Actually, it probably arrived several years ago, but the first case didn’t appear until just this month. A dairy farmer in Chiba reported that one of his cows was staggering and showing signs of BSE infection. The animal was killed and brain tissue samples were sent to the Agriculture Ministry, which announced that the cow was indeed infected with BSE.
Up to this point, the story is merely unfortunate. To be suitable material for a Pit rant, we need to add some abject stupidity or small-minded evil. Here goes:
The dairy farmer, perhaps feeling he was due more than the compensation provided by the government and his insurance company, decided to recoup some of his losses by selling the carcass to a rendering plant where it was ground into cattle feed and shipped to other farms around the country. The feed distributor stopped some of the shipments when they found out where the carcass had come from, but they can’t account for where the rest of it was sent. Meanwhile, the Health and Agriculture ministries are standing around with their thumbs up their asses saying to each other, “it’s not our problem, it’s yours.”
Congratulations, you money-grubbing little sludgewit. You have, all by yourself, quite possibly fucked over the entire Japanese cattle industry, all for the price of single cow carcass. I hope it was worth it. As for the rest of the folks involved in this, I really can’t help laughing at you. For years, you’ve been trying to block food imports by spreading scare stories of how foreign food is so dangerous for Japanese people (for example, that Japanese intestines are much longer than non-Japanese ones, so foreign-grown rice will cause severe digestion problems). Now, thanks to your complacency, your incompetence and your disorganization, the major restaurant chains are all scrambling to reassure the public that they do not now, nor will they ever use Japanese beef. I applaud you on a job well done.
Artificial insemination is a standard method for breeding dairy cattle. Dairy cows have to have calves in order to give milk (lactate). It is pretty dangerous to keep your own bull. My grandfather, hard headed old Dutchman that he was, could never remember the term. I distinctly remember him turning to my uncle at a family Sunday dinner and asking: “Bill, did you call the . . . the what-do-you-call-him, . . . the cow fucker?”
I too thought it was going to be a thread about human/cow relations, maybe a variant of a joke I heard about a pig farmer.
A farmer decided he wanted to raise pigs, but, after acquiring the stock, couldn’t understand why all the pigs did was lay around in the pen. They seemed to have no interest in breeding. So he went to the vet to ask about it, and the vet said if the hogs weren’t getting it one maybe he should try artificial insemination. Farmer didn’t want to admit he didn’t know what that was, but after going home and thinking about it decided that it might mean HE had to …umm…perform, as it were. So he loaded the pigs up in his truck, took them into the wooods where they would be unobserved, and did his duty. But still nothing. So he tried again, thinking once might not have been enough. Still, all the pigs did was lay around in the pigpen. One day he is in the house and his wife comes home from shopping. He calls out, “Honey, are the pigs still just laying around?” She looks outside, and says “No, but they ARE in your pickup, honking the horn!”
