In completing some study in the present day on the differences between ethanol manufactured from corn and ethanol made from sugarcane, I encountered the following sentence: “Cows are flatulent because they are fed corn, which they do not usually eat.”
That lead me on an additional search, to discover if this was in fact accurate.
As Dr. Doolittle puts it, “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 great deal thought to just how livestock is grown for the dinner table, I confess, and I constantly thought what PETA was concerned with was the way in which they were executed…not the manner in which they were raised.
Naturally, I got some hint a few years ago, when it was revealed that a number of farmers fed their cows on the remains of “downer cows” – i.e. changing the cattle into involuntary cannibals. Well, it turns out they feed them on a lot more than that.
There was an piece in the Feb/March 2008 issue of Mother Earth News that explains exactly what happens to cattle.
It’s entirely about “factory farming.”
Up until roughly the 1960s, cows were raised on family farms or ranches round the country. Calves were birthed in the spring and spent their first months nursing milk and feeding on grass. As soon as they were weaned, they were turned out onto pastures. The calves grew to maturity , achieving market weight at two to three years of age. As soon as they were slaughtered, the carcasses were kept cool for a couple weeks to improve taste plus tenderness. (This is called dry aging.) The meat was then shipped in hefty cuts to meat markets, where consumers would stop by and tell the neighborhood butcher what cuts they desired.
According to 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.”
No more.
Nowadays, cattle are brought to slaughter weight in just one or two years, by adding growth hormones in addition to feed additives. This decreases the nutritional value of the meat and increases the danger of bacterial contamination.
This manmade manipulation of beef starts prior to conception. Many cows are treated with artificial hormones to adjust the timing of conception, so that each of the calves are born within days of each other. And logically, rather than natural conception, there is artificial insemination.
When the calves are born, they do get to expend their first seven to nine months grazing on grass. Nevertheless when they attain 500 to 700 pounds, it’s all over. They are sold to new owners and sent to distant feed lots.
The journey can take up to a week. Once they arrive, the stressed, thirsty and hungry calves are driven down chutes and met with such things as horn removal, sterilization, branding and tagging. After that they are dewormed and vaccinated against a variety of diseases. Antibiotics are as a rule blended with the feed, no matter if the currently-stressed animals show signs of sickness or not.
Then, the calves are implanted with small balls including growth-promoting steroid hormones. After a few months, fresh implants of increased potency are utilized. This adds 110 pounds of lean meat or more to a calf.
Nine out of ten U.S. calves are doctored with hormonal growth boosters. The FDA has approved five hormone implant growth promoters for cows. Three of these are naturally appearing hormones that are identical to those present in humans. According to this article in Mother Earth, many consumers and advocacy groups are calling for a ban on these growth-promoting implants because research indicates that even trace quantities of these can encourage tumor growth. (And that is why US beef is forbidden from the European Union – they don’t want it, and who can reproach them?)
Another approach to augment the growth rate of calves is to nourish them an ultra high-grain diet. Calves fattened on grain achieve maturity months earlier than grass-fattened calves. It’s all done for revenue — the less time cattle expend in feedlots, the added money is made when they are sold. Corn is the grain of choice since it’s especially high in energy – regardless of the truth that cows don’t eat grains in nature.
After that because cows don’t consume grain naturally, they get ill. Deathly sick. So of course, they ought to be given a fixed measure of antibiotics in their food supply. And the residue of those antibiotics are of course going to stay with that cow at what time it’s turned into hamburger or steak.
These days, it seems that each year, hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef foodstuffs are recalled. Do you remember the recall in October 2007? Topps Meat Company recalled 21.7 million pounds of hamburger because of potential E. coli contamination.
After reading how cattle are cultivated, I am not surprised.
If you are into living ecologically, and are not a vegetarian, be cautious where you get your meat from!
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