If a farm animal can’t be used after it is dead (because it was very old or died of a horrible disease for example) how does a farmer dispose of the carcass? I just can’t picture what happens to poor old Bessie - the one who was such a good milker for so many years don’tcha know - when she finally kicks the bucket so to speak.
I’m picturing a smaller family farm, not enormous milk barns or something.
How about if there are a lot of dead animals? If some nasty disease swept through and took out all the sheep, what do you do with the bodies? Are they burned, buried, sold or what? I’m sure that except in the most dire of situations something can be salvaged from the body but seems like there still would be a lot left over to deal with…
Random example: my father-in-law lost a cow when a tree fell on it in a storm. He talked of having a meatpacker come out, but didn’t get around to it. Eventually he “let nature take its course” - vultures etc. pecked the thing clean within a week.
There are services that one can call to remove dead animals, generally to the local rendering plant. The one where I grew up could be reached at 1-800-DEAD-COW. My parents actually did have to call once.
You call the local rendering plant and they pick it up. I don’t know what happens to the bodies after that. I assume they’re incinerated, since a sick animal can’t be used for feed.
I don’t know what the procedure would be in the case of a mass die-off, but on our farm when a cow or a calf died we just dragged it out into a pasture away from the rest of the cattle and let nature take its course. There are always plenty of scavengers out looking for a meal. The carcasses were pretty generally stripped within a week. Even the bones didn’t seem to last too long.
Years ago I camped on the dairy farm of a friend’s uncle in Virginia. He just dragged the carcasses to a back lot and let the vultures do their thing. But maybe they don’t do that any more.
Hi,
The ranchers/etc that I know tend to do the drag out thing. Often, they will “stake out” the carcass and make a few opportunistic reductions in the local coyote population. I personally probably have the only sheep in Nevada that get cremated (only because I work for a vet and its free). I don’t think my flock of 12-20 sheep really qualifies as a “farm” though.
Or if the animal was closer to pet than livestock – say for example a horse, call a guy with a backhoe to dig a ‘grave’ and cover it over. Most folks don’t like to see their old trail horse picked clean by the buzzards.
Mr. Stuff was a dairy farmer for 20-odd years, and he’s dealt with a lot of carcasses as a result. He’s far too cheap to pay someone to come get a carcass. Usually, he’d take the carcass back somewhere and let nature take its course, or “bury” it in the dump on the farm - kind of a large swill pot in the ground. Yucky but effective.
For awhile, he knew a guy about 30 miles away that raise tigers and wolves and bears (oh my!) and would pick up any cow carcass for free and feed it to his animals. He wouldn’t pick up anything with a nasty disease, of course, but Mr. Stuff never ran into that problem. Anyway, it worked out well for both of them. The guy got free tiger food, and Mr. Stuff didn’t have to deal with the body. The guy moved his menagerie further away, though, and Mr. Stuff sold off his herd – we only have about 15 head of beef cattle right now – so we don’t see him anymore.
I grew up right next to a dairy farm but not on one. When a calf dies (I can recall one incident where my uncles short lived family dog killed a calf and a few where they just died during birth) my uncle basically throws them out in their dump back in the woods. I can’t recall an incident where a full grown cow has died, to be honest. I’m reasonably confident that when they suspect a cow (they don’t have bulls) is sick and/or near death they call the vet then they call the slaughterhouse and they dispose of it if they figure it can’t be used.
So to answer your question, my uncle used to just throw them out back in the woods. Maybe the process has changed since the mad cow scare, I really don’t know.
My mother in law ran a dude ranch high up in the Colorado Rockies. One winter, one of their percherons died and there being 8 feet of snow on the ground they did not have many options. Finally they decided to bury the horse in a large snow bank and take care of it in the spring. The two ranch dogs, Great Pyrenees, found the horse and for the rest of the winter it was known as Daisy’s Diner.
In the spring they dragged them off into a pasture and nature took its course.
Almost forgot, my uncle was a dairy farmer in Pennsylvania, he would dump the calves into a quarry on his land. This was back in the 70s, they filled the quarry in the 80s. No idea what he did after that.