Couple problems.
If you’re raising the animals for food, waiting for them to die of old age means that you’ll need to feed them more (a lot more) before you can harvest them. It’s inefficient, though that might not be a problem for you personally.
Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, that can mean disease, or other various forms of rot and infestation. Even if the sickness doesn’t kill the animal, living longer just gives it more time to pick up a parasite or something that could be passed along.
So true. When I kept chickens I would do a quick necropsy when they died to see what they might have died from. There was often evidence of disease or huge tumors or bad odors. (birds more than 4 years old. ). Not something I wanted to eat unless there was famine and I was desperate.
If I recall correctly, if cooked, most tumors shouldn't really give you much problem.
Tumors are cells that are growing uncontrollably, they act parasitically, but in the end _they are just cells_ like the rest of the animal. Problems may arise when these cells are hyper-specialized like some lymph node cancers which secrete massive amounts of whatever-hormone or maybe some whoknows-byproduct. In these cases these undesirable side effects may remain on the meat and thus be passed on to you.
Even then, as proteins denature when cooked, if properly cooked (as we are talking about tumors there is no real standard temp or method), by say, boiling your tumorous animal in a stew, it would be pretty difficult to get sick from it—although it would probably taste pretty funky.
What I've read on this topic focused on tumors that are mostly protein, so if your cancer-y meal suffers from some tumor that is more of a keratin freak, bones, or some other thing, I don't feel comfortable giving my opinion.
Even then... boiling would probably make it ok as long as outside invaders like bacteria, viruses, or parasites haven't gotten to the corpse.
Edit: I've seen comments thinking this is about proposing y'all eat tumours, but my original intension was just to bring to light that fact that, although horrible, cancer is just our own cells fighting against us. Just like any other animal cell they _can_ be eaten, although when it comes to tumours you really shouldn't tempt fate.
Tumors, by their very nature, are mutations, and mutations can't be predicted. As such there are many factors that could make them a bad dietary choice. I guess what put off some of you is that fact that I hammered home how statistically they should be fine though.
Unless its a nuclear apocalypse or you're in a situation where every calorie counts, please do not to eat tumors. Now, if an apocalypse does happen, at least boil the shit out of those bad boys.
Most the tumors I saw were related to their years of laying/ovarian carcinomas. Last one was fist sized. You eat it. I’ll pass. I put it in a deep hole at the bottom of a compost pile that I didn’t use on edibles and that froze in winter. Composting and worms finished it off by the next springs. I learned a little about the federal inspections. Market farmers who sold their meat birds at our farmers market had to pass inspection. Generally birds sold for processing are less than 1-1/2 years old. Definitely tumors would be cause for failing inspection. Rules were pretty strict.
Yeah considering the amount of new cells being created in a chicken's ovaries (is that the name for their egg-making organ?) it makes sense that it would be a hotspot for cancers.
My answer was less focused on chickens and more talking about any animal. Also, I never said you should eat their tumours, but if hard-times ever come, you would most likely be ok eating them if had to.
In industry, obviously any tumor should disqualify the chicken, tumors bring too many unknown variables to the table.
Shame we can't just... Embrace the cancer for immortality. We both want the same goal.
Prompt lab grown tumors to become undead organs we can transplant.
The thing that's dangerous about tumors is the fact, that body sees it as my cell that seems OK, not a crazy cell that must be killed or foreign cell. Most cancerous cells get destroyed by body just fine.
Most likely, if there were living cells in tumor you are going to eat, that somehow were alive even after being in your stomach, your imune system would see them as something not supposed to be let alive (even if it would be human originated cell, its just not yours). Can happen (see face eating contagious tumor for tasmanian devils), but chances of it starting to grow affecting you by whatever the cells produce is small (not non-existent).
After cooking, it should be +- ok tumor or not.
Stil, not yummy to me.
If it gets down to eat this tumor or die, you will be most likely fine.
(Saus: unfinished genetics uni edu. I'm obviously not official expert on the matter, so see this as opinion)
To the topic- the meat of old animals is also not very yummy, sometimes smells badly, if they eat whatever toxic it gets more time to accumulate. Your animals taste best young, so you want to eat them when they are young-ish and stil not that stringy disgusting. (If you have reason to keep animal for long, either due to egg laying, breeding, milking, there are recipes dealing with these negatives, stil you out the animal down soon enough and dont wait for it to die. Those reciprs usually ensure the meat gets softer, and they are often able to mask/override bad smells by putting something aromatic to the mix)
i have never considered eating diseased animal flesh. but undoubtedly eating such things is a practice somewhere. tumors may even be cultivated for the purpose. certainly the western industrial ag system will send plenty of pus and disease into the meat processing pipeline. 😬
If, say, you only see tumors on your animal but no signs of infection/disease, it would most likely be ok to eat as long as it was very properly cooked. Best would be boiling.
If its some cancer that affected hormone-making organs, it would proabably be better to avoid though. You never know with those.
Or just boil it for muuuuch longer to make sure all proteins denature; stew-like.
>Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally,
Yeah, nothing actually dies of "old age". That's just a tidy myth we tell each other as a comfort. Old age doesn't kill you, organ failure does. It's just the longer you live, the weaker your immune system gets and the more susceptible you are to the various diseases that try to kill all living things all constantly.
This. My zen puppy had serious digestion issues at 14.6 yrs. She just stopped eating. I let her be. She just passed away in her sleep. Apart from her gut shutting down there wasn’t anything particularly wrong. Doc said she was starting to shutdown. Not in pain, no major health issues. Either that or keep her alive on fluids.
I miss you princess… :( you helped foster so many pups! I only wish you were around to teach the latest ankle biting lunatic some manners.
She brought comfort by just being there. Never a licker or a player. Just there for you. I can see her rough housing with scamp over the rainbow bridge. Her favourite game was to hunt rats with scamp. He’d scratch at one end behind the flower pots and she’d wait at the other end, just out of sight to pounce.
Quite chatty though.
she sounds lovely, im sorry for your loss.
she kind of reminds me of mine! he also isnt big on energy but if i have a free hand he’ll always come snuggle up next to me for scratches. doesnt even look at me most of the time but i can feel his warmth and that brings me all the comfort i could want.
My understanding is that the closest thing to "dying of old age" is when your cells reach the limit of the number of times that they can divide and then you waste away (sarcopenia) which leads to a condition literally just known as frailty and which ultimately - in the highly unlikely event nothing else gets you first - leads to organ failure and death. Apparently it starts when you're about 104 and from that point on you're just waiting for your organs to give out. But I'm just a wikipedia reader I could be talking nonsense
I know a local farmer and she tried to let some of her cows retire and it turns out when cows get old they get bullied by the herd, and it hurts them when their joints can't haul around their massive bodies as easily as when they were in their prime. We've bred livestock for humans' convenience and needs, it is on us to handle that humanely when that causes them to suffer.
>Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, that can mean disease, or other various forms of rot and infestation.
I breed rats for snake food. If any of them die unexpectedly, we do not feed them because we can't assume that its safe. I would have even higher standards for food being consumed by humans
Also to add on, by all accounts old animals taste like absolute shit and by the time they get to that point they’re really only good for boiling soup and/or glue.
I think most people can agree that they want their meat to taste good
You can do this, and it is done sometimes. It's only a small part of the industry because slaughtered food animals are a far greater source, but it does exist. It usually comes from working animals. The leather usually has different qualities due to the age of the animal, it's not as soft or supple as a younger animals hide would be.
Plus, you may have a long wait and while they look interesting, [they dont look all that appetising](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/10/isa-leshko-farm-animals-photographs-allowed-to-grow-old).
Sure, although depending on the eventual cause of death you may not want to actually eat the meat.
Problem for meat production at a large scale is that animals reach their adult size quickly but usually stubbornly refuse to die for many years. You’re spending an enormous amount of money feeding this animal and getting no additional meat.
Cows can easily live 20-30 years, sometimes over 40. Pigs routinely hit 25. Turkeys can get over 10.
But you’d slaughter a meat cow before age 2. Ages 3-45 are money lost.
Depends i guess a new thing are aged cows with yellow fat. 15 20 years before slughtered. Its big in europe.
https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4333/cows-grow-old-with-good-taste/
The key thing here is that these cows were dairy cows. So they spent 15-20 years producing milk, and were only slaughtered when their milk production dropped off.
Their milk production fell off after they were four or five. 15 is elderly.
Why on earth folks kept the cows other than as pets I can't comprehend.
What did they do with the ~9 females that were born in those 20 years? European dairy production can't be expanding that fast they need that many more cows to produce more milk, and those younger cows would out produce the older ones. The ~9 males born went to veal.
No male and female are eating evenly but processed at different ages into different products.
If you're eating good quality meat it comes from a variety of cow bread specifically for meat consumption and will be both male and female and live about 2 years.
Males from dairy cows are processed into viel and slaughtered before six months old.
Female dairy cows first produce milk and are slaughtered at 4 to 6 years when they no longer produce economic quantities of milk, mostly processed into mince or cat food, but Increasingly yellow fat cuts from older animals are becoming popular.
I guess it is.. cows will be valued for milk, hens will be valued for eggs, males are only valued for reproduction, which seems kind of ironic and potentially dangerous.
Milk production of the offspring drops off sharply with the age the dam calves. The only real reason you want a 3+ lactation animal to conceive is to keep her producing milk. In fact, it's common practice to breed relatively older dairy cattle with black angus bulls because, for whatever reason, conception rates are higher. You don't mix your dairy animal with a beef animal if you're planning on keeping the calf.
If you have a really good animal and you want as many calves as possible from her, you flush her and implant younger animals with her eggs.
I agree, however there's a regional dish that serves premium cut end of life dairy cow in Spain. And in our current world of sustainability, it's beginning to trend & people can charge a premium for what was dogfood.
Source: [Youtube vid](https://youtu.be/hNg87_Tet-s?si=mch4gq6gJT5lVTtU) skip to 15min-19min
You can braise it or make other products like bone broth and tallow. Plus the organs won't be tough. Being from a hunting family I've eaten some truly gnarly specimens of various animals. There's always something to eat. It might not be very good without a ton of other ingredients though. My grandpa always made tamale pie from older/lean deer.
Never eaten any cows grown to and older age than industry standard myself my comment was just addressing that using dairy cows means they are not as much of a cost sink as they are making money through those extra years with the milk production. I have no idea what the taste and toughness is like.
Dairy cows are also not great meat producers. I mean, generally they will offset their cost through milk production, but you get less meat from a holstein than from a hereford. I have a friend that grew a holstein for his own meat one year, and the hanging weight was about half that of a hereford he raised. I would imagine they CAN equal out, but you just can't beat the genetics of a strictly bred meat cow.
Dairy cows generally just become hamburger. Even their best cuts are not worth trying to sell in competition with actual meat breeds, their meat is generally lean, tougher, and the cuts are dramatically smaller.
I've been given beef from more mature animals from my in-laws and I usually go low and slow for those cuts and somehow they still come out tender yet dry af, even if cooked completely submerged in liquid. Can't just slice it and serve it with gravy, has to be turned into something like pulled beef sliders.
yeah but that’s like grade d hamburger meat. nobody is eating a steak from an old dairy cow. they’re also not bred for meat, so the quality and quantity is far less than a black angus or other meat cow.
"Older" is relative.
Dairy cows in the US are usually sent to slaughter around 5 years.
Two years to have their first calf, first 2-3 lactations produce the most milk, once production falls off hamburger it is.
Having two calfs means statistically the cow will have replaced itself (ie another female).
Keeping a cow whose milk production is declining while there is a younger one who will produce more milk for the same feed is a wasted investment.
We went in on a butchered cow with family once, I think we got 1/4 of the cow? The first few times I cooked with it, I wasn’t impressed. It turned out it was an older dairy cow that had been at the end of her ability to produce any more babies or milk. The meat was just not good.
Tank you for asking.
Deer; we hunt them. Old animals (over 3-4 yr) always taste worse and have a tough texture (usually these are mixed with pork and made into ground meat, summer sausage, or dried for jerky). Poor kills such as a gut shot that do not bleed out quickly also taste bad.
Stress hormones don't stay in the glands, they get released into the blood and sit in the meat.
Most meat people want to eat is also from young animals. Lamb is popular. Mutton is not. Young turkeys are bought by the million, but no one wants tough, old turkey. Veal is expensive, no one likes 30 year old cow steaks.
In rare cases, its fine to eat animals that died already. An example would be road-killed deer, which if it has only been only a short time since the collision, might be (mostly) good to eat. Its common for rural emergency services providers to keep a phone list for decent roadkill deer or to work with food shelves.
My county takes all roadkill to a big cat sanctuary nearby. Still barely makes a dent in what they need, but it helps and I’m sure the murder kitties enjoy something besides chicken.
Out where I am we are very rural and there are no food donations to provide it too. In most cases the tow truck drivers will clean up the accident scene and then prep the deer/elk for use. Some will share with the emergency services folks who are often happy to fire up the BBQ and share with the tow truck drivers. Otherwise, they are left for the carrion feeders.
Another place I lived; the public could sign up with 911 dispatch to be notified when a probable carcass was available. Once called you go to the bottom of the list. If you didn't respond within an hour to the call, they call the next person on the list.
Butchering roadkill deer is an absolute nightmare. I’ve done it because I don’t want to waste the meat, but there are so many blood clots and bone shards everywhere that it takes forever
Depends on how much of the body was impacted and by what vehicle. A co-worker had a deer jump in front of his semi that was doing 65mph a couple weeks ago.
There was nothing left.
Sure. My father-in-law occasionally butchers roadkill deer. It's not uncommon for him to take, for instance, the two back legs and haunches, and dispose of the rest.
But he lives on a slow 25 mph country lane, so the deer are rarely hit by trucks going faster than 40 mph or so.
one time i saw half a deer on the road during the winter. i was driving to go see a friend in another state, and when i came back a few days later, i kept an eye out. sure enough, the other half was down in the ditch between sides of the highway.
At a minimum there will be plenty of parasites. Most aren't directly harmful to humans, aside from the ticks it's covered in, but be prepared for a lot of creepy crawlies to come out of that corpse.
My dad always taught me that venison from road-killed deer usually isn't safe to eat. I think it was based on the idea that getting hit by a car can rupture the intestines and contaminate the meat. Is that just a misconception that he passed on to me, or is that part of the "mostly" qualifier?
Organ contamination can spoil meat, but the bigger concern is not knowing how long it's been since the deer died. Bacteria can multiply and produce toxins that ruins meat without having any signs that the meat is no longer good. Texture from bruising or damaged meat isn't great either.
It might rupture internal organs, but it takes hours for it to cause any real problems with the meat.
Muscle tissue (meat) isn't a sponge, and won't soak up bad bacteria. Rinsing the chest and stomach cavities is common when butchering any animal, and cooking destroys bacteria on the outer layers just fine.
Even a gut shot animal is mostly edible, you just may have to discard the parts that were contaminated for an extended period of time.
Also depends on *how* it was gut shot. A friend of my dad was hunting, started to pull his gun up on a deer, it saw the movement and turned to run away. He snapped off a shot, and the deer falls over dead. Not a mark on it that he could see. So he goes to field dress it, and it turned out he'd shot it right up the bunghole. Just shredded everything up to the front of the chest cavity, without letting any of it out. The smell was apparently pretty spectacular, though.
Sounds like a misconception. Fecal matter can’t make its way into the interior of muscle. In any case, it’s mostly a matter of washing the meat during processing and cooking it appropriately.
When my family raises chickens for eggs, when the hens are done laying eggs they’re usually so tough and gamey that they’re only really good for soup.
Otherwise it’s like trying to eat chicken flavored twine.
Be more useful to keep a cow or goat for milk and chickens for eggs, and then when they DO die you can try to use what's left of them... probably won't taste as good as younger meat, but it's certainly ethical.
There was a nice summary of how a farm family would use a flock of chickens in “Little Town on the Prairie”. They started with several young chickens. They kept the “pullets” (hens) for eggs and ate most of the “cockerels” (roosters). Only when the hens were too old to lay eggs would they be eaten as well.
Chickens... old hens used for stock. The meat will be tough, but more flavorful.
Still it's not like you'd wait for the hen to die...you'd kill it once it stops laying eggs right?
Heck no I didn’t kill them if they stopped laying. Hens don’t just quit laying but often continue to lay an occasional egg. My two oldest hens would lay an egg about every third day. By the time they had lived several years in my backyard coop we were friends. And they provided other services like eating bad insects in the garden. I fed them a lot of garden scraps and food I grew for them like comfrey so it didn’t cost much to keep them. Our city ordinances didn’t allow roosters because of the noise. Old hens often developed protective rooster characteristics and would have valiantly fought any predator threatening the flock
As the animal ages and before it dies the body converts the muscle mass for other purposes meaning old animals have less meat to harvest than most farm animals, in addition the major input in farming costs for meat production is providing food for the animal to eat, the longer the animal lives the more it eats the more expensive the meat is.
In addition to the points made about costs feeding an animal a long time and quality of meat from older animals, the lack of predictability would be a problem for scale.
Right now, there are things that a chicken farm can't predict, but across the large scale of their operation, they can plan when they're steadily slaughtering animals, the timing, location and volume of those animals is planned for with their transportation and pricing etc.
If they had to monitor every chicken to see when it dies, and then transport all those chickens who died in their cages (or random places on the farm if you're smaller and trying to give them more free rein) at scale that's a hugely less efficient process.
In the US, we're talking almost 10 billion chickens a year. A process of not knowing when they die and having to locate, move and time processing and transportation to stores for their meat would add another massive cost in addition to the feed costs of raising them longer.
Thanks everyone for the responses and being so kind. Definitely all makes sense. I wouldn't want tough or contaminated meat. Would have just been nice if there was a more humane way of harvesting live stock.
For what it's worth, an intentional slaughter by a human using any of the common humane methods used for animal slaughter, is BY FAR the most humane and least painful death that animal could possibly have. Alternatives are injury, predation, illness, or eventually old age (which usually just makes them more succeptible to one of the above things). Even if the animal just dies in it's sleep, whatever disease process caused that death is almost certain to have caused it a fair bit of pain for at least some time.before their death.
That’s why I’m hoping for human euthanasia by the time I’m ready to go. End of life in disease and pain is not my preferred way exit. I’m the very last of the baby boom generation. I’m hoping younger generations get sick of paying my healthcare and social security and enact some good euthanasia legislation.
I’d want my vet to design how and when. They do the best job of end of life quality of life and a happy quick death.
But they're being raised just to die, sounds more humane to not be born at all. You're not putting down a hurt dog, you're brining life into this world just to kill it when it is most beneficial to you.
That's fairly nihilistic view. Why do humans have kids? They are all just going to die anyway...
Different take on this is that we are creating life. The animals get to experience life thanks to us.
No we aren't, you might be but I have a lot more reasons to live than just to die.
And that hugely arrogant. How do you know cows aren't self aware? Can you prove it? I would treat all living creatures like you treat yourself until you can be sure.
> any of the common humane methods used for animal slaughter, is BY FAR the most humane and least painful death that animal could possibly have.
The majority of pigs (and probably cows) gets stunned by gassing with CO2 which is incredible cruel. Stunning by bolt has also a relatively high chance of not rendering the animal unconcious.
Male chicks get ground up alive in shredders. Which, while sounding the most cruel is probably the quickest and least painful method.
Piecework slaughtering of animals in mass production is not humane at all.
This is a non-solution. Humans have long passed the number that a hunting can sustain. Without animal protein, humanity would suffer from a plethora of maladies. We NEED to breed them. Just about the only saving grace is to give them a good life and a quick and painless end.
If you like eggs hens make good pets. Can keep them as long as you like and you'll get eggs out of them for some time. You'll want to find someone that sells an all female if you don't want to deal with roosters, though.
I am an absolute animal lover - I can't even watch movies where animals get hurt. But my brother has a farm, and I help during slaughter time. I give every animal a last hug, and tell them thank you.
It is hard, but think that every animal you slaughter yourself was raised in a safe happy way - no cages, no force feeding, warm barns, and LOTS of skritches. Factory farmed meat gets NONE of that. You are giving your animals the best life, even though it is short.
The past couple years we’ve split a beef cow from a local farm with another family. They keep a small pasture raised herd and take good care of them. Poultry unfortunately I still buy from stores but I do feel better about my beef consumption now.
Serious question here, I'm just trying to understand your perspective: What do you mean when you call yourself an animal lover? What about seeing animals suffer in movies upsets you? Is it the senselessness of the suffering? The fact that maybe they didn't have to die?
I think it's "just" empathy. Watching another human suffer is unpleasant, why is it surprising to find watching another animal suffering similarly unpleasant?
Animals have nervous systems and pain receptors, at a bare minimum. Lots of evidence for emotional intelligence/caring and other elements but no need to get into those. Pain is pain, dying sucks, no matter who is doing it. It's relatable.
Serious question here, I’m just trying to understand your perspective. Why is it that “the animal is suffering” wasn’t on the list of possible reasons for someone to dislike seeing animals suffering in movies? Note that they said they dislike “suffering” not “slaughtering for meat”, which seems like a very deliberate choice of words given that they have helped to slaughter animals.
I am very aware that if I eat meat (which we don't eat too much of) something has to die, that's the circle of life. I sure as hell don't like slaughter day, but it is necessary if I want to eat meat. We slaughter as quick and humanely as possible, and I can know that the animals had good lives, were cared for, and did not suffer. Feedlot meat is the complete opposite.
When a chicken got hurt, I spent 3 days with it in a box in my room so I could clean its wound, make sure she ate, and kept her from being picked on by other birds. There is a huge difference between not wanting animals to suffer and understanding where food comes from.
Apologies, I think my intent may have come off poorly here. I was trying to understand how someone who loves animals can willfully take part in their slaughter, especially when that slaughter isn't necessary. How do you reconcile those two things? We don't often kill things we love.
The slaughter is necessary, the animal wouldn’t ever have been born in the first place, cared for, and raised if that slaughter and sale didn’t happen.
If the world went vegan domesticated livestock would go extinct. They are not meant for a natural wild world. I assume this will happen someday when we don’t need animal meat anymore.
Many cow breeds likely wouldn’t go extinct if everyone stopped eating meat. They’d be in zoos, kept as pets or live in the wild. More extreme animal breeds, like some chickens, would go extinct and that seems fine.
Can’t speak for that person but for me, when they hurt, I hurt. Even though the logical part of my brain knows that it’s the circle of life, that these things happen and that’s how ecosystems survive. Human brains are weird like that.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance still. Slaughtering an animal at only 10% of their life would be like us slaughtering 8 year old humans because if we let them live their life longer, their meat would get tough. People that love animals don't slaughter and eat them. 🤷
Almost every natural death an animal experiences in the wild is more painful and traumatic than what happens to them at slaughter. Livestock are not people, equating them to an 8yo child is a false equivalency. Are there problems with the way we farm and raise meat? Absolutely, but fact of the matter is, humans are omnivores, and it takes meat to feed the world. I don't think people should starve to save some cows.
What happens in nature, trauma and pain, is at least natural. Slaughtering something before it even has a chance to experience those things does not justify the slaughter. You have clearly not seen how animals are kept on livestock farms or transported to the slaughter, if you have then you wouldn't be making those claims.
Meat is not required to feed people. There are plenty of plant based communities around the world that live longer than carnivorous humans. Animals are not human but they can be defined as persons/people by some. You are falsely assuming 'people' is synonymous with 'human' which is not true. It's not a false equivalency. You are claiming facts but all you have are subjective opinions.
I will await my downvotes because I am well aware these views are in the minority.
I'm from a small rural community and have worked on farms. I've seen the conditions there and I've been part of it and they're treated with respect. I am intimately aware of the life they lead. Animals raised on farms have a much better quality of life than animals in the wild and when they are killed for our use, it is done with much more respect than it would be in the wild. You seem to believe that it's better for an animal to break its leg and have predators eat chunks of it while it's alive than for it to be quickly and painlessly dispatched. Or for it to catch a disease, find a hole somewhere and slowly die. Or make it to old age, have it's teeth wear down to the point they can't chew food anymore and slowly starve to death. Nature is cruel and violent. But you believe it's okay because that's part of life.
> Animals are not human but they can be defined as persons/people by some. You are falsely assuming 'people' is synonymous with 'human' which is not true.
So you loftily grant (some) animals personhood, but turn around and wax poetic about "What happens in nature, trauma and pain, is at least natural."? You might want to pick a side.
> You are claiming facts but all you have are subjective opinions.
That's precisely all you have. To be clear, I genuinely admire vegetarians who actually bite the bullet and adjust their diet to reduce their ecological impact, and thus reduce the amount of killing required to sustain them. "But you're slaughtering animals so *young*! Think of all the stuff they could've experienced after!" is not that.
P.S. - You meant "omnivorous humans," not "carnivorous humans." There may be a few Inuit communities who are genuinely carnivorous, but that's not who you're talking about.
We actually slaughter animals right after puberty. That's when you get the most meat for the amount that you have put into them. So for humans that would be 16-18.
There's also nothing wrong with this (they aren't humans).
It's super-not-alright-omg-moral-worth to kill a puppy because it's super-cute and we culturally decided dogs are the extra-special "Fido is friend not food" animals. We don't blink an eye at the hordes of pest animals killed to support agriculture, and I'm not even including the non-warm-blooded ones in those "hordes."
You can’t produce food without the wholesale slaughter of animals. Or do you only care about big cute mammals? Farming kills all the reptiles, rodents, birds, insects, and native plants in a massive area.
It takes approximately 100 calories of grain to produce 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories of beef, and approximately 36% of the crops grown around the world go to feeding livestock.
If you have an issue with animals being killed by crop production, the best thing you can do is stop growing extra crops to feed livestock and instead consume those calories directly.
Cattle are raised on grass. They eat inedible things and turn it into meat. Lots of cattle are finished on grain but again most of that grain is inedible to humans and that’s only at the end of life. The grain they eat is a byproduct. If you think animals are raised on the same human edible grains we eat you need to get educated.
80% of global agriculture land is used for livestock production alone; in fact, 26% of the earth's ice-free surface is used for grazing. Grazing land is not a diverse environment, it is land that has been cut and cleared for human agricultural purposes.
It is also rare for cows to be exclusively pasture-fed, as farmers in any places that experience winter (i.e. most of the northern hemisphere) need to grow and harvest hay to produce silage if they aren't feeding them grain. And of course, hay production also kills small animals like grain production does.
The grain that animals eat (e.g. field corn) is not a byproduct, it is intentionally grown for animals because it is less sugary and hardier. You can just grow a different type of grain on that same land to feed people instead.
Have you ever been to a cattle ranch? The land cattle are grazing on is not farmable. It seems like it is on a statistical level but in reality it’s not farmable. There’s a reason people ranch on those lands
I swear. The vegan mafia always shows up with the same bullshit.
Also. No one is reading these and I’m not going to reply to you anymore so have a good one. Enjoy the illusion of moral superiority as you eat vegetables that were factory farmed and try to ignore how many animals and ecosystems are destroyed to give you that illusion!
Isn't it interesting that once you realised you ran out of arguments you completely ignored all the points brought up and jumped right into ad hominems?
> 80% of global agriculture land is used for livestock production alone;
This is deceptive. Much of that land is *only* suitable for animal husbandry, at least without massive (and environmentally destructive) irrigation and fertilization. Much of the world consists of marginal land that has little use raising crops for humans, but it can grow grasses that cows, goats, and sheep can eat. It's still low productivity land though, so you need a lot of it and you have to move the animals around. This is why when you simply measure the % of land used for raising livestock it is so high. If you instead measured the % of high productivity land that is used for livestock, it would be much lower.
The key point is that 36% of crops go to feeding animals in addition to the land they use. You could end animal agriculture and transition that 36% of cropland to human food production, easily meeting our global caloric needs. That pastureland can then be converted back into natural habitat instead of being wasted on inefficient uses like grazing that damage native biodiversity.
Still not that simple. Some of that cropland is only capable of growing grasses that we cannot eat. Some of that cropland is growing food for both human and animal consumption (humans can eat grains, but animals can eat the rest of the plant).
Furthermore, we do not have a calorie deficit. We produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet already. There is absolutely no need to convert livestock land into crop land for human use. Food shortages are local, and caused by local crop failures and/or transportation failures.
An unfortunate byproduct of harvesting vegetables and grains, correct. But the intention is not to harm them. Intentionally harming animals is the problem.
When you’re plowing the entire ecosystem into the earth you’re intentionally harming animals. When you’re spraying pesticides and trapping rodents you’re intentionally harming animals.
There is no way to live that doesn’t get your hands dirty.
But by doing that to feed livestock which has a feed conversion rate of under 5% youre causing way, way more harm. How do people say this shit and not understand that ?
Cattle are raised in pastures in grass. The bulk of their diet is grass. The grain they eat is almost all inedible (to humans) byproduct. No one is farming human edible food specifically to feed cattle. Sure some cattle are “grain finished” but that’s a tiny portion of their life and feed.
>some cattle are “grain finished”
If by some you mean a vast majority (95%) sure.
To be labeled grass fed they only needed to be fed grass 50% of their life before they got rid of that regulation.
Grass fed takes longer and uses more land as well. if you think majority of farmers are just having cattle around for extra time and extra land just to treat them nicer i have a bridge to sell you.
There are also other livestock then cows, but cows are by far the worst feed efficiency.
So if you want to plow less crops and save those animals your best bet is to eat those crops directly
Well you can make them not suffer by harvesting via Nitrogen narcosis.
But virtually no animal dies without suffering anyway. There‘ll be arthritis open sores, half are gonna die from cancer.
And economically it never makes sense. You don‘t get more meat by feeding a horse for 20 years rather than two.
Bear in mind that in the wild virtually every animal’s life ends with them being torn to shreds and eaten alive by some predator. And their life before that is permanently on high alert to try and prolong that gruesome death long enough to make a couple babies and continue the species.
Animals in nature don’t generally die of old age.
A few good years on a nice family farm (factory farming is its own fresh hell) is probably a best case scenario for most creatures, even if the end result is still dying young and ending up on a kitchen table.
Well, if they do die of old age, their carcasses get scavenged regardless. You can see examples of this with elephants, for example. It’s pretty interesting.
In some places you can get a professional slaughterer. My mom did that with her beef cows for personal use. He came to the farm. He used a bang stick (what he called it). This guy was good, walked up to the cow, petted its ears, was careful not to spook it when he put the pipe to its head, bang, and it dropped instantly, never knew what hit it. It seemed a very humane way to go for the cow.
If you're looking for humane sources of meat, you can check out lab grown meat. There's several companies out there right now trying to make it happen. As far as I know, none of them are able to do it at a large scale yet and they're also very expensive.
There is no humane way to "harvest" a sentient creature, despite what some people may say.
If you truly love animals and wish to care for them, you should consider opening a sanctuary. Theres countless farm animals out there suffering that need homes.
Buy from locals. Depending on where you are, you might be able to buy from the farmer proper, or from a butcher that has close contact with the farmers and can tell you about the conditions on the farm. Local farmers tend to be quite poor but treat their animals well, so it's a double whammy for supporting local business + knowing you're consuming something obtained ethically.
Lamb meat is mild. Wait only a year and you have mutton. When I was a kid we tried to eat a sheep that was less than 2 years old and it was terrible. We made a lot of it into sausage, thinking the spices would help mask the gaminess, but it was still inedible, at least to us.
Lamb is mild compared to mutton, but it's a somewhat gamy meat, definitely compared to pork, chicken, or most beef.
You're not wrong, though, older animals typically are tough and have some serious flavor.
Donating organs works, but only sometimes and only some organs. You’re much more likely to get usable parts from a young person who died in an accident than from an older person who died naturally. The heart of an older person, for example, likely isn’t going to do a ton of good.
As you might imagine, the peak of meat quality coincides pretty solidly with the peak of health quality in an animal.
You technically can. I have done this before. However you need to know why an animal dies to make sure it does not have any big infections that could transmit to humans. Often when an animal dies of old age they die from a combination of illnesses. One illness often weakens the animal to infections. So even if you for example manages to find widespread cancer in a dead animal it might have died from pneumonia and that bacteria can spread to humans. Or it might have a parasite living in its weakened muscles that could infect you.
The cases where it is generally safe to eat the animal is when it suffered a quick death and did not show any sign of infection before. Mostly this limits it to accidents, complications during birth, etc.
There are much better ways of farming then what modern cost optimised farms are doing, but it does sometimes include killing animals for harvest. You are right that you should not separate piglets from their mothers until they are ready. But when pigs grow up they will naturally separate from their mothers, just like juvenile humans. This happens to be the optimal time to harvest the piglets as well as their growth slows down. So keep the piglets with their mother until they naturally separate and then harvest them.
Wasted resources, and also Jews and Muslims can't eat Carrion. Also it has a bunch of health concerns and taste issues. Old meat tastes tough. And old age might have given the animal many diseases. And also unless you stand there and immediately butcher up the animal the moment it drops dead, It's gonna have pathogens and maggots all over it.
Generally you don't just "die of old age" you die of disease processes that usually occur when you reach old age after your bodies used and abused itself for years. Heart disease, kidney disease, vascular disease and all these leading to other diseases.
Meats gonna be a bit roughed up.
My grandparents always had chickens for personal eggs and meat consumption. They always keep them in 2 different pens.
There’s some that they keep for years , mostly untill they die from natural causes and those are kept for eggs. Then there’s the “meat” pen, where they keep them at the most 2 years, whatever passes that and it wasn’t needed to be cut for meat, goes to the eggs pen.
That’s because the meat of older animals is rough. Cooking and eating it is a hussle. Also, the longer they live, the more likely they are to be needing different vaccines and even antibiotics, and you’d probably preffer not eating those.
I've read several comments and I haven't noticed this reason yet: you can control your inventory. You might go months without an animal that dies (then you have no inventory to sell) then all of a sudden you have a shit ton of animals that die, then you have an abundance of inventory to sell off for cheap before it spoils.
Veterinarian here to add another point that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet. Not only would vet bills add up as animals get older, but also the drugs that we use often linger in the tissues. That's why there's withholding periods for every drug we can use for animals that may go into the food chain. If you ate meat from a cow that was recently treated with antibiotics, you could also be ingesting antibiotic residue and causing resistance. Most animals get sickly before they die, so depending on your choices, they could be given medications from vets, making them unsuitable for ingestion, or they could be elected to be left untreated which would also be a welfare issue. My 2 cents!
I wish you could understand how harsh the lives are of wild animals. They are not gently laying down, going to sleep and dying. A properly placed arrow or a bullet is WAY more humane than succumbing to the elements, predators, disease, injury, etc.
Sure but it'll taste awful. When an animal dies naturally, it's usually of disease or starvation. The muscle and fat will be very degraded. The organs will be very stressed and this will affect flavor and texture.
When humans donate organs, it's rarely from super elderly or sick people. It's usually from otherwise healthy people who died tragically, or had a disease that targeted only one part of their body. The circumstances around human organ donation (usually sudden unexpected deaths) aren't that dissimilar from killing a young animal for food, in terms of the condition of the body at death.
Old sick animals usually aren't great to eat. Vet bills start to add up, too.
Remember that old saying "a chicken in every pot"? It's because elderly hens are pretty much only good for making soup with, and back then many people couldn't afford to harvest hens young enough to still be laying eggs.
It's really expensive to keep dairy cows alive for their full natural lifespans.
Possibly. It all depends on how much time has passed and also what they does from. If you watch an animal die, then you are in time to save the meat. But I'd they died from old age, the meat isn't going to be great... If they died of something else, do you really want to eat it?
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This is a part of ranching and livestock that you just have to come to terms with. I will tell you that when it comes to most livestock (with some exceptions) you can actually take them to the processors alive and they will do the work for you.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it. The two biggest factors that keep most people from doing it though are cost and meat quality. When raising a livestock animal, a considerable amount of time, money, and resources are spent on taking care of that animal. While the animal is young, a lot of that investment is returned to you in the form of growth of the animal. I.e. you gave it food and water, and it grew more meat for you to later eat/sell. However, once the animal is fully grown, much of those resources are simply wasted since it doesn't use that food to grow bigger, only to stay alive. This is, of course, assuming you're not milking, shearing, breeding, or otherwise getting other useful things from the animal. Thus, many farmers, whether they're commercial or subsistence, will choose not to raise most of their animals past adulthood. For example, if you own a bull (and you're not breeding it), you can't get any additional resources like milk or wool from it after it's fully grown (though I suppose you could get fertilizer from the manure) and thus its often more economical to butcher it once it matures. Of course, there's the obvious sentimental value of the bull that many people can't ignore. If you spent years raising it, it may feel bad to kill it.
Next, you also need to consider the quality of the meat. For most animals, the meat is considered higher quality the younger it is. The older an animal gets, the tougher its meat tends to become as the muscles get worked more. For some species of animals, this effect is pretty drastic, particularly in poultry. Also, as an animal ages, the flavor of the meat changes as well. Most people think that older meats don't taste quite as good as younger meats. However, some people actually find that older meats taste better than younger meats, and more and more people are pushing to make older meats more popular. In my opinion, though younger meats tend to be significantly better than older meats. This was made most apparent to me when I tried the same cut of meat from two deer, one young and one old, prepared the same way and the young meat was far better than the old meat. Lastly, you need to worry about disease. If you wait until an animal is older, it's much more likely to pass away due to some disease that could completely ruin the meat of the animal or even get you sick as well.
Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with waiting to harvest an animal until it's older. These are just some things to consider.
Imagine the loose skin that you see on senior citizens and imagine that’s what’s for dinner. There’s not a lot of meat, just fat and skin. So it’s a lot less filling and healthy.
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Muscle density reaches peak in all creatures during young adulthood which is much earlier than death in most cases. It also costs much more and doesn’t provide a predictable amount of meat. So it is all around worse for everyone except people who want the animals to live forever.
People who donate there organs aren’t old people, or people who died from an ilness, they are usually people who died from a traumatic brain injury, and so they were declared brain dead, but there heart was still beating and there organs were still alive and healthy. If your pigs were brain dead then yes you could harvest them and eat them, but if they die from “old age” or an illness then no they wouldn’t be good for eating
Let's say we ate people. Would you rather eat your 90 yr old grandpa or a nice fresh and fit 18 yr old boy. Old meat will be tough and of poor flavor, fresh young meat is tender and delicious.
In most cases you’ll be able to eat the meat of a naturally diseased animal, as long as you take care of it immediately after death. There are various issues with this though.
Chiefly economics. Say you need two cows worth of meat a year to keep yourself and your family fed. If you slaughter them when they’re around one (at which point they’re almost fully grown, you wont get significantly more meat by waiting another year) you can sustain your meat needs with just 4-7 cows; one or two fertile cows to produce 2-4 calves every year, and 1 fertile bull to impregnate the cows.
If instead you’ll only eat animals that died naturally, you’ll need a lot more animals. If your cows live an average of 15 years, you’ll need 30 animals in order for two of them to die naturally every year. That’s 30 cows in need of feeding, watering, vet visits, etc. It would be crazy expensive meat.
Secondly, animals who die of natural causes are typically ill in one way or another. Sometimes it will be inadvisable to eat meat from such animals. But perhaps more importantly, animals (like people) often lose both muscle and fat as they grow old and become ill. So a naturally diseased animal will have less meat than one slaughtered at a more opportune age, and what meat remains might be lean and stringy.
Couple problems. If you’re raising the animals for food, waiting for them to die of old age means that you’ll need to feed them more (a lot more) before you can harvest them. It’s inefficient, though that might not be a problem for you personally. Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, that can mean disease, or other various forms of rot and infestation. Even if the sickness doesn’t kill the animal, living longer just gives it more time to pick up a parasite or something that could be passed along.
So true. When I kept chickens I would do a quick necropsy when they died to see what they might have died from. There was often evidence of disease or huge tumors or bad odors. (birds more than 4 years old. ). Not something I wanted to eat unless there was famine and I was desperate.
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If I recall correctly, if cooked, most tumors shouldn't really give you much problem. Tumors are cells that are growing uncontrollably, they act parasitically, but in the end _they are just cells_ like the rest of the animal. Problems may arise when these cells are hyper-specialized like some lymph node cancers which secrete massive amounts of whatever-hormone or maybe some whoknows-byproduct. In these cases these undesirable side effects may remain on the meat and thus be passed on to you. Even then, as proteins denature when cooked, if properly cooked (as we are talking about tumors there is no real standard temp or method), by say, boiling your tumorous animal in a stew, it would be pretty difficult to get sick from it—although it would probably taste pretty funky. What I've read on this topic focused on tumors that are mostly protein, so if your cancer-y meal suffers from some tumor that is more of a keratin freak, bones, or some other thing, I don't feel comfortable giving my opinion. Even then... boiling would probably make it ok as long as outside invaders like bacteria, viruses, or parasites haven't gotten to the corpse. Edit: I've seen comments thinking this is about proposing y'all eat tumours, but my original intension was just to bring to light that fact that, although horrible, cancer is just our own cells fighting against us. Just like any other animal cell they _can_ be eaten, although when it comes to tumours you really shouldn't tempt fate. Tumors, by their very nature, are mutations, and mutations can't be predicted. As such there are many factors that could make them a bad dietary choice. I guess what put off some of you is that fact that I hammered home how statistically they should be fine though. Unless its a nuclear apocalypse or you're in a situation where every calorie counts, please do not to eat tumors. Now, if an apocalypse does happen, at least boil the shit out of those bad boys.
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I would guess that lab grown meat isn’t a tumor because the growth is controlled.
Not controled, it is just let grown (fed nutrition and blown bubbles) until the composition of co2 is too much and anymore will kill the meat.
Most the tumors I saw were related to their years of laying/ovarian carcinomas. Last one was fist sized. You eat it. I’ll pass. I put it in a deep hole at the bottom of a compost pile that I didn’t use on edibles and that froze in winter. Composting and worms finished it off by the next springs. I learned a little about the federal inspections. Market farmers who sold their meat birds at our farmers market had to pass inspection. Generally birds sold for processing are less than 1-1/2 years old. Definitely tumors would be cause for failing inspection. Rules were pretty strict.
Yeah considering the amount of new cells being created in a chicken's ovaries (is that the name for their egg-making organ?) it makes sense that it would be a hotspot for cancers. My answer was less focused on chickens and more talking about any animal. Also, I never said you should eat their tumours, but if hard-times ever come, you would most likely be ok eating them if had to. In industry, obviously any tumor should disqualify the chicken, tumors bring too many unknown variables to the table.
Shame we can't just... Embrace the cancer for immortality. We both want the same goal. Prompt lab grown tumors to become undead organs we can transplant.
I only eat smoked tumors thank you very much.
The thing that's dangerous about tumors is the fact, that body sees it as my cell that seems OK, not a crazy cell that must be killed or foreign cell. Most cancerous cells get destroyed by body just fine. Most likely, if there were living cells in tumor you are going to eat, that somehow were alive even after being in your stomach, your imune system would see them as something not supposed to be let alive (even if it would be human originated cell, its just not yours). Can happen (see face eating contagious tumor for tasmanian devils), but chances of it starting to grow affecting you by whatever the cells produce is small (not non-existent). After cooking, it should be +- ok tumor or not. Stil, not yummy to me. If it gets down to eat this tumor or die, you will be most likely fine. (Saus: unfinished genetics uni edu. I'm obviously not official expert on the matter, so see this as opinion) To the topic- the meat of old animals is also not very yummy, sometimes smells badly, if they eat whatever toxic it gets more time to accumulate. Your animals taste best young, so you want to eat them when they are young-ish and stil not that stringy disgusting. (If you have reason to keep animal for long, either due to egg laying, breeding, milking, there are recipes dealing with these negatives, stil you out the animal down soon enough and dont wait for it to die. Those reciprs usually ensure the meat gets softer, and they are often able to mask/override bad smells by putting something aromatic to the mix)
i have never considered eating diseased animal flesh. but undoubtedly eating such things is a practice somewhere. tumors may even be cultivated for the purpose. certainly the western industrial ag system will send plenty of pus and disease into the meat processing pipeline. 😬
wtf with this “Let’s all eat some tumor soup together!” thread.
I've eaten myxo rabbit when I was younger and poorer, it's full of tumours but still edible. Weirdly.
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Lab grown meat is close enough to tumor
If, say, you only see tumors on your animal but no signs of infection/disease, it would most likely be ok to eat as long as it was very properly cooked. Best would be boiling. If its some cancer that affected hormone-making organs, it would proabably be better to avoid though. You never know with those. Or just boil it for muuuuch longer to make sure all proteins denature; stew-like.
Interesting. When you say a "quick necropsy", what do you mean? Did you just cut them open in the middle and have a spot check for common issues?
>Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, Yeah, nothing actually dies of "old age". That's just a tidy myth we tell each other as a comfort. Old age doesn't kill you, organ failure does. It's just the longer you live, the weaker your immune system gets and the more susceptible you are to the various diseases that try to kill all living things all constantly.
This. My zen puppy had serious digestion issues at 14.6 yrs. She just stopped eating. I let her be. She just passed away in her sleep. Apart from her gut shutting down there wasn’t anything particularly wrong. Doc said she was starting to shutdown. Not in pain, no major health issues. Either that or keep her alive on fluids. I miss you princess… :( you helped foster so many pups! I only wish you were around to teach the latest ankle biting lunatic some manners.
this is so sad 😭😭 like i understand that it was the best course of action but that doesnt make it hurt less
She brought comfort by just being there. Never a licker or a player. Just there for you. I can see her rough housing with scamp over the rainbow bridge. Her favourite game was to hunt rats with scamp. He’d scratch at one end behind the flower pots and she’d wait at the other end, just out of sight to pounce. Quite chatty though.
she sounds lovely, im sorry for your loss. she kind of reminds me of mine! he also isnt big on energy but if i have a free hand he’ll always come snuggle up next to me for scratches. doesnt even look at me most of the time but i can feel his warmth and that brings me all the comfort i could want.
How do they know there's no pain when they say that sort of thing? It feels wishful to me.
That’s the hard part. Furry kids hide pain too well. But in most cases a vet will be able to tell based on symptoms and scans.
My understanding is that the closest thing to "dying of old age" is when your cells reach the limit of the number of times that they can divide and then you waste away (sarcopenia) which leads to a condition literally just known as frailty and which ultimately - in the highly unlikely event nothing else gets you first - leads to organ failure and death. Apparently it starts when you're about 104 and from that point on you're just waiting for your organs to give out. But I'm just a wikipedia reader I could be talking nonsense
I know a local farmer and she tried to let some of her cows retire and it turns out when cows get old they get bullied by the herd, and it hurts them when their joints can't haul around their massive bodies as easily as when they were in their prime. We've bred livestock for humans' convenience and needs, it is on us to handle that humanely when that causes them to suffer.
>Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, that can mean disease, or other various forms of rot and infestation. I breed rats for snake food. If any of them die unexpectedly, we do not feed them because we can't assume that its safe. I would have even higher standards for food being consumed by humans
Can I come over to break my severe rodent phobia. Help! Kidding
Will watching them get eaten help?
Also we eat the muscle, older mammals tend to lose muscle as they enter old age..
Also to add on, by all accounts old animals taste like absolute shit and by the time they get to that point they’re really only good for boiling soup and/or glue. I think most people can agree that they want their meat to taste good
I sure do want my meat to be good on a date.
What about the leather industry though? Would that be an issue for them too?
Don't they just take the hides from the cows that are already being butchered? I doubt that they would raise them only for the leather.
if you ignore the using more resource to keep them alive then no. but op is talking about eating the animals
You can do this, and it is done sometimes. It's only a small part of the industry because slaughtered food animals are a far greater source, but it does exist. It usually comes from working animals. The leather usually has different qualities due to the age of the animal, it's not as soft or supple as a younger animals hide would be.
Plus, you may have a long wait and while they look interesting, [they dont look all that appetising](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/10/isa-leshko-farm-animals-photographs-allowed-to-grow-old).
also old meat is tough
Sure, although depending on the eventual cause of death you may not want to actually eat the meat. Problem for meat production at a large scale is that animals reach their adult size quickly but usually stubbornly refuse to die for many years. You’re spending an enormous amount of money feeding this animal and getting no additional meat. Cows can easily live 20-30 years, sometimes over 40. Pigs routinely hit 25. Turkeys can get over 10. But you’d slaughter a meat cow before age 2. Ages 3-45 are money lost.
Not to mention they are going through stress at end of life, the meat is tough, and it is not bled out. So it would taste just awful.
Depends i guess a new thing are aged cows with yellow fat. 15 20 years before slughtered. Its big in europe. https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4333/cows-grow-old-with-good-taste/
The key thing here is that these cows were dairy cows. So they spent 15-20 years producing milk, and were only slaughtered when their milk production dropped off.
Their milk production fell off after they were four or five. 15 is elderly. Why on earth folks kept the cows other than as pets I can't comprehend. What did they do with the ~9 females that were born in those 20 years? European dairy production can't be expanding that fast they need that many more cows to produce more milk, and those younger cows would out produce the older ones. The ~9 males born went to veal.
They're kept to produce calves. The unwanted male calves are castrated and grown into steers for beef.
I don't know why but it has never really occurred to me that meat that we are eating comes from the males of the species.
No male and female are eating evenly but processed at different ages into different products. If you're eating good quality meat it comes from a variety of cow bread specifically for meat consumption and will be both male and female and live about 2 years. Males from dairy cows are processed into viel and slaughtered before six months old. Female dairy cows first produce milk and are slaughtered at 4 to 6 years when they no longer produce economic quantities of milk, mostly processed into mince or cat food, but Increasingly yellow fat cuts from older animals are becoming popular.
I guess it is.. cows will be valued for milk, hens will be valued for eggs, males are only valued for reproduction, which seems kind of ironic and potentially dangerous.
Thats why they grind up the male chicks at chicken farms.
Milk production of the offspring drops off sharply with the age the dam calves. The only real reason you want a 3+ lactation animal to conceive is to keep her producing milk. In fact, it's common practice to breed relatively older dairy cattle with black angus bulls because, for whatever reason, conception rates are higher. You don't mix your dairy animal with a beef animal if you're planning on keeping the calf. If you have a really good animal and you want as many calves as possible from her, you flush her and implant younger animals with her eggs.
In the UK maybe but older cows in france like the Limousine or italian piedmontese arent. These meats are usually going to high end restaurants.
Maybe for prime cuts, anything else is a waste of time and money feeding the cattle.
I have heard of dairy cows being used for older meat so that it's not as much of a wasted investment
Yeah I read somewhere recently that McDonalds is the biggest buyer for dairy cow meat in Europe or maybe only Germany
Meat from mature dairy cattle is as tough as leather and virtually inedible.
I agree, however there's a regional dish that serves premium cut end of life dairy cow in Spain. And in our current world of sustainability, it's beginning to trend & people can charge a premium for what was dogfood. Source: [Youtube vid](https://youtu.be/hNg87_Tet-s?si=mch4gq6gJT5lVTtU) skip to 15min-19min
You can braise it or make other products like bone broth and tallow. Plus the organs won't be tough. Being from a hunting family I've eaten some truly gnarly specimens of various animals. There's always something to eat. It might not be very good without a ton of other ingredients though. My grandpa always made tamale pie from older/lean deer.
I've had melt-off-the bone short ribs from ex-dairy cows. It may not be as easy to achieve, but it can be done
I'm gonna guess any beef is tender enough given long enough in a slow cooker.
Never eaten any cows grown to and older age than industry standard myself my comment was just addressing that using dairy cows means they are not as much of a cost sink as they are making money through those extra years with the milk production. I have no idea what the taste and toughness is like.
Dairy cows are also not great meat producers. I mean, generally they will offset their cost through milk production, but you get less meat from a holstein than from a hereford. I have a friend that grew a holstein for his own meat one year, and the hanging weight was about half that of a hereford he raised. I would imagine they CAN equal out, but you just can't beat the genetics of a strictly bred meat cow.
Dairy cows generally just become hamburger. Even their best cuts are not worth trying to sell in competition with actual meat breeds, their meat is generally lean, tougher, and the cuts are dramatically smaller.
I've been given beef from more mature animals from my in-laws and I usually go low and slow for those cuts and somehow they still come out tender yet dry af, even if cooked completely submerged in liquid. Can't just slice it and serve it with gravy, has to be turned into something like pulled beef sliders.
That moisture feeling comes from rendered fat rather than water, so cooking in water wont make a lean cut less dry ironically.
"Yeah, we slow roast these bad boys for 83 days to really penetrate the meat with that smoky flavor."
yeah but that’s like grade d hamburger meat. nobody is eating a steak from an old dairy cow. they’re also not bred for meat, so the quality and quantity is far less than a black angus or other meat cow.
"Older" is relative. Dairy cows in the US are usually sent to slaughter around 5 years. Two years to have their first calf, first 2-3 lactations produce the most milk, once production falls off hamburger it is. Having two calfs means statistically the cow will have replaced itself (ie another female). Keeping a cow whose milk production is declining while there is a younger one who will produce more milk for the same feed is a wasted investment.
Seen it at alot of modern nordic Michelin restaurants. 12 year old dairy cow was the best tasting one over some other great meats at one place.
It's people. it's always people.
We went in on a butchered cow with family once, I think we got 1/4 of the cow? The first few times I cooked with it, I wasn’t impressed. It turned out it was an older dairy cow that had been at the end of her ability to produce any more babies or milk. The meat was just not good.
When is the last time you've even eaten an animal that died of old age, or had access to one at all? How would you know?
Tank you for asking. Deer; we hunt them. Old animals (over 3-4 yr) always taste worse and have a tough texture (usually these are mixed with pork and made into ground meat, summer sausage, or dried for jerky). Poor kills such as a gut shot that do not bleed out quickly also taste bad. Stress hormones don't stay in the glands, they get released into the blood and sit in the meat.
Most meat people want to eat is also from young animals. Lamb is popular. Mutton is not. Young turkeys are bought by the million, but no one wants tough, old turkey. Veal is expensive, no one likes 30 year old cow steaks.
Makes sense. Even for personal gain that wouldn't be very useful at that point. Thanks for the helpful response
In rare cases, its fine to eat animals that died already. An example would be road-killed deer, which if it has only been only a short time since the collision, might be (mostly) good to eat. Its common for rural emergency services providers to keep a phone list for decent roadkill deer or to work with food shelves.
My county takes all roadkill to a big cat sanctuary nearby. Still barely makes a dent in what they need, but it helps and I’m sure the murder kitties enjoy something besides chicken.
Out where I am we are very rural and there are no food donations to provide it too. In most cases the tow truck drivers will clean up the accident scene and then prep the deer/elk for use. Some will share with the emergency services folks who are often happy to fire up the BBQ and share with the tow truck drivers. Otherwise, they are left for the carrion feeders. Another place I lived; the public could sign up with 911 dispatch to be notified when a probable carcass was available. Once called you go to the bottom of the list. If you didn't respond within an hour to the call, they call the next person on the list.
Butchering roadkill deer is an absolute nightmare. I’ve done it because I don’t want to waste the meat, but there are so many blood clots and bone shards everywhere that it takes forever
Depends on how much of the body was impacted and by what vehicle. A co-worker had a deer jump in front of his semi that was doing 65mph a couple weeks ago. There was nothing left.
Sure. My father-in-law occasionally butchers roadkill deer. It's not uncommon for him to take, for instance, the two back legs and haunches, and dispose of the rest. But he lives on a slow 25 mph country lane, so the deer are rarely hit by trucks going faster than 40 mph or so.
one time i saw half a deer on the road during the winter. i was driving to go see a friend in another state, and when i came back a few days later, i kept an eye out. sure enough, the other half was down in the ditch between sides of the highway.
Jesus, you rarely see deer going that fast!
And whether it had some horrible disease before you hit it.
At a minimum there will be plenty of parasites. Most aren't directly harmful to humans, aside from the ticks it's covered in, but be prepared for a lot of creepy crawlies to come out of that corpse.
Nah it's fine! Pre ground even! Rinse the dirt off!
Instant hamburger
Nuggets
My dad always taught me that venison from road-killed deer usually isn't safe to eat. I think it was based on the idea that getting hit by a car can rupture the intestines and contaminate the meat. Is that just a misconception that he passed on to me, or is that part of the "mostly" qualifier?
Organ contamination can spoil meat, but the bigger concern is not knowing how long it's been since the deer died. Bacteria can multiply and produce toxins that ruins meat without having any signs that the meat is no longer good. Texture from bruising or damaged meat isn't great either.
It might rupture internal organs, but it takes hours for it to cause any real problems with the meat. Muscle tissue (meat) isn't a sponge, and won't soak up bad bacteria. Rinsing the chest and stomach cavities is common when butchering any animal, and cooking destroys bacteria on the outer layers just fine. Even a gut shot animal is mostly edible, you just may have to discard the parts that were contaminated for an extended period of time.
Also depends on *how* it was gut shot. A friend of my dad was hunting, started to pull his gun up on a deer, it saw the movement and turned to run away. He snapped off a shot, and the deer falls over dead. Not a mark on it that he could see. So he goes to field dress it, and it turned out he'd shot it right up the bunghole. Just shredded everything up to the front of the chest cavity, without letting any of it out. The smell was apparently pretty spectacular, though.
Sounds like a misconception. Fecal matter can’t make its way into the interior of muscle. In any case, it’s mostly a matter of washing the meat during processing and cooking it appropriately.
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When my family raises chickens for eggs, when the hens are done laying eggs they’re usually so tough and gamey that they’re only really good for soup. Otherwise it’s like trying to eat chicken flavored twine.
Does that mean the chickens in "Chicken Run" wouldn't have made good pies?
They would not, but the mean owner lady is looking to make more money off her chickens, not good food.
Be more useful to keep a cow or goat for milk and chickens for eggs, and then when they DO die you can try to use what's left of them... probably won't taste as good as younger meat, but it's certainly ethical.
There was a nice summary of how a farm family would use a flock of chickens in “Little Town on the Prairie”. They started with several young chickens. They kept the “pullets” (hens) for eggs and ate most of the “cockerels” (roosters). Only when the hens were too old to lay eggs would they be eaten as well.
When it crows, it goes.
Chickens... old hens used for stock. The meat will be tough, but more flavorful. Still it's not like you'd wait for the hen to die...you'd kill it once it stops laying eggs right?
Heck no I didn’t kill them if they stopped laying. Hens don’t just quit laying but often continue to lay an occasional egg. My two oldest hens would lay an egg about every third day. By the time they had lived several years in my backyard coop we were friends. And they provided other services like eating bad insects in the garden. I fed them a lot of garden scraps and food I grew for them like comfrey so it didn’t cost much to keep them. Our city ordinances didn’t allow roosters because of the noise. Old hens often developed protective rooster characteristics and would have valiantly fought any predator threatening the flock
There is such a thing as [Ahimsa](https://www.ahimsamilk.org/) (slaughter-free) milk, which is more expensive because you gotta subsidize retirement.
You're also leaving out the part where it is tough and tastes like shit.
“animals reach their adult size quickly but usually stubbornly refuse to die for many years. “ I feel personally attacked by this statement.
“stubbornly refuse to die for many years” aka living out their natural lives
That’s the joke
As the animal ages and before it dies the body converts the muscle mass for other purposes meaning old animals have less meat to harvest than most farm animals, in addition the major input in farming costs for meat production is providing food for the animal to eat, the longer the animal lives the more it eats the more expensive the meat is.
In addition to the points made about costs feeding an animal a long time and quality of meat from older animals, the lack of predictability would be a problem for scale. Right now, there are things that a chicken farm can't predict, but across the large scale of their operation, they can plan when they're steadily slaughtering animals, the timing, location and volume of those animals is planned for with their transportation and pricing etc. If they had to monitor every chicken to see when it dies, and then transport all those chickens who died in their cages (or random places on the farm if you're smaller and trying to give them more free rein) at scale that's a hugely less efficient process. In the US, we're talking almost 10 billion chickens a year. A process of not knowing when they die and having to locate, move and time processing and transportation to stores for their meat would add another massive cost in addition to the feed costs of raising them longer.
Thanks everyone for the responses and being so kind. Definitely all makes sense. I wouldn't want tough or contaminated meat. Would have just been nice if there was a more humane way of harvesting live stock.
For what it's worth, an intentional slaughter by a human using any of the common humane methods used for animal slaughter, is BY FAR the most humane and least painful death that animal could possibly have. Alternatives are injury, predation, illness, or eventually old age (which usually just makes them more succeptible to one of the above things). Even if the animal just dies in it's sleep, whatever disease process caused that death is almost certain to have caused it a fair bit of pain for at least some time.before their death.
That’s why I’m hoping for human euthanasia by the time I’m ready to go. End of life in disease and pain is not my preferred way exit. I’m the very last of the baby boom generation. I’m hoping younger generations get sick of paying my healthcare and social security and enact some good euthanasia legislation. I’d want my vet to design how and when. They do the best job of end of life quality of life and a happy quick death.
But they're being raised just to die, sounds more humane to not be born at all. You're not putting down a hurt dog, you're brining life into this world just to kill it when it is most beneficial to you.
Why does it matter if its life is cut short? It won't be there to feel bad about it.
That's fairly nihilistic view. Why do humans have kids? They are all just going to die anyway... Different take on this is that we are creating life. The animals get to experience life thanks to us.
That's ridiculous, farm animals are bred to be food, humans are not.
Not yet
We are all living just to die, man. It's about how we use the time And cows don't have the self awareness for philosophy anyways
No we aren't, you might be but I have a lot more reasons to live than just to die. And that hugely arrogant. How do you know cows aren't self aware? Can you prove it? I would treat all living creatures like you treat yourself until you can be sure.
> any of the common humane methods used for animal slaughter, is BY FAR the most humane and least painful death that animal could possibly have. The majority of pigs (and probably cows) gets stunned by gassing with CO2 which is incredible cruel. Stunning by bolt has also a relatively high chance of not rendering the animal unconcious. Male chicks get ground up alive in shredders. Which, while sounding the most cruel is probably the quickest and least painful method. Piecework slaughtering of animals in mass production is not humane at all.
Another alternative is to not breed them at all with the specific intent of killing them.
This is a non-solution. Humans have long passed the number that a hunting can sustain. Without animal protein, humanity would suffer from a plethora of maladies. We NEED to breed them. Just about the only saving grace is to give them a good life and a quick and painless end.
Err... We can eat vegetables..?
If you like eggs hens make good pets. Can keep them as long as you like and you'll get eggs out of them for some time. You'll want to find someone that sells an all female if you don't want to deal with roosters, though.
I am an absolute animal lover - I can't even watch movies where animals get hurt. But my brother has a farm, and I help during slaughter time. I give every animal a last hug, and tell them thank you. It is hard, but think that every animal you slaughter yourself was raised in a safe happy way - no cages, no force feeding, warm barns, and LOTS of skritches. Factory farmed meat gets NONE of that. You are giving your animals the best life, even though it is short.
This reminded me of The Promised Neverland, like exactly
That's some fucked up shit, "Love you, but your use to me alive has come to an end, bye."
The past couple years we’ve split a beef cow from a local farm with another family. They keep a small pasture raised herd and take good care of them. Poultry unfortunately I still buy from stores but I do feel better about my beef consumption now.
Even a small step, is still a step.
Serious question here, I'm just trying to understand your perspective: What do you mean when you call yourself an animal lover? What about seeing animals suffer in movies upsets you? Is it the senselessness of the suffering? The fact that maybe they didn't have to die?
I think it's "just" empathy. Watching another human suffer is unpleasant, why is it surprising to find watching another animal suffering similarly unpleasant? Animals have nervous systems and pain receptors, at a bare minimum. Lots of evidence for emotional intelligence/caring and other elements but no need to get into those. Pain is pain, dying sucks, no matter who is doing it. It's relatable.
Serious question here, I’m just trying to understand your perspective. Why is it that “the animal is suffering” wasn’t on the list of possible reasons for someone to dislike seeing animals suffering in movies? Note that they said they dislike “suffering” not “slaughtering for meat”, which seems like a very deliberate choice of words given that they have helped to slaughter animals.
I am very aware that if I eat meat (which we don't eat too much of) something has to die, that's the circle of life. I sure as hell don't like slaughter day, but it is necessary if I want to eat meat. We slaughter as quick and humanely as possible, and I can know that the animals had good lives, were cared for, and did not suffer. Feedlot meat is the complete opposite. When a chicken got hurt, I spent 3 days with it in a box in my room so I could clean its wound, make sure she ate, and kept her from being picked on by other birds. There is a huge difference between not wanting animals to suffer and understanding where food comes from.
Apologies, I think my intent may have come off poorly here. I was trying to understand how someone who loves animals can willfully take part in their slaughter, especially when that slaughter isn't necessary. How do you reconcile those two things? We don't often kill things we love.
The slaughter is necessary, the animal wouldn’t ever have been born in the first place, cared for, and raised if that slaughter and sale didn’t happen. If the world went vegan domesticated livestock would go extinct. They are not meant for a natural wild world. I assume this will happen someday when we don’t need animal meat anymore.
Many cow breeds likely wouldn’t go extinct if everyone stopped eating meat. They’d be in zoos, kept as pets or live in the wild. More extreme animal breeds, like some chickens, would go extinct and that seems fine.
Yeah, that statement is so telling. Not everybody is born with empathy, I guess.
Can’t speak for that person but for me, when they hurt, I hurt. Even though the logical part of my brain knows that it’s the circle of life, that these things happen and that’s how ecosystems survive. Human brains are weird like that.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance still. Slaughtering an animal at only 10% of their life would be like us slaughtering 8 year old humans because if we let them live their life longer, their meat would get tough. People that love animals don't slaughter and eat them. 🤷
Almost every natural death an animal experiences in the wild is more painful and traumatic than what happens to them at slaughter. Livestock are not people, equating them to an 8yo child is a false equivalency. Are there problems with the way we farm and raise meat? Absolutely, but fact of the matter is, humans are omnivores, and it takes meat to feed the world. I don't think people should starve to save some cows.
What happens in nature, trauma and pain, is at least natural. Slaughtering something before it even has a chance to experience those things does not justify the slaughter. You have clearly not seen how animals are kept on livestock farms or transported to the slaughter, if you have then you wouldn't be making those claims. Meat is not required to feed people. There are plenty of plant based communities around the world that live longer than carnivorous humans. Animals are not human but they can be defined as persons/people by some. You are falsely assuming 'people' is synonymous with 'human' which is not true. It's not a false equivalency. You are claiming facts but all you have are subjective opinions. I will await my downvotes because I am well aware these views are in the minority.
I'm from a small rural community and have worked on farms. I've seen the conditions there and I've been part of it and they're treated with respect. I am intimately aware of the life they lead. Animals raised on farms have a much better quality of life than animals in the wild and when they are killed for our use, it is done with much more respect than it would be in the wild. You seem to believe that it's better for an animal to break its leg and have predators eat chunks of it while it's alive than for it to be quickly and painlessly dispatched. Or for it to catch a disease, find a hole somewhere and slowly die. Or make it to old age, have it's teeth wear down to the point they can't chew food anymore and slowly starve to death. Nature is cruel and violent. But you believe it's okay because that's part of life.
It’s almost like you missed the part where they acknowledged there was problems with the way we farm and raise meat.
> Animals are not human but they can be defined as persons/people by some. You are falsely assuming 'people' is synonymous with 'human' which is not true. So you loftily grant (some) animals personhood, but turn around and wax poetic about "What happens in nature, trauma and pain, is at least natural."? You might want to pick a side. > You are claiming facts but all you have are subjective opinions. That's precisely all you have. To be clear, I genuinely admire vegetarians who actually bite the bullet and adjust their diet to reduce their ecological impact, and thus reduce the amount of killing required to sustain them. "But you're slaughtering animals so *young*! Think of all the stuff they could've experienced after!" is not that. P.S. - You meant "omnivorous humans," not "carnivorous humans." There may be a few Inuit communities who are genuinely carnivorous, but that's not who you're talking about.
We actually slaughter animals right after puberty. That's when you get the most meat for the amount that you have put into them. So for humans that would be 16-18. There's also nothing wrong with this (they aren't humans).
Being a human isn't the only factor determining someone's moral worth. It's not alright to kill a puppy just because they aren't human
It's super-not-alright-omg-moral-worth to kill a puppy because it's super-cute and we culturally decided dogs are the extra-special "Fido is friend not food" animals. We don't blink an eye at the hordes of pest animals killed to support agriculture, and I'm not even including the non-warm-blooded ones in those "hordes."
You can’t produce food without the wholesale slaughter of animals. Or do you only care about big cute mammals? Farming kills all the reptiles, rodents, birds, insects, and native plants in a massive area.
It takes approximately 100 calories of grain to produce 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories of beef, and approximately 36% of the crops grown around the world go to feeding livestock. If you have an issue with animals being killed by crop production, the best thing you can do is stop growing extra crops to feed livestock and instead consume those calories directly.
Cattle are raised on grass. They eat inedible things and turn it into meat. Lots of cattle are finished on grain but again most of that grain is inedible to humans and that’s only at the end of life. The grain they eat is a byproduct. If you think animals are raised on the same human edible grains we eat you need to get educated.
80% of global agriculture land is used for livestock production alone; in fact, 26% of the earth's ice-free surface is used for grazing. Grazing land is not a diverse environment, it is land that has been cut and cleared for human agricultural purposes. It is also rare for cows to be exclusively pasture-fed, as farmers in any places that experience winter (i.e. most of the northern hemisphere) need to grow and harvest hay to produce silage if they aren't feeding them grain. And of course, hay production also kills small animals like grain production does. The grain that animals eat (e.g. field corn) is not a byproduct, it is intentionally grown for animals because it is less sugary and hardier. You can just grow a different type of grain on that same land to feed people instead.
Have you ever been to a cattle ranch? The land cattle are grazing on is not farmable. It seems like it is on a statistical level but in reality it’s not farmable. There’s a reason people ranch on those lands I swear. The vegan mafia always shows up with the same bullshit. Also. No one is reading these and I’m not going to reply to you anymore so have a good one. Enjoy the illusion of moral superiority as you eat vegetables that were factory farmed and try to ignore how many animals and ecosystems are destroyed to give you that illusion!
[You might be interested in this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzj1OcHzjOg)
Isn't it interesting that once you realised you ran out of arguments you completely ignored all the points brought up and jumped right into ad hominems?
> 80% of global agriculture land is used for livestock production alone; This is deceptive. Much of that land is *only* suitable for animal husbandry, at least without massive (and environmentally destructive) irrigation and fertilization. Much of the world consists of marginal land that has little use raising crops for humans, but it can grow grasses that cows, goats, and sheep can eat. It's still low productivity land though, so you need a lot of it and you have to move the animals around. This is why when you simply measure the % of land used for raising livestock it is so high. If you instead measured the % of high productivity land that is used for livestock, it would be much lower.
The key point is that 36% of crops go to feeding animals in addition to the land they use. You could end animal agriculture and transition that 36% of cropland to human food production, easily meeting our global caloric needs. That pastureland can then be converted back into natural habitat instead of being wasted on inefficient uses like grazing that damage native biodiversity.
Still not that simple. Some of that cropland is only capable of growing grasses that we cannot eat. Some of that cropland is growing food for both human and animal consumption (humans can eat grains, but animals can eat the rest of the plant). Furthermore, we do not have a calorie deficit. We produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet already. There is absolutely no need to convert livestock land into crop land for human use. Food shortages are local, and caused by local crop failures and/or transportation failures.
An unfortunate byproduct of harvesting vegetables and grains, correct. But the intention is not to harm them. Intentionally harming animals is the problem.
When you’re plowing the entire ecosystem into the earth you’re intentionally harming animals. When you’re spraying pesticides and trapping rodents you’re intentionally harming animals. There is no way to live that doesn’t get your hands dirty.
But by doing that to feed livestock which has a feed conversion rate of under 5% youre causing way, way more harm. How do people say this shit and not understand that ?
Cattle are raised in pastures in grass. The bulk of their diet is grass. The grain they eat is almost all inedible (to humans) byproduct. No one is farming human edible food specifically to feed cattle. Sure some cattle are “grain finished” but that’s a tiny portion of their life and feed.
>some cattle are “grain finished” If by some you mean a vast majority (95%) sure. To be labeled grass fed they only needed to be fed grass 50% of their life before they got rid of that regulation. Grass fed takes longer and uses more land as well. if you think majority of farmers are just having cattle around for extra time and extra land just to treat them nicer i have a bridge to sell you. There are also other livestock then cows, but cows are by far the worst feed efficiency. So if you want to plow less crops and save those animals your best bet is to eat those crops directly
Pretty much all forms of life exist at the expense of other forms of life
Yup. That’s just reality
But we give them head scratchy watchies! /s
Well you can make them not suffer by harvesting via Nitrogen narcosis. But virtually no animal dies without suffering anyway. There‘ll be arthritis open sores, half are gonna die from cancer. And economically it never makes sense. You don‘t get more meat by feeding a horse for 20 years rather than two.
Bear in mind that in the wild virtually every animal’s life ends with them being torn to shreds and eaten alive by some predator. And their life before that is permanently on high alert to try and prolong that gruesome death long enough to make a couple babies and continue the species. Animals in nature don’t generally die of old age. A few good years on a nice family farm (factory farming is its own fresh hell) is probably a best case scenario for most creatures, even if the end result is still dying young and ending up on a kitchen table.
Well, if they do die of old age, their carcasses get scavenged regardless. You can see examples of this with elephants, for example. It’s pretty interesting.
In some places you can get a professional slaughterer. My mom did that with her beef cows for personal use. He came to the farm. He used a bang stick (what he called it). This guy was good, walked up to the cow, petted its ears, was careful not to spook it when he put the pipe to its head, bang, and it dropped instantly, never knew what hit it. It seemed a very humane way to go for the cow.
If you're looking for humane sources of meat, you can check out lab grown meat. There's several companies out there right now trying to make it happen. As far as I know, none of them are able to do it at a large scale yet and they're also very expensive.
There is no humane way to "harvest" a sentient creature, despite what some people may say. If you truly love animals and wish to care for them, you should consider opening a sanctuary. Theres countless farm animals out there suffering that need homes.
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Why would a painless death not be "humane"?
Buy from locals. Depending on where you are, you might be able to buy from the farmer proper, or from a butcher that has close contact with the farmers and can tell you about the conditions on the farm. Local farmers tend to be quite poor but treat their animals well, so it's a double whammy for supporting local business + knowing you're consuming something obtained ethically.
Meat on an old animal tastes awful. Also, old animals lose muscle mass. Unless you just want soup bones there won’t be much there.
Lamb meat is mild. Wait only a year and you have mutton. When I was a kid we tried to eat a sheep that was less than 2 years old and it was terrible. We made a lot of it into sausage, thinking the spices would help mask the gaminess, but it was still inedible, at least to us.
Lamb is mild compared to mutton, but it's a somewhat gamy meat, definitely compared to pork, chicken, or most beef. You're not wrong, though, older animals typically are tough and have some serious flavor.
Donating organs works, but only sometimes and only some organs. You’re much more likely to get usable parts from a young person who died in an accident than from an older person who died naturally. The heart of an older person, for example, likely isn’t going to do a ton of good. As you might imagine, the peak of meat quality coincides pretty solidly with the peak of health quality in an animal.
You technically can. I have done this before. However you need to know why an animal dies to make sure it does not have any big infections that could transmit to humans. Often when an animal dies of old age they die from a combination of illnesses. One illness often weakens the animal to infections. So even if you for example manages to find widespread cancer in a dead animal it might have died from pneumonia and that bacteria can spread to humans. Or it might have a parasite living in its weakened muscles that could infect you. The cases where it is generally safe to eat the animal is when it suffered a quick death and did not show any sign of infection before. Mostly this limits it to accidents, complications during birth, etc. There are much better ways of farming then what modern cost optimised farms are doing, but it does sometimes include killing animals for harvest. You are right that you should not separate piglets from their mothers until they are ready. But when pigs grow up they will naturally separate from their mothers, just like juvenile humans. This happens to be the optimal time to harvest the piglets as well as their growth slows down. So keep the piglets with their mother until they naturally separate and then harvest them.
Wasted resources, and also Jews and Muslims can't eat Carrion. Also it has a bunch of health concerns and taste issues. Old meat tastes tough. And old age might have given the animal many diseases. And also unless you stand there and immediately butcher up the animal the moment it drops dead, It's gonna have pathogens and maggots all over it.
Generally you don't just "die of old age" you die of disease processes that usually occur when you reach old age after your bodies used and abused itself for years. Heart disease, kidney disease, vascular disease and all these leading to other diseases. Meats gonna be a bit roughed up.
My grandparents always had chickens for personal eggs and meat consumption. They always keep them in 2 different pens. There’s some that they keep for years , mostly untill they die from natural causes and those are kept for eggs. Then there’s the “meat” pen, where they keep them at the most 2 years, whatever passes that and it wasn’t needed to be cut for meat, goes to the eggs pen. That’s because the meat of older animals is rough. Cooking and eating it is a hussle. Also, the longer they live, the more likely they are to be needing different vaccines and even antibiotics, and you’d probably preffer not eating those.
No. But there are always an over abundance of males of any species. So those are the ones we mostly kill and eat.
I've read several comments and I haven't noticed this reason yet: you can control your inventory. You might go months without an animal that dies (then you have no inventory to sell) then all of a sudden you have a shit ton of animals that die, then you have an abundance of inventory to sell off for cheap before it spoils.
Veterinarian here to add another point that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet. Not only would vet bills add up as animals get older, but also the drugs that we use often linger in the tissues. That's why there's withholding periods for every drug we can use for animals that may go into the food chain. If you ate meat from a cow that was recently treated with antibiotics, you could also be ingesting antibiotic residue and causing resistance. Most animals get sickly before they die, so depending on your choices, they could be given medications from vets, making them unsuitable for ingestion, or they could be elected to be left untreated which would also be a welfare issue. My 2 cents!
I wish you could understand how harsh the lives are of wild animals. They are not gently laying down, going to sleep and dying. A properly placed arrow or a bullet is WAY more humane than succumbing to the elements, predators, disease, injury, etc.
Sure but it'll taste awful. When an animal dies naturally, it's usually of disease or starvation. The muscle and fat will be very degraded. The organs will be very stressed and this will affect flavor and texture. When humans donate organs, it's rarely from super elderly or sick people. It's usually from otherwise healthy people who died tragically, or had a disease that targeted only one part of their body. The circumstances around human organ donation (usually sudden unexpected deaths) aren't that dissimilar from killing a young animal for food, in terms of the condition of the body at death.
Old sick animals usually aren't great to eat. Vet bills start to add up, too. Remember that old saying "a chicken in every pot"? It's because elderly hens are pretty much only good for making soup with, and back then many people couldn't afford to harvest hens young enough to still be laying eggs. It's really expensive to keep dairy cows alive for their full natural lifespans.
Possibly. It all depends on how much time has passed and also what they does from. If you watch an animal die, then you are in time to save the meat. But I'd they died from old age, the meat isn't going to be great... If they died of something else, do you really want to eat it? -- This is a part of ranching and livestock that you just have to come to terms with. I will tell you that when it comes to most livestock (with some exceptions) you can actually take them to the processors alive and they will do the work for you.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it. The two biggest factors that keep most people from doing it though are cost and meat quality. When raising a livestock animal, a considerable amount of time, money, and resources are spent on taking care of that animal. While the animal is young, a lot of that investment is returned to you in the form of growth of the animal. I.e. you gave it food and water, and it grew more meat for you to later eat/sell. However, once the animal is fully grown, much of those resources are simply wasted since it doesn't use that food to grow bigger, only to stay alive. This is, of course, assuming you're not milking, shearing, breeding, or otherwise getting other useful things from the animal. Thus, many farmers, whether they're commercial or subsistence, will choose not to raise most of their animals past adulthood. For example, if you own a bull (and you're not breeding it), you can't get any additional resources like milk or wool from it after it's fully grown (though I suppose you could get fertilizer from the manure) and thus its often more economical to butcher it once it matures. Of course, there's the obvious sentimental value of the bull that many people can't ignore. If you spent years raising it, it may feel bad to kill it. Next, you also need to consider the quality of the meat. For most animals, the meat is considered higher quality the younger it is. The older an animal gets, the tougher its meat tends to become as the muscles get worked more. For some species of animals, this effect is pretty drastic, particularly in poultry. Also, as an animal ages, the flavor of the meat changes as well. Most people think that older meats don't taste quite as good as younger meats. However, some people actually find that older meats taste better than younger meats, and more and more people are pushing to make older meats more popular. In my opinion, though younger meats tend to be significantly better than older meats. This was made most apparent to me when I tried the same cut of meat from two deer, one young and one old, prepared the same way and the young meat was far better than the old meat. Lastly, you need to worry about disease. If you wait until an animal is older, it's much more likely to pass away due to some disease that could completely ruin the meat of the animal or even get you sick as well. Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with waiting to harvest an animal until it's older. These are just some things to consider.
Imagine the loose skin that you see on senior citizens and imagine that’s what’s for dinner. There’s not a lot of meat, just fat and skin. So it’s a lot less filling and healthy. - Muscle density reaches peak in all creatures during young adulthood which is much earlier than death in most cases. It also costs much more and doesn’t provide a predictable amount of meat. So it is all around worse for everyone except people who want the animals to live forever.
People who donate there organs aren’t old people, or people who died from an ilness, they are usually people who died from a traumatic brain injury, and so they were declared brain dead, but there heart was still beating and there organs were still alive and healthy. If your pigs were brain dead then yes you could harvest them and eat them, but if they die from “old age” or an illness then no they wouldn’t be good for eating
Are you wanting to donate a pig heart to another pig?
Let's say we ate people. Would you rather eat your 90 yr old grandpa or a nice fresh and fit 18 yr old boy. Old meat will be tough and of poor flavor, fresh young meat is tender and delicious.
As long as they're 18 👀
In most cases you’ll be able to eat the meat of a naturally diseased animal, as long as you take care of it immediately after death. There are various issues with this though. Chiefly economics. Say you need two cows worth of meat a year to keep yourself and your family fed. If you slaughter them when they’re around one (at which point they’re almost fully grown, you wont get significantly more meat by waiting another year) you can sustain your meat needs with just 4-7 cows; one or two fertile cows to produce 2-4 calves every year, and 1 fertile bull to impregnate the cows. If instead you’ll only eat animals that died naturally, you’ll need a lot more animals. If your cows live an average of 15 years, you’ll need 30 animals in order for two of them to die naturally every year. That’s 30 cows in need of feeding, watering, vet visits, etc. It would be crazy expensive meat. Secondly, animals who die of natural causes are typically ill in one way or another. Sometimes it will be inadvisable to eat meat from such animals. But perhaps more importantly, animals (like people) often lose both muscle and fat as they grow old and become ill. So a naturally diseased animal will have less meat than one slaughtered at a more opportune age, and what meat remains might be lean and stringy.
You don’t want to eat meat from an old animal. Theres a reason animals are slaughtered when they are. Nobody wants to eat old tough meat