In doing some study in our day on the dissimilarities between ethanol created from corn and ethanol made from sugarcane, I came across the following sentence: “Cows are flatulent for the reason that they are fed corn, which they do not normally eat.”
That lead me on an additional search, to discover if this was in fact accurate.
As Dr. Doolittle says, “I love red-blooded juicy chunks of meat. Legs of lamb. Sides of beef and chops and steaks and veal. And pork of course, my favorite meal.” But that’s before I found out how this food is “grown.”
I hadn’t devoted a good deal thought to just how livestock is cultivated for the dinner table, I admit, and I always thought what PETA was consumed with was the manner in which they were slaughtered…not the way in which they were raised.
Sure, I got some notion a few years ago, when it was revealed that a number of farmers fed their cattle on the remains of “downer cows” – i.e. changing the cattle into unsuspecting cannibals. Well, it turns out they feed them on a lot more than that.
There was an article in the Feb/March 2008 edition of Mother Earth News that makes clear precisely what happens to cattle.
It’s all about “factory farming.”
Up until about the 1960s, livestock were cultivated on family farms or ranches round the country. Calves were birthed in the spring and devoted their first months nursing milk and munching on grass. As soon as they were weaned, they were put out onto grazing land. The calves matured , achieving market weight at two to three years of age. Once they were slaughtered, the carcasses were kept chilly for a couple weeks to improve taste plus tenderness. (This is referred to as dry aging.) The meat was then transported in large cuts to meat markets, where consumers would stop by and tell the community butcher which cuts they desired.
As stated in this article, “This meat was free of antibiotics, added hormones, feed additives, flavor enhancers, age-delaying gases and salt-water solutions. Mad cow disease and the deadliest strain of E. coli — 0157:H7 — did not exist. People dined on rare steaks and steak tartare (raw ground beef) with little fear.”
Not any longer.
Today, cattle are brought to slaughter weight in just one or two years, by employing growth hormones in addition to feed additives. This decreases the nutritional value of the beef and increases the possibility of bacterial contamination.
This manmade manipulation of beef initiates prior to conception. Loads of cattle are treated with man-made hormones to control the timing of conception, so that all the calves are born within days of one another. And logically, as opposed to natural conception, there’s manmade insemination.
When the calves are birthed, they do get to expend their first seven to nine months grazing on grass. Nevertheless when they arrive at 500 to 700 pounds, it is all over. They are sold to new owners and shipped to distant feed lots.
The journey could take up to a week. Once they get there, the stressed, thirsty and hungry calves are driven down chutes and subjected to such things as dehorning, sterilization, branding and tagging. Then they are dewormed and vaccinated against a range of diseases. Antibiotics are typically mixed with the feed, no matter if the currently-stressed animals exhibit signs of sickness or not.
Next, the calves are implanted with small spheres containing growth-promoting steroid hormones. After a few months, fresh implants of increased potency are used. This adds 110 pounds of lean meat or more to a calf.
Nine out of ten U.S. calves are medicated with hormonal growth promoters. The FDA has accepted five hormone implant growth boosters for cows. Three of these are organically occurring hormones that are equal to those present in people. In accordance with this article in Mother Earth, lots of customers and advocacy groups are calling for a ban on these growth-promoting implants because research demonstrates that even minute amounts of these can promote tumor growth. (And that is why US beef is forbidden from the European Union – they do not want it, and who can criticize them?)
Another approach to augment the growth rate of calves is to feed them an particularly high-grain diet. Calves fattened on grain reach maturity months ahead of grass-fattened calves. It’s all completed for revenue — the less time cattle expend in feedlots, the added cash is made when they are sold. Corn is the grain of choice for the reason that it is particularly high in energy – in spite of the truth that cows don’t consume grains in nature.
After that because cattle do not consume grain naturally, they get ill. Deadly ill. So of course, they ought to be given a constant dose of antibiotics in their food supply. And the remainder of those antibiotics are of course going to remain with that cow at what time it’s converted into hamburger or steak.
Now, it seems that every year, hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef products are recalled. Do you remember the recall in October 2007? Topps Meat Company recalled 21.7 million pounds of hamburger due to potential E. coli contamination.
After reading exactly how cattle are cultivated, I am not surprised.
If you are into living ecologically, and are not a vegetarian, be careful where you obtain your meat from!
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