Allegedly, farmers are being forced to liquidate pigs cows and chickens because of lack of demand because of C19.
Is there any we can allow these animals to just wander federal open lands and at least give them a chance to fend for themselves? Is there a way we can put them on ships and export them to countries with hunger issues and let them butcher them?
Surely, just mindlessly slaughtering livestock because of economics seems mindless to me, no?
Not sure what to do, given the scope.
I called a rancher friend yesterday to inquire about relieving him of at least one animal, should he decide to destroy any of them. So far he’s decided to continue feeding until next year and see what happens. I also contacted someone who works with ranchers in another area with the same question. I’ve found some good deals on freezers, so we can try to take advantage of near-zero prices to get one filled with beef. Worst case scenario, we might end up needing it.
They would have been mindfully slaughtered for economics, so why the fit of conscience now?
And the notion of just turning them loose in a national park or reserve to fend for themselves is asinine and just means most are going to die in a much more inhumane manner. And for the remnants herds of pigs going feral and then requiring to be shot and culled after they trash the reserve is no better result.
Yes, finding a practical use for them would be good but dumping them in some sort of aid program really only be done with carcasses. The US has no capability for livestock exporting and there are a whole raft of quarantine regulations to be negotiated and agreed.
There’d be a much better chance of placing them domestically through the usual supply chain.
Cite that ranchers are slaughtering animals due to lack of market demand? People are still hungry. (I thought the problem was the big slaughterhouses are being closed, disrupting the supply chain …)
Taking a domesticated animal that’s been fed in a pen all its life and “setting it free!” is abysmally cruel. Letting cattle and pigs roam grasslands at will is asking, begging, for ecological damage.
Shipping live animals overseas isn’t easy, or cheap, and that’s even without being overly concerned about humane treatment.
You have to remember that these animals cost money every day and so if they were kept around for another year their input cost, in the case of a steer, would come close to doubling. Also, while the demand for meat hasn’t changed it really won’t change in a year when the meat packers are back working so then the ranchers would have twice the number of cattle available at 150% more expensive input cost but the demand would be flat which typically drives down the sales price so ranchers would spend more money to get less money. That’s not going to happen.
The second option is by passing the FDA meatpacking plants. This would be sending the animals to all of the wild game plants around the country but then it can’t be sold in stores and those plants typically have much less ability to be safe. This option is similar to the buying a side of beef yourself If you’ve got freezer capacity its a good time to stock up on meat. This isn’t a high volume option since most meat eaters couldn’t store 150 pounds of meat.
Lastly, there is the option of finding homes for all of these animals. Releasing them in to the wild would do untold damage, as already mentioned feral hogs are large problems in most of the country and could you imagine what would happen if you hit a cow instead of deer with your car. On the small farm front most of those people already have livestock and can’t significantly increase their carrying capacity and convincing someone to take in a 200 pound hog isn’t exactly simple.
In the end these animals live their lives on a conveyer belt and at the end of the belt is death the only question is if we can make use of their corpse and right now the answer is not safely.
Right, it’s definitely more from processing plants closing due to COVID than lack of end user demand. Although, for example with organic farms in the outer NY area (my daughter manages livestock at one) there is also an issue with finding new distribution channels where farms previously relied heavily on high end restaurants in the City as customers for premium meat and produce. The people who went to those restaurants still have to eat, but finding a new way to those customers for the same high end products, on the fly, can be a challenge.
As other answers already noted, we’re talking about the business of raising animals for slaughter for profit (or at least ‘surplus’ for farm operations part of broader purposed non-profit orgs, as it sometimes the case with organic type operators). If convinced there’s something basically ethically wrong with that business, you wouldn’t be in it. Now the animals might be slaughtered sooner than they otherwise would be and in a regrettable waste of food, if the supply chain breaks down somewhere. But anything that introduces major new costs is not going to solve what is basically a cost problem, the cost of feeding them without an accessible market for the meat. Finding homes for the animals as pets, while not ridiculous on its face like ‘release them into the wild’, is probably not going to work on a large scale in practical cost terms.
Very much seconding all of this; and adding to the last one that not all countries will accept live animals from all other countries due to possible risk of transmission of diseases known to be in some areas and not in others. Also, of course, I expect some of the other countries are having similar problems.
In addition to the above, which is true: modern breeds of meat livestock are bred to be slaughtered at a certain age. Keeping them beyond that point can result in carcasses which are much less desired by the market; the meat is tougher from an older animal, and the fat distribution and quantity is likely to be different.
I doubt such plants actually have “much less ability to be safe”; in at least most states they’re also strictly regulated, and because they’re usually run by a small number of people, sometimes all of them members of one family, the chances of specifically covid-19 transmission within small slaughterhouses is probably actually much lower.
However, I very much doubt they’ve got the capacity. I usually buy locally-raised meat that is processed by one of the local small slaughterhouses, and even in normal times there’s often a waiting list to get an individual animal done. In most areas, most such places have been driven out of business by the small number of very large operations which are now experiencing problems; the survivors aren’t able to suddenly re-absorb the entire nation’s capacity now that we’re having drummed into us one of the reasons why that consolidation wasn’t such a great idea.
Given the some zoos because of a lack of revenue from guests, are considering slaughtering some of their lesser species to feed their carnivores, could ranchers/farmers give meat to zoos??
Sure, they could, but they’d exhaust the market for meals on the hoof very quickly. I wonder how the Tiger King’s zoo is handling this with no income?
I’m sure that’s happening to a small degree but zoos could only consume a tiny trickle of the vast river of meat products that normally flow through our supply chain.
Also consider, it’s one thing for a relative novice to slaughter and break down small/medium sized mammals. It’s a whole other issue when the animal to be processed weighs several hundred pounds. You need large, somewhat specialized tools and a certain amount of skill to do it safely.
I wasn’t referring to safety from COVID but instead food safety practices. I have approached a couple of different local places around the country about processing meat for resale particularly at grocery stores and was told they couldn’t meet the FDA guidelines if their lives depended on it. If we also increased the through put from a couple of steers a week and a couple hundred elk in the fall to try to make up the 5% short fall I’m sure their practices would get more lax. That isn’t to say I haven’t or wouldn’t use them for my own meat but that someone is more likely to get sick as they tired to process hundreds of hogs and brought in extra staffing to get the work done instead of the family group they are used to.
I do like the zoo idea and would be interested in the response from both zoos and farmers but I’d suspect that even a large zoo could only use a couple of cows a day.
Excess livestock will be slaughtered a bit earlier than usual and their bodies wasted. How much feed grain (mostly maize corn) will then overwhelm granary storage capacity? Will massive dumping ensue?
I doubt you’ll see very much outright dumping of grain. Temporary, outdoor grain storage facilities are easy to set up. They’re little more than a giant pile of grain in a vacant field somewhere, usually but not always covered with a plastic sheet. Losses from critters and rot are fairly high from such storage measures but are sufficiently low to be manageable.
IMHO, the worst likely result of the grain glut would be a massive reduction in plantings because farmers know they can’t sell it profitably. this will result in some farms going under entirely and wild yo-yos in market fluctuation for years.
We are going to release the tigers onto federal lands at the same time we release the excess livestock. It’s nature’s way.
I mean, if wolves were good for Yellowstone, then tigers will be even BETTER. And smilodons are in evolutionary memory. Basically a reintroduction, really.
It may vary from state to state. As I understand it, in New York State the main difference is that an FDA plant must have each and every carcass inspected by a federal inspector; places only inspected by the State have the facility inspected, but not the individual carcasses. The facility inspections cover safety practices; the required facility setup is designed for them, with washable surfaces, required sanitary facilities, separation of areas for live animals, kill room, preliminary and final processing, and so on. Since the inspectors aren’t there all the time I’m sure it’s possible that a particular place might not bother washing up properly, or whatever, while there’s no inspector around; but I’d expect the smarter ones to realize that there’s no sense in getting their customers sick.
I agree with you that trying to put huge numbers of additional animals through a plant that’s only set up for a much smaller number would be likely to cause problems.
Is there any zoo in the United States seriously considering this?
Not in the US, but elsewhere.
Or a really hungry pride of lions who normally eat larger prey.
[Really, lead cow to cat pen, bolt gun to the head, toss it in. Lions/tigers/whatever takes care of the rest. It isn’t like we need primal cuts or anything. ]
All you really need is a way to get the cows or pigs to the zoo, a place to pen them while they are trickled into the supply chain.
That’s what I was thinking, big cats really don’t care if their meat is chops, roasts, steaks or asshole.
Mmmmm! Asshole…