not to react to the pain that palpation may cause, often by severely punishing the horse for flinching after the sored area is touched.
The practice is called "stewarding," in reference to the horse show steward.
Others use topical anesthetics, such as lidocaine and benzocaine, which are timed to wear off before the horse goes into the show ring.
Use of chemicals can be completely avoided if pressure shoeing is also used.
This process involves placing some type of hard foreign object (such as a small piece of wood, stone, hard acrylic, or sharp object such as a tack or nail) against the sole of the horse's foot before applying the horseshoe and pads.
It can also be done by trimming down the horse's hoof to its sensitive structures, then shoeing.
Either method causes pain when the horse places its foot on the ground. 
There have been a number of challenges to the Horse Protection Act on the grounds of constitutionality, mainly regarding due process and equal protection, none of which were successful.
Courts have also ruled on other issues with regard to the Act, including whether knowledge of soring or intent to sore is required in order to prove a violation of the act, and courts have repeatedly held that it is not.
The issue of digital palpation, one of the main methods used by inspectors to find and verify soreness, has been contested in several courts, and is the only issue that has had courts come to varying conclusions on its legitimacy.
The majority of courts with appeals rising to the Circuit Court level, have held that palpation is a legitimate method for identifying soreness, and that soreness found through palpation is grounds for penalties under the Horse Protection Act.
However, in a decision promulgated by the Fifth Circuit Court, it was found that soreness found through digital palpation alone was not sufficient evidence upon which to base penalties.
The largest association in the United States for equine veterinarians, the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP), called the practice of soring "one of the most significant welfare issues affecting any equine breed or discipline" after releasing a white paper on the subject in 2008.
The organization pointed out that despite over three decades of work, the HPA law had failed to prevent sored horses from being trained, shown, and sold.
The AAEP blamed this failure on what they called the "woefully inadequate" level of funding for enforcement, which the law caps at $500,000 annually.
The federal Office of Inspector General found in 2010 that the self-enforcement system of HIOs and DQPs was inadequate for eliminating the practice of soring.
This led to the June 2012 strengthening of penalty systems.
In 2010, the Friends of Sound Horses launched a website containing the names of the over 8,700 people who had received suspensions from the horse showing and training world under the Horse Protection Act between 1986 and 2010.
This list was developed as part of the USDA Horse Protection Operating Plan for 2007–2009, and supported by most of the USDA-certified HIOs.
Despite the work being done to dissuade trainers from soring horses, APHIS inspectors found hundreds of violations in the course of their work during the 2012 year.