Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls
npr.org
npr.org
Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.
I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.
I hope that the 2020 updated new dietary guidelines will reflect the fact that dairy is completely optional for a healthy diet even for infants, and even not recommended for most non-caucasians as they are usually lactose intolerant.
Completely necessity driven (calories, nutrients and such)... the food market could be much tinier than it is today. We'd be getting our animal proteins from insects, our fresh vegetables from a small collection of locally efficient species, etc.
Dairy is a long tradition in a lot of places, and an important (culturally, but also nutritionally in-context) food. So is beef. So are spices. Increasingly, things like almond milk and avocados, for newer cultural movements.
Sure, dairy is not necessary. Neither are avocados. People like them though.
In any case, long history and tradition of cattle. The "matrix" problem is mostly a problem of agricultural policy, corporat farming and technology.
I live in Ireland. We have a big dairy industry. Cows eat mostly grass and live mostly in fields. Antibiotics are for sick cows. The medium sized farmers are still strong and I feel fine about the ethics of dairy, at least from an animal welfare perspective.
There a newer reasons for change. It might be a good idea to plant forest, instead of grassy fields and to be concerned about atmospheric methane. That said, if we are to reforest, we might use the forest to farm pigs the old fashioned way. Pigs are factory farmed, and animal welfare is a problem.
And it couldn't be any other way, its economics. If one farmer starts feeding the animals with cheaper food and have better milk yielding cows, he would have a competitive advantage over other farmers, and start taking over a larger part of the market.
This is a disingenuous way of making an argument. Existence of factory farming isn't in dispute. It exists. ...as does regular farming! How can you possibly argue that decent farming (eg dairy) doesn't exist. Decent farming exists. Widely. Profitably. I'm looking out my window at decently raised cows right now.
If you think farming is wrong in principle, that's fine. We can debate this. Arguing that farming is inevitably dominated by bad factory farming practices is nonsense.
Still, it will have their child taken at birth, shot, plugged into a milk machine daily, etc.
Farming if left to the natural economic forces in the market will lead to factory farming, unless regulated which is usually not the case. It's on the rise in Europe for example.
It's about supply and demand, and about producing the cheapest product at the highest margin, spending the least amount of money. People at the supermarket will often just choose the cheapest option.
Also, there is the need to feed a lot of people, and with animal products its hard to do that with traditional methods especially given the current levels of meat consumption.
Basically, yes. I can see how opinions would differ, that human exploitation makes it wrong. I do see farming involving raising animals for milk & meat as decent if done decently. It's a big question, and imo, fundamental in that it doesn't have deeper reasons.
Singer (you mentioned above) is famously utilitarian (in the bentham sense). So he does go one deeper. Right & wrong = pleasure and pain. For cows specifically, the question gets too weird to do the utilitarian math... for me.
In some senses, cows wouldn't have exist separately from farming, and for the most part won't. They did in the aurochs sense, but auroch are extinct and were probably pretty different. Would the world be better without cows...
Anyway, a lot of this relates to where I live. Visit Ireland, you will encounter cows. Decent farming is more than viable. I'm not even sure feedlots is what you would get in an unregulated market. All agg markets are subsidized & regulated, so who knows. It's even possible to do pork and poultry well, though here it generally isn't.
Unfortunately overcoming years of marketing and influence peddling in the government is hard to overcome. Look how long it took to overcome the disinformation on fats and dietary cholesterol, and it still persists to this day. People are still afraid to eat too much salt, fat, cholesterol.
At the same time, look at how many people think it's fine to consume over 100g of sugars a day (mostly refined). It's kind of nuts when you think about it.
I agree, there are lots of responsible and ecosystem driven farms practices out there, it's just hard to convince a lot of people about the value. Aside: I did love the most recent South Park episode, Cartman's apology on processed (vegan) foods was hilarious.
So yes, your little vegan rant is a thing of the US.
Especially for things like chickens and pork, they are prevalent, but also for cows.
Of course, a large portion of European cattle is fed grain rations. Europe is literally covered with feed crops.
This argument that you hear a lot online as "it's a thing of the US" is just not true.
I don't think this is really true. people tend to associate "ethical" products with higher quality and are willing to pay more for them if they can afford it. this is the whole business model for stores like whole foods. of course whole foods sometimes misleads customers regarding how "ethical" the sourcing really is, but that's more a problem of marketing/advertising.
Its too much work and unrealistic to think people will be that aware, read labels, compare options, etc. It needs to come from the law.
sure, all I'm saying is both can be true. most people can not care and just by the cheapest stuff and you can have upmarket suppliers for whole foods and farmer's market.
obviously this is not a solution for all the animals. that probably does have to be some sort of law. good luck to any politician who campaigns on pricing poor people out of meat.
Of course it can. You just regulate the market and don't allow it to operate completely freely because it's well understood that if you do do so everyone will quickly converge on the lowest common denominator.
I'd just like to point out as you seem to be (wilfully?) unaware - there are far more ethical and natural ways of producing cows' milk commonly practised all over the world as they have been for centuries.
I'm also horrified by the abomination that is the modern US intensive factory model but it's disingenious to claim that this is the only way. Consumers can easily avoid it without cutting out dairy altogether as long as they're informed.
FWIW, when my grandparents ran a dairy, in the 40s-70s, they peaked ~300 head of cow and all production remained local -- within 50 miles of the farm. They went out of business because they couldn't compete with the global producers. The farm was eventually sold at auction to a coal mining operation.
If the world wants to engage in better farming practices, it's a global problem. It's not going to be solved by Americans alone.
Dairy price would sky-rocket and become a luxury item, and few people would be able to afford it several times a day every day, as its so common today.
This is simply not true. What you probably mean is it is not possible to achieve the same results while not caring how it is done (ie. going about our lives).
Throughout the history people relied on dairy way more than today. In some places it was almost life or death as during winter grain and dairy was the only feed available.
Of course, today, you don't want to spend your entire day tending cows and the field.
But don't try to imply that our way of life is the only one possible.
There exists whole industry of keeping cows and producing diary in humane way. It costs more, true, but not nearly as much as to make it impractical.
It is simply our choice -- people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
> people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
When vfc1 says "One thing implies the other", the charitable interpretation of that statement is likely "given the way our society is structured at this time, it's inevitable that this result will obtain".
When taking care of cows means spending more money on their welfare than some competitor, and when people are willingly disinterested in the welfare of the cows whose milk they consume, we have a good-old-race-to-the-bottom.
The most powerful work I've read on the topic is the 1975 classic "Animal Liberation" by a philosopher Peter Singer. In it he uses excerpts from literature written by the industry (presumably the most-rosy picture you can find of the conditions of animals in the factory farms) to show how horrible the conditions are (and to make an argument why we ought to abstain from consuming and why we ought to try to dismantle the system).
Singer argues that these conditions aren't good enough, agriculture inevitably leads to stuff he can't live with. That's a reasonable thing to argue. I disagree. It's not reasonable to argue that these conditions are a practical impossibility. That either prices skyrocket or cows can't fields. It's not true. It is possible, and common.
If we keep attacking the problem from the wrong angle, we won't ever have a good solution.
In most cases, this is actually done to create feed crops like soy and corn. Most of the agricultural fields in the world are used to feed animals either used for slaughter or for dairy and not to feed people directly.
Feeding the same amount of people directly instead of feeding animals and then eating them could be done with a fraction of the agricultural resources.
Dairy production is actually one of the most environmentally impactful things that we do, if we want to go that route.
Soy and corn, particularly corn, have many uses beyond animal feed.
> Most of the agricultural fields in the world are used to feed animals either used for slaughter or for dairy and not to feed people directly.
Please support that statement.
> Livestock is the world's largest user of land resources, with pasture and arable land dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of the total agricultural land. One-third of global arable land is used to grow feed, while 26% of the Earth's ice-free terrestrial surface is used for grazing.
So a lot of that land could be used for reforesting. And if it would be so simple to use that land to raise cattle, why are there factory farms then?
It sounds cheaper to raise the cows on grass which is free food, unlike rations. Clearly the amount of meat produced that way is not sufficient for the demand.
There are all sorts of alternatives to that paradigm, but none allow us to compare a single metric for both. The nature of the debate reminds me of the apocryphal drunk, looking for his car keys below the streetlamp even though he knows he didn't lose them there.
For example, states require cars to meet minimum quality, safety and emissions standards and also have insurance.
This is in recognition that, given choice, most people will not voluntarily pay for these things.
These are usually market gimmicks. They say a cow is pastured raised if they leave it out an hour a day, grass-fed if it gets fed half the diet in grass the other in grains, etc.
The costs of raising cattle and producing dairy in that way would simply not allow to meet the demand and it will never happen. Factory farms are the reality of what it takes to produce dairy for so many people.
Ultimately, in the end the result the animal dies a horrible death after having lived often a horrible live, so there is nothing humane about that.
This is the "market for lemons" problem: Consumers can't tell actually humane treatment from fake, which ends up economically pressuring farms to cut corners and go towards the fake.
You could register a trademark and have a certification program for "humane" milk / meat producers to use. Then go around raising awareness of what "pasture-raised" and "grass-fed" really means. If you do a good job of communicating, people will be happy to pay the extra $0.50 (or $1) to know the cows are actually chilling in the fields and not cooped up in a pen.
As an example, if a producer declares they meet a specific standard this could mean they voluntarily undergo regular audit of their entire process including how the cows are treated.
We do this for many products and services. Here in Poland, eggs are regulated in many categories from hens kept in cages to free-range. When you buy eggs they are all individually stamped with a mark that clearly indicates how hens are kept and fed and you, as a customer, can choose the more expensive product but with a knowledge that you get what you pay for.
It seems like it's just not very effective, most people are looking for the cheapest alternatives as one would expect - https://polandin.com/36653246/consumption-of-ethical-eggs-st...
But I agree that packaging for products contains multitude of markings and without extensive research it is difficult to recognize which markings are regulated and which are not and what they mean exactly.
The reason why factory farms exist is to meet the increasing demand. Farmers have every economic incentive to try to raise the animals in the cheapest way possible.
Still the cow is a prisioner, it has its childs taken away at birth and shot and gets impregnated immediately after, to keep producing more milk.
If the cow stops producing as much milk, it gets shot as well. Even if the cows lived a live chilling in the fields, all of this would still happen.
You can tour their farms and watch the process and they are very open about it.
http://debackerfamilydairy.com/
If we had more of these local farms servicing more areas it would definitely help reduce reliance on factory farms.
If you live in an urban/highly populated area I don't see anyway for a small farm like this to produce enough for the population.
Those huge structures are I imagine grain silos to store feed -https://www.google.com/search?q=de+backer+family+dairy&rlz=1...:
How many cows do they have? Apparently farms with more than 100 cows make up just 0.3 percent of the total dairy farm population.
You can clearly see that it's a factory-like installation. Are all those people part of the family or full-time employees? I bet several are employees.
At least it does not come from across the world it's local so less impactful.
> use to make the richest ice cream that you’ll ever taste.
The other day I tried one of those plant-based Magnum ice creams, I couldn't tell the difference and actually liked it more.
Anyway, decent farming is as possible today as ever, even moreso. Dairy would not be a luxury item, it would cost slightly more.
At the same time farmers here moan that they aren't getting enough money per pint. They are at a loss.
Meanwhile some luxury oat milk costs £1.80 a litre. The plant milks are a nightmare when you consider transportation. Be nicer to have local bottling of these alternatives. At least traditionally dairy farms were a little more localised and smaller.
That seems to compare favourably with US prices. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-2-Reduced-Fat-Milk-1-...
That's for grass fed cows that are free to roam outside.
How could it not, its economics and its a business. The goal is to produce the maximum amount of dairy at the lowest possible price, to fulfill an ever-increasing demand.
Maybe the agricultural factories are usually not of the same size as in the US, but the techniques and the consequences are the same.
Increasing animal welfare(, for lack of a better term,) results in higher environmental impact, because slower growth, longer lives and less conversion, require more feed and produce more emissions. At least globally - locally, large-scale concentrated operations have a high impact.
I can speak for southern Germany where there are still many small farms in villages. Due to space constraints, those businesses have to extract as much as possible out of every animal. I only have german sources, but this is what those stalls can look like: https://www.ariwa.org/leben-in-ketten-video/
The text says that cows are tethered like this for months or even years (basically their whole life). It's estimated that this affects about 1 million or about a quarter of the german dairy cows. I think the Matrix would compare favorably to this.
Not a specialist here, but I think I'm generally well informed and just trying to use some common sense. You probably pay a bit more for that milk than at the supermarket, right?
Most people in your country don't do what you do, they buy it at the supermarket. The dairy products at the supermarket simply don't come from those farms.
Do you think it would be possible for everyone in your city to consume milk that way?
Would there be enough farms to produce enough dairy that way at a reasonable price that most people would be ready to pay? I'm going to guess that probably not that would not be sustainable.
Still, in the end, the economic incentives for that farmer to produce more milk are the same. The farmer would be incentivized to use better milk yielding cows, get rid of the males, feed the cheapest possible food to the animals.
American here, but I feel like this has to be a very American ideal. Scandinavian countries have this idea of Lagom which is a sort of balance that's right for everything. Italians have this idea of high quality ingredients nurtured in the best way. French have this idea of doing things the exact old way and protecting that. Sure there are places in those societies still for factory farming, but the ethos that profit must rise above all reasoning is something I only see in my culture.
The competition will catch up, etc. it's the same thing. But there is this very powerful marketing message that these things only happen in the US, which is not at all true.
It's all these pictures of happy cows and farmers at the supermarket, that create an unrealistic perception of how animals are raised.
You should definitely double-check your common sense, just in case (I'll check mine too)
A lot of it under the form of crop subsidies:
> This land, and other targeted subsidies for livestock, is worth between €28-€32bn (£24-£27.9bn) in CAP direct payments per year for the animal farming sector, 18-20% of the EU’s total budget.
That seems like pretty heavy subsidizing to me, although in the US I have the impression that things are worse.
I think a lot of the europeans perception of the livestock industry comes from advertising, all those pictures on the supermarket of happy farmers next to happy cows and pigs, I think that's where a lot of it comes from.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/29/revealed...
I remember someone drawing that parallel before.
I mean, my fiancee and I used to rescue shelter dogs, and I can't square that behavior of putting through chickens and cows through hell in factory farms.
I still eat meat, but I feel like I'm getting closer to not doing that every day.
Shooting the animals yourself is not a very practical solution, or scalable. Sure you could do it for yourself and your family at great expense of your time and even some personal risk, but what about the rest of your city and country?
That would surely not scale, there is just not enough wild game to hunt, it can only be done at certain times of the year., etc.
It is 100% practical for me personally. I have the time and money for it. I can agree that isn't scalable, not everyone can hunt their own meat.
>but what about the rest of your city and country?
> It isn't for everyone. That would surely not scale...
I am not looking to solve a national problem, just trying to do what is best for me and my family.
Sure, it isn't scalable to many people, but I'd argue non-factory farms also isn't scalable.
Seriously, the worst thing for me about doing away with milk/cream/etc. would be having to get all new recipes. Especially for baking. Milk is in so very many recipes and you can't just switch it out for soy milk or almond milk.
Sometimes the stuff made with almond or coconut flour is okay, but I find the closer I stick to mostly eggs and meat, the better I feel.
P.S. Oh right, there's butter, but shortening has been around for ages and butter-flavored shortening about as long.
What's a "natural diet"? I always assumed that animals (including us) ate what they could get, and their diets were perpetually evolving along with their environment.
Dairy cows have a diet that is strictly designed by a nutritionist. When cows are fed corn, it isn't just the corn seed, it is the entire plant. Dairy cows get the more expensive premium feed, and soy is not a large part of that.
Yesterday I saw a documentary (Zembla) about the veal industry in The Netherlands (largest in EU, which exists mostly for export, also to US and China).
Terrible conditions for the calves, but what most surprised me is that the farmers only feed them with milk! This way their meat will have the light color associated with 'fresh, young' veal.
From the 1,500 veal producers, only a single one is biological, giving the calves proper food. Result is their meat is red in color.
Human neural networks are miscalibrated to trigger oxytocin around non-humans or even convincing fakes, for example many people are absolutely in love with stuffed animals too, but it's pretty evolutionarily maladapted.
>I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.
This has been standard operating procedure for nearly a century and has fed billions of people. Over that same time life expectancy has gone up significantly and milk remains one of the cheapest and most plentiful foods on the planet.
Your complains smell more like superstition than anything supported by scientific evidence.
So it's addictive in nature, this addition is probably meant to keep the calf close to the mother and away from harm.
But the addiction can be easily broken and after a while you start finding cheese actually a bit gross because its essentially solid melting fat.
As far as I know for people looking to eat in a less environmentally impactful way, eating only pork, chicken and eggs and removing the dairy and beef is great already.
Out of the calories you get from (most) cheese half of it is fat and the other half protein. It's absolutely not just fat.
So is the following plant-based foods
Gluten exorphin (from gluten found in cereals wheat, rye, barley) Gliadorphin/gluteomorphin (from gluten found in cereals wheat, rye, barley) Soymorphin-5 (from soybean) Rubiscolin (from spinach)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_peptide#Opioid_food_pep...
I have a hard time thinking that wheat and barley are that addictive, cheese however I can see it as being quite addictive.
Citation Needed
>I have a hard time thinking that wheat and barley are that addictive
Sorry but You having a hard time thinking that wheat and barley are that addictive is completely irrelevant.
Suggest to a few people that their inability to lose weight could be due to a low-grade gluten intolerance, and I predict you'll start to believe it fairly quickly. I try not to evangelize anyway, but dang people get defensive around their carbs.
Nah, that would be the Cavendish banana as they are effectively all clones.
It's not an all or nothing thing, there are several degrees to it. Some people will end up in the hospital, others with only sporadic digestive issues not that troubling at first, etc.
> "A meta-analysis of cow’s milk intake and hip fracture studies showed no significant protection"
> "milk may sometimes increase bone and hip fracture rates"
Milk and all it's derived products have lactose, so they should be avoided by people that can't digest them properly, which includes, for example, most African Americans and Native Americans among many others.
It's a gradual thing that gets worse with age, you become more and more lactose intolerant. If you find yourself having frequent diarrheas say once a month or so, consider cutting on dairy and see if it improves, you might be slightly lactose intolerant without realizing it.
Who does that?
The estimates of 1000mg or more have been pushed for decades by the dairy industry.
You can get calcium from greens like kale etc. eat a bit of brocolli, eat pulses like beans and lentils, use tahini as a sauce, drink fortified plant-milk.
Just eat a well-balanced plant-based diet and you will be absolutely fine. Studies show that plant-based diets don't cause brittle bones at all on the contrary.
You can get all the nutrients that you need, calcium included from a plant-based diet. The only thing you need to supplement is B12, which is produced by bacterias in the dust.
And as everything is so clean, we don't eat a lot of dirt anymore so that its advised to supplement. Animals don't have it too on factory farms, they get injected with it together with the anti-biotics for health reasons.
So might as well take it directly, otherwise calcium is not an issue at all in a plant-based diet and this can and it has been easily shown.
Edit: Check this YouTube playlist on bone health for more info - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd_ACcY8TDQC...
“ You can get all the nutrients that you need, calcium included from a plant-based diet. The only thing you need to supplement is B12”
Plant based milk is fortified with calcium carbonate. You just told us to take a calcium supplement added to a liquid.
That’s admitting it’s not possible to get enough calcium from plants.
With that logic there’s a lot of food we don’t need.. everyone just needs a multivitamin.
There is no indication of lack of calcium in vegetarians or vegans, many studies have shown it.
Most likely, its your expectation of how much calcium is actually needed and how essential dairy is that has been shapped through years of advertising and missinformation.
Actually, its the opposite vegetarians and vegans have usually stronger bones. Dairy has been actually linked to more bone fractures in general - https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/01/31/why-is-milk-consumptio...
Eat a balanced whole food plant-based diet and you will be absolutely fine and actually much healthier in general than with a standard diet.
Well that settles it then. Now all we need is to get everyone to do this.
Modern milk is also a processed food, which brings a host of other negative associated factors.
Link?
> Even worse, milk increases calcium loss in bones, resulting in higher rates of fractures.
I would love to read some serious research on this. Some 3-4 years ago I read similar advice, stopped drinking milk for about 5 months and started having serious problems with teeth which I never had before. Started drinking milk again and a month later all the problems disappeared.
People, don't stop drinking milk just because a random person on the Internet said so.
Funny you ask for scientific research to support OP's argument, then you follow it up with a personal anecdote about milk fixing your teeth problem in a month (which it assuredly did not).
The reason your teeth still have enamel is that they are constantly being remineralized with minerals (including calcium) in your saliva being deposited on the top surface of the tooth.
If you consume less calcium, less calcium will be in your saliva, and that’ll slow that process down, while erosion continues normally (leading to sensitivity and eventually cavities)
if the problems he’s referring to are sensitivity (not related to gum disease), and he wasn’t getting enough calcium without milk, it’s quite possible that milk (calcium) reduced the sensitivity.
Biologically this means that the infant would release the mother so that they could have another child, so there is biological adaption on most species to not drink milk past a certain age.
And we have it too via lactose intolerance, which is normal.
However, some relatively small percentage of humans developed the ability to drink milk around 10k years ago in Turkey, but it's not perfect. It gets worse with age as one would expect.
Human babies shouldn't drink cow's milk, it's completely unnecessary and there are questions about it's effect on long-term human health.
1. According to whom?
2. Can you name a type of food that has zero questions about its effect on long-term human health?
Globally seen yes. Locally it depends. Living in i.e Europe and having lactose intolerance is not normal.
https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Lactose_intolerance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
And we know since the mid 2000s by a dozen or so genetic studies that these genes did not arrive from a single culture or single timeframe, but are an example of "convergent evolution" aka it was beneficial for humans generally and thus when independent random mutations occurred they persisted longer for those people were more likely to breed and thrive. This happened several times in human history and are not a singular event.
And thus individual humans may have Lactase Persistence in adulthood and other individual humans may not have the persistence. Furthermore how much Lactose you can process with the Lactase enzyme is a dependent process where some people can handle some quantities but not too much quantity of Lactose all at once.
There's an entire class of people called "children" who are neither babies nor adults who can benefit from drinking milk (or any other good source of calcium).
But we're not animals. Animals cannot drive cars (not even the babies!) and we do. We're different than animals in some aspects.
Some of us are able to digest milk
We are animals like all the others, even if a percentage of our population evolved the ability to continue to digest milk into adulthood.
Also, there is a whole spectrum to it. You don't have to be 100% medically diagnosed as lactose intolerant, it might cause you ocasional digestive issues without you even know it.
Like those unexplained, once a month or once every 3 months diarrheas that many of us take as a fact of life, it's actually not normal and might very well be dairy that is causing it for a lot of people.
At least, a lot of us do it a lot worst than we realize, and there are a ton of people with recurring mild digestive issues which should not be consuming dairy daily at all, but keep doing do due to the public perception that its a healthy thing to do when in fact it's not.
The ones that can digest it, do it usually less well than they think they do. Mild chronic diarrhea is prevalent is western countries, and a degree of dairy intolerance could very well be one of the factors.
It gets worse for most people with age, as elderly people can become lactose intolerant, fully or only slightly. This does not happen overnight, its a progressive thing, many people gradually stop being able to properly digest dairy.
There are also lots of dairy products that contain little lactose, from lactose-free milk to cheese. And of course, it's pretty simple to just take lactase pills.
From a completely subjective perspective, dairy products are some of the tastiest foods, and they're objectively a huge part of food culture in Europe. I don't foresee them going away.
But there is this perception that they are absolutely essential due to decades of dairy industry advertising and lobbying, and it's simply not true.
https://www.agweb.com/article/how-it-works-sex-sorted-semen-...
https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0601-sexed-semen-econo...
It's also a somewhat controversial practice.
https://hoards.com/blog-24477-sexed-semen-an-asset-or-a-prob...
Contrast with the Aberdeen Angus beef cattle that my father bred. Beef bulls are, for whatever reason, fairly mellow. I would walk through the bull lot regularly. Now, I would always keep an eye on the bulls, and calculate how fast I could run to the fence and jump over, but I never received worse than the evil eye and a snorting hoof-stamp. A Holstein would have crushed me 3 times over by then. Also, beef cows generally are left to their own devices out in the pasture, so tracking when they are in heat is challenging making AI much less practical.
Factors like floor material also matter. On wet concrete, work boots have decent traction but bull hooves don't, so a bull with a nose ring is a little bit less of a threat. On dirt or dry manure, though, watch out.
Knowing what we do to their calves, I can't say I blame them. They have every reason to try and protect their calves from us.
From your first link:
> For sex sorted semen, the ability to shift the gender ratio of a calf crop comes from the fact that gender is determined by the sperm cell that fertilizes the egg. Sperm cells that result in a heifer calf (XX) have more DNA than sperm cells that result in a bull calf (XY).
> Of the several attempts to find ways to sort XX and XY sperm cells, the only method proven to be commercially viable is flow cytometry. Before going through the flow cytometer (sorting machine), a fluorescent dye is incorporated into the DNA of the sperm cells. They pass through the sorting machine in drops of liquid containing a single sperm cell per droplet. The machine detects the amount of florescence each cell emits; an XX sperm cell will have more florescence than an XY. A positive or negative charge is applied to the droplet depending on the type of sperm cell in it. Then, the machine can sort them into different collection tubes, based on the charge on the droplet, as it moves through a magnetic field.
It's not easy to find and correctly interpret solid numbers on this topic, but the USDA's National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS) survey appears to support a substantial increase in both artificial insemination (for both cows and heifers) and sexed semen (for heifers) between 2007 and 2014.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/animalhealth/monit...
From the 2007 report:
> Although it has been possible to sex and sort semen since the 1980s, the use of sexed semen is still not a common practice. The sorting process is extremely slow, can damage the semen, and greatly reduces the overall semen counts. Consequently, compared with unsexed semen, sexed semen costs more and contains fewer viable sperm per straw, leading to a lower conception rate. Because heifers are generally more fertile, it is recommended that sexed semen be used only in virgin heifers.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/dairy/downloa...
> Artificial insemination (AI) to natural estrus was used for first-service breeding for the majority of heifers on 57.1 percent of operations and the majority of cows on 54.7 percent of operations during the previous 12 months. Natural service (use of bulls for breeding) was the second most common practice used at first service for the majority of heifers and cows (33.2 and 21.7 percent of operations, respectively).
> For operations with pregnancies conceived via AI during the previous 12 months, sexed semen was used to inseminate 11.4 percent of heifers and 3.5 percent of cows. Because sexed semen costs more and contains fewer viable sperm per straw than unsexed semen, it is recommended that sexed semen be used only in heifers, which generally are more fertile than cows.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/dairy/downloa...
From the 2014 report:
> The highest percentage of operations (89.3 percent) used AI for breeding. AI was used exclusively on 43.7 percent of operations. Timed AI programs were used to manage heifer and cow reproduction on 34.9 and 55.5 percent of operations, respectively. For operations that used a timed AI program, more than two-thirds (68.6 percent) had used the program for 9 years or more.
> A higher percentage of operations used sexed semen in heifers than in cows (41.1 and 18.6 percent, respectively).
> About one-third of heifers (32.5 percent) were bred using sexed semen compared with only 3.4 percent of cows.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/dairy/downloa...
It's like the perfect case of encouraging something that isn't profitable for the common good.
If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.
Global famine? Give me a break.
That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale.
Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?
The biodiversity issue is intraspecies not interspecies.
Simply, copies.
If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly.
Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first couple, the superbug would likely start to tailer itself to genes that many plant species share, making the next jumps even easier.
Thing is, I'm pretty sure that ants and humans are only a few times further apart than potatoes and corn are. (Monocots and Dicots split ~140-150 Myr ago [0], Arthropoda and Chordata about ~1000 Myr ago [1]) (I initially thought the Monocots/Dicots split was further back... looks like a closer comparison would be to marsupials, diverging ~170 Myr ago)
There are already lots of viruses at scale that don't become superbugs and randomly jump the species barrier.
A species entirely made up of genetic clones is what this whole thread is about. I'm surprised you missed this.
This isn't Pandemic - there is no neural or neural analog on viruses - hell we couldn't even do that with networked nanomachines.
It would be far more plauisble for all housecats in the world to coordinate and plan the conquest of humanity as they at least have the ability to think and communicate.
I just think, on average, an individual virus particle will mutate at a certain rate. If there are a million times the population, a virus as a whole will then mutate 1 million times faster. So, if a certain virus would given a certain mutation, would jump to another species, and that had a certain chance to do so, then that same virus with 1 million times its normal population would have 1 million times the chance to do so.
That's about as spelled out and basic I'm able to make it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana: "After years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel."
Disease can still have tremendous global impact.
> Why did African swine fever spread so fast in China?
> Systemic problems in China may have accelerated the spread of African swine fever, a dangerous pig virus that has no cure or vaccine. According to an investigative piece by Chinese business portal Caixin last month, divergent interests of central and local officials, money worries and "political tasks" created incentives to hide disease reports. Lacking reliable information, farmers panicked and liquidated herds when they heard rumors of disease in their neighborhood. Big regional price differences due to localized pig liquidations and quarantines created strong incentives to truck pigs and pathogens around the country. Traders flouting bans easily evaded authorities--and were often abetted by corrupt veterinary officials who sold fraudulent health certificates and ear tags.
http://dimsums.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-did-african-swine-fe...
It is like putting crocodiles in hotel rooms up an elevator or a foot high stack of stairs - too steep for them to climb on their own. If crocodiles eat people then it is clearly the fault of the people who put crocodiles in the hotel rooms in the first place because they couldn't get there on their own as they are aquatic ground clingers.
It is interesting how selective breeding has played a part in several industries though. This example sounds a little appalling to my mind, but I'm a fan of horse racing and all thoroughbreds have to trace their lineage to one of three horses or they're not considered thoroughbred and I'm fine with that.
What is it that makes some examples unnerving, and some acceptable?
Mitochondrial Adam and Eve are not mates.
Some combination of the status quo and ideology.
Selected Excerpt from Wikipedia Below
Jallikattu is cited as one of the last available ways to promote and preserve the native livestock because the other uses of native breeds such as ploughing, breeding via mating and milk is on decline due to advancement in mechanization by tractors, improvement in artificial insemination and hybrid Jersey cows respectively. Karthikeyan Siva Senaapathy, a native breed activist, has said in an interview with the BBC that "[Tamil Nadu] had over one million Kangayam bulls in 1990. The population has fallen to 15,000 now." Minor protests were initiated by cattle rights activists and farmers such as Karthikeya Sivasenapathy who has appeared multiple times on the STAR Vijay talk show Neeya Naana. Music videos, such as "Takkaru Takkaru" by Hiphop Tamizha, and on Facebook videos to talk about jallikattu and its benefits inspired the protestors. Sivasenapathy has claimed that the indigenous cattle bulls are critically endangered in Tamil Nadu and banning jallikattu will have the adverse effect of wiping them out completely. According to Sivasenapthy and other pro-jallikattu activists, jallikattu is not just a sport that is deeply entrenched in Tamil culture, but it has also inadvertently served as a scientific method of breeding cattle.[clarification needed] This view is held among a majority of jallikattu supporters. The protest is aimed at revival of the native humped bull, called the zebu. The Tamil Nadu breed of zebu is unique to India and has several advantages compared to European varieties of cattle such as the Holstein cow. The native breeds are rich in the A2 variety of beta casein protein which aides easy digestion whereas milk from European Bos taurus contain the A1 variant of the beta casein protein which is related to allergies and some serious health conditions.The Holstein breeds found their way into India as a result of Operation Flood of late 1960's through cross breeding to increase the low milk yield of native breeds. As the Jersey cow can yield nine times the quantity of milk as a zebu in the same period, there is concern among protesters that without jallikattu providing an economic incentive for the breeding of zebu, the breed will become endangered and eventually extinct.
This is simply because you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents and 8 ggp and so on. Eventually this exponential growth lead to a size greater than the world population. 30 generation would mean more than 1 billion ancestors, and a lot of that would intersect, while the chance of having a certain individual be part of your ancestry greatly increases.
You are trying to let your bias manipulate others yourself.
Or you could think of it as constructing an IPv6 address by embedding the MAC in the low order bits.
My father-in-law used to get hours of joy from poring over semen catalogs. You know those really intense baseball fans that dig through page after page of player statistics, and quote them from memory to anyone who will listen? Translate that to dairy animals, and that was my father-in-law. The catalogs were full of tables of production records of each bull's progeny. He had two semen storage freezers for his speculative acquisitions. (Basically, insulated tanks cooled by liquid nitrogen. The milk hauler carried liquid N so that he could top off the farmers' semen storage as he pumped their milk into the truck.)
In the old days, you were paid by the total production with a butter-fat premium for richer milk. Then at some point they reduced the butter-fat premium but added a new premium for protein content. That caused a major reshuffling of the value of many bulls.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORA_Elevation
It seems like Elevation was one of his dad’s names, and Round Oak was part of his mom’s name.
Maybe I'm just annoyed that there's a bull who's more famous than me, and that he got that famous by being a lot more reproductively successful than me.
Because I like German Shorthair Pointers, take a look at the names in this list: https://www.westminsterkennelclub.org/breed-results?id=GSP&s...
Slipstream Kismet Wedding Jitters
So you never get back to two of any one species.
Not that I mind, quite enjoying these articles.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chad-thundercock (somewhat NSFW)
This is like saying 1 in X men are descended from Genghis Khan...
This doesn't mean that the bulls in the catalog are genetically identical. They still had lots of different mothers, as well as grandmothers. But it does show that this system of large-scale artificial insemination, with farmers repeatedly picking top-rated bulls, has made cows more genetically similar. Meanwhile, genetic traits that existed in Holstein cows a generation ago have disappeared
You'd (and I was) be surprised to know that Aberdeen Angus sires impregnate dairy cattle for offspring that end up as prime steak. And this isn't just for burgers, it's for premium supermarket cuts such as fillets.
Also (in the UK anyway), most beef that is labelled as Aberdeen Angus only need to be 50% Angus (i.e. be sired from an AA bull)...check the small print on the packaging. It's actually rarer (pardon the pun) to see 100% Angus steaks on the shelves (say as cuts of fillets or sirloin) because their muscle structure is somewhat less appealing to consumers.
Anyway, he's still in the village at the moment and can ask any questions anyone has tomorrow.
What cut did you have?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu9g5OmzcCpcJnmSYyHnIVw/vid...
My village pub is quite amazing, you meet all sorts of interesting people there. A couple of months ago I met a fund manager and author of "China, Trade and Power: Why the West's Economic Engagement Has Failed":
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1907994815
...which is well worth a read. That too was an interesting chat.
Glib comments aside, the beef industry (particularly, but not exclusively, in the US) seem to have a death-wish for our planet.