My Justice Would Be Swift and Done With a Sword

A reader of this blog writes:

I read your blog every day and while I haven't as yet commented on any posts I am always interested in what you have to say. My daughter is a sophomore at The Ohio State University and is majoring in animal science. This is an email she sent me. I hope that you will read this and investigate this story. If what Mercy for Animals did to this dairy farm family is true, I am outraged! I told my daughter that this dairy farm could not stay in business for 80 years if they treated their animals the way you see them treated on this horrible video. I do not for a minute believe it and yet so many people will look at the video and they WILL believe it. Please help. Thank you for your time.

Feeling a little uneasy, I scrolled down to find an email allegedly written by Mariette C. Benage, Coordinator, Student Success, Department of Animal Sciences at Ohio State University. The email reads:

Dear Students,

Here is a story that I just learned about after class today. I'm passing it along to you as an example of both direct pressure and animal activist techniques that you, as young adults, need to be aware of. My personal opinions about this are unprintable!

All:

Ryan Conklin, a senior in our department, has asked me to put out this email to you to make you aware of a situation involving his family farm in Plain City. At 11:00 today there will be a news conference that will show terribly graphic footage their animals being mis-treated on their dairy farm. Ryan told me that a man was hired to work on their dairy last month that turned out to be an under-cover investigator for a group called Mercy For Animals, an affiliate-I believe-of HSUS. Ryan told me that this man from Mercy For Animals coordinated the video footage with another person working at the dairy, and he is the one seen causing the abuse on the video. The person recording the footage is the Mercy For Animals advocate, and he quit his position at the dairy on Sunday. The young man seen in the video was released of his duties at 6 am this morning.

I know some of you in the department know Ryan and his family very well, and I can tell you that they are very honorable people and that they would NEVER condone any of these actions. I believe they’ve been in the dairy business for close to 80 years, and they are certainly people that genuinely care about the well-being of their animals. This appears to be a trap that HSUS has set up to gain voter support in the state at the expense of a well-known dairy. This is a very difficult time for the family, and I know Ryan would appreciate any support that we can offer.

For those of you that are interested, here is the link to the video: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/ohdairy/

I will warn you…it’s not easy to see.

Now I was beginning to really feel uneasy.

You see, here was an employee of Ohio State University writing to students about an explosive and legally actionable issue, and suggesting to them that there was a smear campaign being waged against an "honorable" family farm that had never abused animals.

And yet this Ohio State University employee had quite obviously not taken a minute's time to actually investigate the situation!

"Who are you going to believe, me who has not bothered to investigage anything at all, or your lying eyes," she seems to be asking.

Wow! The stupidity of this email was dizzying.

Bracing myself, I went to the video tape.

When it comes to abuse, I thought I had seen it all. Apparently not.



I wrote back to the regular reader of this blog, trying to measure my words as carefully as possible.

How could anyone see this video tape and frame the story as if the dairy operator was the victim? My mind boggled:

Sorry, but this one does not pass the smell test and I will be going in the opposite direction.

I cannot speak to what the farm management knew or did not know (a court will decide that), but a couple of points need to be made here:

1. No one is going to voluntarily appear in a video showing this kind of abuse. The suggestion that this was a put-up-job is complete nonsense. What is shown in the video is extreme, shocking and totally unnecessary violence to animals, the kind that gets you a prison sentence in a place where your teeth are pounded out with a bar, and your assh*l* is stretched by your bunk mate. No one signs up for that tour. No one. Ever.
   
   
2. This is not just one person doing violence, and this video tape was not shot in one day. This video tape shows at least two people doing criminal violence to animals, and the change in clothing makes clear it was shot over at least six or seven days.
   
   
3. If farm management did not know what was going on here, they are criminally negligent. The employees shown here are overt sadists and sick twisted souls, and this fact would have been self-evident over even a brief period of time. The fact that this farm hired these people and retained them, speaks to negligent omission at best, and criminal comission at worst. They better get a damn good defense lawyer and throw the people on the video tape under the bus!

I do not feel sorry for this farm<; I feel sorry for these cows and the honest and hard-working dairy industry of Ohio which has been tarred by this horror. You want me to defend this farm and suggest Mercy for Animals or HSUS (allegedly, by inference and suggestion) put up some kind of fabrication? Nope. Sorry, but I am not blind or stupid. Very clearly, the managers, owners and administrators of this dairy, however, are. It is a horror. It is a sadness. And YES, someone needs to go to jail.

Put me on the jury and I assure you they will.

Any question of where I stand?

Just because I stand for farmers, do not salute every inanity of the animal rights community, and will not wink at the direct mail pettifoggery of the Humane Society of the U.S., does NOT mean I will ever defend true animal abuse.

Put me on the jury, and make me jury foreman, and I will see to it that the men in this video get the electric chair if that is at all possible.

Sadly, however, it is not.

You see, one of the people on this video tape has already been arrested.

But guess what?

The people beating and stabbing these poor cows and calfs are only going to be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $750.

Outrageous!

If an animal abuse case ever cried out for criminal prosecution with real jail time, this is it.

But in Ohio, farm animals apparently have no real protection even from this kind of wanton and horrific cruelty.

Should that change? Very clearly, YES.

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Farming Like People are Hungry

From The Altoona Mirror, in Pennsylvania:

Farmers will face a 100 percent increase in demand for food worldwide by 2059, and researchers in the dairy industry say genetic technology will be the key to stepping up production.

Of the United Nations' projection that 100 percent more food is needed, 20 percent of it will come from increasing agricultural production land and 10 percent will come from upping the production intensity of existing land, said Lisa Holden, a Penn State associate professor of dairy and animal science.

"And the other 70 percent? It will come from utilizing science and new technology," Holden said. "We'll learn how to do things better."

Better, of course, means hybrid plants and animals that produce more, mature faster, grow longer, and are easier to plant and harvest.

How will that be done? Is is possible?

We shall see.

Recombinant DNA will certainly be used (it is already part of every meal you eat), but old methods of boosting production have their place too.

To read more see:

• Green Cows Produce More White Milk
  
  
• Inbreeding and the Axis of Production
  
  
• Making Hay and Losing Birds
  

Green Cows Produce More White Milk

Earlier this week, I put up a blog post entitled Inbreeding and the Axis of Production, detailing how famers are very careful to keep coefficients of inbreeding low in their dairy cow herds.

Why do farm managers work to keep inbreeding values low? Simple: the higher the inbreeding score, the less milk produced. Inbreeding is bad for dairy production.

So how are today's dairies doing, in terms of production?

Extremely well! In fact, modern dairies produce far more milk per cow than their analogs did 25, 50 or 100 years ago.

Consider these numbers from Cornell University's Journal of Animal Science, and what they mean for a greener, cleaner world:

[T]he carbon footprint for a gallon of milk produced in 2007 was only 37 percent of that produced in 1944. Improved efficiency has enabled the U.S. dairy industry to produce 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows in 2007, compared to only 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows in 1944. This has resulted in a 41 percent decrease in the total carbon footprint for U.S. milk production.

Efficiency also resulted in reductions in resource use and waste output. Modern dairy systems only use 10 percent of the land, 23 percent of the feedstuffs and 35 percent of the water required to produce the same amount of milk in 1944. Similarly, 2007 dairy farming produced only 24 percent of the manure and 43 percent of the methane output per gallon of milk compared to farming in 1944.

Which beggars the question: If famers can make better cows without inbreeding them to death, how come the Kennel Clubs cannot do the same for dogs?

And the answer is quite simple: They can!

But to do so, they are going to be have to abandon 19th century eugenics theories that put a premium on breed and race purity.
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This Farm Milks 32,000 Cows a Day

And it's all on public display! A single farm produces enough milk needs to fill the needs of 8 million people. Hat tip to Paul H. for this one!
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Inbreeding and the Axis of Production

In an earlier post entitled Inbred Thinking, I noted that the cattle industry was the first to create a formal registry of breeding stock, and that this industry was also the first to note that milk and meat production dropped when animals were inbred very deeply or for very long.

Because farmers had a clear "steak and eggs" axis for evaluation of stock, they were ready and willing to outcross to achieve the best results for their needs and their land. Consumers, after all, do not much care what breed of chicken their eggs come from, or what "champion" bull sired their steak.

Through experimentation, farmers discovered that outcrosses and hybrids of two "pure" types produce as well or better, while remaining more disease resistant, more fecund, and longer-lived than deeply homogeneous stock.

Of course, what was true 150 years ago is still true today!

Anyone who wants to look at the deleterious effect of inbreeding animals beyond the single-digit threshold need only look at performance records for racing animals or farm stock where there is a real axis for evaluation.

As I have noted in the past, winning race horses are not heavily inbred, nor are winning Greyhounds.

In both animals, a Coefficient of Inbreeding of less than 5% is the norm.

What about production farm animals? Here too we find rising levels of inbreeding correlating perfectly with declining performance. As The Dairy Site notes:

The effects of inbreeding have been so much more negative than positive in animal breeding that the term "inbreeding depression" was coined. Table 1 shows inbreeding depression for lifetime and individual lactation traits of Holsteins from a recent study by Smith, et al. at Virginia Tech. The changes are expressed "per 1% increase in inbreeding." This means that the lifetime economic loss for a mating producing 6.25% inbreeding would be $24 X 6.25 = $150 expected loss from such a mating. Notice that, with the exception of somatic cell score where inbreeding has no apparent effect, all consequences of inbreeding in Table 1 are undesirable. Age at first freshening goes up, length of productive life goes down, all production traits are reduced, and first calving interval is lengthened as inbreeding increases.

The table referenced in the paragraph, above, is appended below:

What about egg production and beef cattle?

Here too we find exactly what we have found with racing dogs, racing horses, and mik cows: increased inbreeding results in less productivity.

The bottom line is a simple one: breeding any animal beyond the single-digit threshold is a recipe for infecundity and sickness.

As Heather Lorimer, associate professor of genetics at Youngstown State University notes:

Mammals, most other animals, and higher plants as well, have evolved mechanisms to avoid inbreeding of any sort. Some, like sweet cherries, have even evolved elaborate biochemical mechanism to ensure that their flowers can not be fertilized by themselves or by very genetically similar individuals.

Most pack animals (like lions, primates, and dogs), kick young males out of the pack so as to prevent them from mating with female relatives. Humans have very strong taboos against mating with relatives. Even fruit-flies apparently have a sensing mechanism to avoid too close of inbreeding; even in a closed population they maintain more genetic diversity than they ought to by random mating.

Professor Lorimer goes on to detail a quick list of the negative consequence of inbreeding:

1. Elevated incidence of recessive genetic diseases
2. Reduced fertility both in litter size and in sperm viability
3. Increased congenital defects such as cryptorchidism, heart defects, cleft palates.
4. Fluctuating assymetry (such as crooked faces, or uneven eye placement and size).
5. Lower birthweight
6. Higher neonatal mortality
7. Slower growth rate
8. Smaller adult size, and
9. Loss of immune system function.

And what are the positive benefits according to Kennel Club rosette chasers?

Simple: They can incrementally increase their chance of winning a $2 rosette made in China.

That's it!

Want to read more? Try these links:

• Dairy Crossbreeding: Why and How: There has been renewed interest in dairy crossbreeding as new advantages come to light.... Crossbreeding is more widely practiced by dairy producers every year.
  
  
• Inbreeding in Cattle: Inbreeding does not create undesirable recessive genes, but it does tend to bring to light these unfavorable genetics. This leads to a decline in average phenotypic performance called inbreeding depression. This phenomenon is well documented in all the major livestock species....
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Playing God With Milk Cows

The Washington Post reports this morning that scientists have managed to sequence the entire genome of an eight-year old Hereford cow living in Montana, the first time a farm animal's entire genome has been published.

Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years, and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past 10,000.

As with other species, genes governing the immune system, the metabolism of nutrients and social interaction appear to be where much of the evolutionary action has occurred. The result is an animal that lives peacefully in herds and grows large on low-quality food, thanks to the billions of bacteria it carries around....

So what? How does a sequenced gene lead to anything positive?

The short answer is that a sequenced gene should enable cattle breeders to create more productive cattle faster because they will be able to find sires with the correct genetic outputs without having to go through the time-wasting (and expensive) process of actually crossing cows and tracking their production over a lifetime.

Traits carried by bulls are important in determining how much milk a cow produces. Because bulls don't make milk, however, a bull's "performance profile" has to be sketched by observing the milk production of his daughters -- a process that takes about six years and costs $25,000 to $50,000. Now, male calves can be tested at birth for milk-enhancing traits using gene-chip technology.

Of course, the great thing about cows and chickens and sheep, is that they actually have a milk, meat, and eggs axis upon which to evaluate the animal.

In the dog world, a true axis for performance is largely gone. You can find it in the world of racing greyhounds, and (arguably) in the world of working terriers, sled dogs, and border collies. But Chihuahuas and Bulldogs, Scotties and German Shepherds?

Not so much.

• Related Links
  ** Nazi-bred Super Cattle in the U.K.
  ** Inbred Thinking

Making Hay and Losing Birds

As human population numbers have increased in the U.S. and across the world, more and more pressure has been put on America's farm land -- the source of 15% of the world's cereal production.

The good news is that record crops are being produced despite the fact that less and less land is being put under the plow.

The bad news is that this increased production has required more automation, less fence-row cover, and more intensive management of farm habitat than ever before.

A good example of what is going on can be seen by taking a look at America's hayfields. While 40 years ago a hay field might have been harvested once a year, most hayfields are cut three times a year now, thanks to automation. The second and third hay harvests typically occur just as grassland birds are breeding. The result -- a tremendous decline in grassland breeding birds across the U.S. (PDF at link)

The number of hayfields in the U.S. is also in decline -- a direct consequence of fewer horses and fewer grass-fed beef cattle, and also a decline in grass-fed dairy production.

Today most cattle are fed and fattened on grain, which produces both greater milk yields and more rapid beef production. While consumers benefit, grassland bird populations are in general and rapid decline.
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What's The Special of the Day?

I have posted the video, but the gourmands, will want to check out the article as well.

And nothing wrong with it -- we serve pig's feet in this country, and tripe and blood pudding (a type of sausage, for the record) are national dishes in some countries.

And for anyone in the U.S. getting too holier-than-thou, be advised that our national food, the hot dog, is made from ground dairy cow udders packed inside casings made from animal intestines. Quite good too.

So they're serving dingus today are they? Bring it on -- scrotum on the side, if you please.

Besides, dingus is a step up from rats, eh?

That said, this story reminds me of an old joke:

On a vacation in Spain, a guy goes to a bullfight. He sees the bull get killed.

Afterwards he's looking for somewhere to eat and he comes across a restaurant near the bullring. He goes in and takes a seat. He can't understand anything on the menu, so he just orders the special of the day.

The waiter brings out a bowl of broth in which float two large meaty balls.

"What are these?" asks the guy.

The waiter explains that they are the testicles of the bull that was killed in the ring that very day.

The guy's adventurous, so he takes a bite, decides they are delicious and finishes them off.

The next day he's sightseeing but he can't resist going back to the restaurant and ordering the "Bullfight Especial."

The waiter brings out a bowl, but this time the balls are much smaller.

He eats them anyway, finds them delicious but asks the waiter: "Aren't these balls much smaller than the ones you had yesterday?"

"Oh yes, Señor. You see it is not always the bull that loses."

As for what dingus to order, when you are ordering your plate of dingus, Yak is apparently pretty good, but be sure to ask if they have any duck dong. Seeing is believing here.

Of course, I hope it does not need to be said that not all dingus are not the same, and it's best if you steer clear of those with bones in them or anything that is not well cooked.

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The Omnivore's Dilemma

My father used to subscribe to a publication called Organic Gardening put out by Rodale press, and he also had this huge book on composting.

This may not seem like such an odd thing in this day and age, but in 1969 it was an almost subversive thing to subscribe to this kind of publication. It meant, at some level, that you were either a hippie, a free thinker or a bit strange.

What was particularly odd about it is that I have never once seen my father with a hoe in his hand (or even a paint brush), and we were living in North Africa at the time. Whatever organic gardening was about, it did not seem to have too much to do with turning over the soil. It seemed to have something to do with thought -- a way of looking at the world.

As for a 400-page book on compost, that was clearly either madness or a mistake.

At age 10 I did not quite get it, but by age 20 I did. By then I was a pretty good mushroom collector. I even took a course in fungus in college, and once served wild mushroom omelets (clitocybe nuda) with apple sauce (made from found apples) to 100 folks at an eating co-op on campus. No one got sick, the omelets and applesauce were proclaimed excellent, and the total cost was $20 bucks.

A few folks gave me strange looks when they later found out I had collected the mushrooms from a leaf mulch pile near where I had constructed a dog run for my terrier, but what could they say? The food was good and they were very much alive.

Life moved on.

Bob Marley died, the hippies disappeared, eating co-ops vanished into the sucking tide of individuality, and I got a job that required a suit, a tie and wingtips.

One day in the 1990s I looked up and it seemed every independent store in America had fallen under the rip tide of corporate America, with Bed, Bath and Beyonds, Starbucks and Best Buy stores shoe-horned into every strip mall. Nothing was "mom and pop" anymore -- it was all Big Corporate.

Meanwhile, something weird was happening to the food. It was subtle. At first it was the ever-expanding sodas and bags of popcorn at the local movie theatre. The cups were now so large they would not fit in the holders.

Hamburgers, which had been discrete human-sized items wrapped in paper, were now so large they were served in Styrofoam boxes. A "Whopper" -- once one of the biggest hamburgers imaginable -- was replaced by the Double Whopper. McDonald's came out with the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder.

Meanwhile, the grocery store produce section no longer seemed to have seasons. You could get grapes year round, and oranges too. New varieties of fruits and vegetables started showing up. What the hell was Bok Choy and Star Fruit?

On trips across America, I would see fewer and fewer cows and horses. I almost never saw a pig.

Sometime in the 1990s tobacco disappeared in Maryland and Virginia and North Carolina. Only two crops seemed to be grown now: corn and soy. A great deal of land in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, and all along I-95 South seemed to be lying fallow. Old pastures of thick grass reverted to weeds and small bushes.

Flying down the road you could not help but notice that a lot of land was being colonized by dense stands of Virginia cedar.

I would never have thought all this was connected, but after reading Michael Pollan's excellent new book Omnivore's Dilemma, I can see that it is.

When I first heard about this book, I was not all that interested. It was clearly a book written by a “foodie,” and I am pretty much done with food-fadists who think bread is evil, and so too are beef, eggs, milk, and …. My God are you eating an apple? They have Alar on them!

But Fate intervened when I came across the book at a local book store. Reading the back of the book, I realized Pollan was the same fellow who had written "The Botany of Desire" -- a book I found quite well written and entertaining. I flipped through his newest book and saw a section on mushroom hunting. I was in.

My money was well spent. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a terrific book. Roughly structured around four meals, Pollan attempts to trace the food back to its origins. How was this stuff grown? What are the ecological, economic, health, and social trade-offs to eating conventional food from the local grocery store versus "Fresh Fields" (industrial organic), versus artisan foods (local organic) and even hunting and foraging?

The book starts with a chapter on corn, which is so astounding that it alone is worth the price of the book.

And let me hasten to say that while Pollan is squeamish (and almost vegetarian), he went on his first hunt (for pig) while writing this book, and his conclusions are pleasantly surprising. There is only one “perfect” meal in this book, and it does not come from Whole Foods.

The power of Pollan's book is that he connects a lot of disparate pieces into a greater whole.

One small fact-filled mosaic after another is slipped into the frame until at last you have a larger picture of what is happening, not only on America's farms, but also in politics, economics and kitchens.

I had seen bits and pieces of this story myself, but only after reading this book did I understand the big picture of what has been going on all around me my whole life. Good stuff. Not just good writing, but good thinking.

Pollan is not a polemicist, and he does not tie it all up with a "this is what you need to do" kind of ending (thank God!)

In fact, he does not need to. If you read this book, you will get the point and you may actually change what you buy. Grass-fed beef may show up in your cart as well as locally grown vegetables. You may discover the joys of returning to seasonal food selection.

Pollan does not seem to think everyone has to eat the same way, and he does not begrudge those who want to continue to eat as they are eating now.

He suspects, however, that if people knew more about the economics and ecology of corn, and the fakery behind much of the "organic" food being hawked to us today, more people would eat locally, seasonally and healthier (even if not entirely organic).

Suffice it to say, that he made a believer out of me, and I was not a likely convert.

And, for the record, he confirmed what I already knew: My Old Man is a pretty smart cookie and more than a little bit ahead of the curve.

The Cow and the Derrick

I hunt several farms where corn and soy are grown and beef cattle are raised. One farm is entirely organic, and the cattle there are grass-fed Angus. Another farm has a mixed herd of cross-bred beef cattle, and they too are grass fed. A third farm has few cattle, but they raise over 1,500 acres of soy and roast it for cattle feed. All three farms also grow corn.

I mention this because in many ways these farms are oddities. When I was a young boy, almost all beef cattle were grass-fed, but today most beef comes to the table not from the farm, but the feed lot. You can drive a long way in parts of America today and see mile after mile of corn without ever seeing a cow.

A corn field is a lovely thing, but if you know what you are looking at it's easy to have mixed emotions. If you walk through a modern American cornfield today, you will find no weeds; almost all corn is now "Roundup Ready," which means it has been genetically engineered to be immune to the powerful herbicide "Roundup". Most soy is now Roundup Ready as well.

It has been said that the rise of modern feed lots has transformed cows from natural solar-powered ruminants into artificial fossil-fuel-guzzling hamburgers on the hoof. Because corn depends on fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides -- and machines to harvest, plant, and transport it -- it has a high "oil price." It takes about 1.2 gallons of oil to grow a bushel of corn which is then converted into a few ounces of beef.

Corn, and to a lesser extent soy, are the main live stock feeds used today because they are so cheap and plentiful. This is due, in part, to federal crop subsidies (in the form of cheap water, low-cost loans, and price support programs), genetic engineering, and petrochemical fertilizers. It is also due to the tremendous natural potential of America's lands, and the expertise of American farmers.

As a result of our tremendous corn-and-soybean glut, the USDA encourages farmers to find a new markets for corn and soy, and -- absent a new market to dispose of it -- that means turning as much of it as possible into animal feed.

Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of land -- the modern American feedlot.

We are not going back to grass-fed beef, for the simple reason that there are too many people in the U.S. and they are too demanding. Grass-fed beef tends to be harvested in late Fall, after fattening up all summer, and before the grass grows dormant in winter, while corn-fed beef can be harvested all year round. People want to eat McDonalds, and they do not want to eat beef "in season" like sweet corn and tangerines.

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