One in five pounds of beef sold come from Holstein or Jersey cows, which frequently are decommissioned dairy cows past their prime. Almost all of the meat from dairy cows is ground (it’s generally not marbled enough or muscled enough for steaks) and made into inexpensive hamburger for food service. So, it’s our consumption of milk and cheese that ultimately fuels the avalanche of burgers at fast-food restaurants.I think young male calves from dairy production often face the same fate.
When buying cheap mince from Coles or Woolworths, it usually does cross my mind how it is from cows, which I like to think don't suffer much in the milk production phase of their life. (Although they do get calves taken away from them.)
At least steak from adult cattle is from an animal that had a pretty good life.
While I enjoy a good steak, I can imagine a life in which I give up beef. I can't bear the idea of giving up on cheese, though. Which reminds me - why don't we hear more about the question to make "cow-free dairy products"? The company is apparently selling (on a very small scale, by the sounds) an ice cream product, but it attracts very little attention.
"When buying cheap mince from Coles or Woolworths, it usually does cross my mind how it is from cows, which I like to think don't suffer much in the milk production phase of their life. (Although they do get calves taken away from them.)"
ReplyDeleteYou others might be laughing at Steve about this. But I think its disgraceful myself. I think we ought not wean the calves until Mum kicks them off. And even after that they should stay with Mum until the males weight gain is tailing off and they are ready for the butcher.
Our failure to do so is simply that we have the market failure of not creating terraced hillsides and mobile milking stations. This shows us the disaster of our economic settings and our failed financial system. It means that the carbon-rich manure is lost to the bottom creek below the low-lying milking shed. Rather than enriching the farm entire.
The whole thing is market failure and shows with all our machinery and all that finance , all those hydrocarbons we cannot seem to outdo the ancient Peruvians. We are hardly up to the standard of the stone age Maori even. What a disgrace. But if the hills were terraced then the milking stations could be mobile then the mother and her calf can stay together until even after she has a new calf.
There is no giving up on beef anytime soon. We need to meat, the milk but perhaps even more than that we need the manure. So I think we are obligated to make the life of any bovine as pleasant as we can. We let our ethics slip next thing we are killing our babies, then carpet-bombing German, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese children to the detriment of any war effort. Then next we are helping the Israelis murder Muslims and pretending they weren't false flag attacks. Then next we are slaves.
ReplyDeleteWe couldn't have been so manipulated into enslaving ourselves had we not lost our sense of ethics.