I’m hoping that someone with some insight into livestock raising can give some perspective on what drives the number of animals that get raised - and eventually killed.
Basically, what I’m wondering is: if someone wishes not to contribute to the killing of animals, is it necessary to avoid purchasing all animal products, or just the key items that drive the markets?
My sense is that each type of lifestock has one principal use that determines the size of the market. Other products from that animal are, essentially, leftovers (note I’m focusing on the products that require the animal be killed; not milk, manure, etc.)
For instance, it would seem that the beef market alone drives the demand for cattle. If the beef market were to go down by, say, 10% (and stay down), in the long run there would be 10% fewer cows needed as livestock. I’m doubting that farmers would go through the expense of raising those extra cows solely for the value of their leather, gelatin, etc.
I suppose that if the beef market went completely to zero, one of the other uses would become dominant and support some size of a cattle market, but I bet it would be WAY smaller than the current one.
If this is true, then the goal of not personally causing animals to be killed is primarily acheived by not buying the following products:
Meat from animals that are primarily raised (or harvested) for food: cattle, pigs, poultry, fish.
Cheese made with animal rennet (since calves are killed to collect the rennet, separately from their meat).
**Hides from not-primarily-meat animals ** (minks, sables, alligators)
**Specialty items from not-primarily-meat and not-primarily-hide animals ** (shark-fin soup, eastern medicine from rhinocerous horns, etc.)
But there are a lot of “if’s” in this, and I’d like to hear some confirmation/argument from someone who knows about this area.
I’m also hoping that this doesn’t turn into a discussion of the issues around vegetarian ethics, etc., and that it can stay on the topic of what drives livestock market sizes.
From a purely economic standpoint (since that’s what you’re asking) if fewer people eat beef or pork, there will be fewer cow hides and pig skins with which to make leather. Accordingly, the price of leather will go up, and at some point the price of hide will increase enough to make cattle/hog production profitable, even if the reduced consumption of the meat products means a lower price for beef and pork.
However, according to this document the single best way to reduce the killing of livestock animals is to reduce the demand for export, since the export market for U.S. livestock is several times the domestic market.
OK. I’ve lurked here for as long as I can remember. This post has finally given me the excuse to ‘buy-in’ to help fight ignorance. So, if this post doesn’t turn out right, or I do anything wrong, please forgive me.
The export market for US livestock is NOT several times the domestic market. Just the opposite, in fact. Without taking the time to dig up a staggering amount of statistics and links, the breakdown on the pork industry, for instance is about 10% exports, 90% domestic.
The export market IS very important to livestock prices. As with most supply and demand situations, the loss of ten percent of demand can be devastating to prices. However, that is not always the case. The US beef industry lost the vast majority of its export market when BSE was discovered. Cattle prices took a brief hit, but are still quite profitable.
My answer to the OP? In a global market, there is nothing any one person or group can do to have an impact on demand or supply. Stop eating meat if it makes you feel better, but there won’t be any packing plants slowing down the chain because of it.
And this forces me to go back and review my own cite and admit I was wrong :smack: johnsonlnl is right. About 10% of the market for beef is for export, and about 25% of the market for chicken.
In other words, I read my own statistics backward, and I apologize for perpetuating ignorance.
I suspect this will turn out to be a debate, but the GQ answer is that most animals jointly produce a number of products and ALL prices count in output decisions, including the negative price farmers get from the bits you have to pay people to take away.
That being said, there is no way you can completely isolate yourself from any activity in the economyand you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
I understand what the OP is saying. Basically, he’s saying that wearing leather or not wearing leather has no impact on the life or death of livestock. Regardless of whether or not the hide is sold, the animal is going to be slaughtered for its meat. From a standpoint of preventing animal deaths, a 5% reduction in the amount of beef eaten would save more animals than a 100% ban on the sale of leather. Or in terms of personal actions, a decision to reduce your trips to Burger King by a third will have a greater impact than a vow to never wear leather.
I’d have to see some actual evidence before I could believe that. Livestock farming is no different to another business,a nd as such is dictated by profit margins. For example a beast may currently be worth $400 to a farmer and $50 of that is from the sale of the hide. If that $50 is removed then somewhere there will be farmers who decide that it simply is not profitable to produce beef for $350/animal. Those famrers may switch to sheep or to plant crops. But either way not wearing leather does indeed have an impact on the life or death of livestock.
Your suggestionis equivalent to saying that not buying fries will have no effect on the number of McDonalds’. Of course thats not true, the sale of fries may be a small part of the total profit but in at least some instances it will be the difference between the business being more profitable than an alternative or less. The same applies to leather and cattle production. At some point someone will decide the profit margins have become too slim to make it worthwhile to continue. If you cut the profit margin by removing the price of the hide then the whole enterprise becomes unattractive.
The only alternative is that the price for the farmer remains constant and is subsidised by the increased cost of meat fom the abattior. But increasing the cost of meat itself will drive down demand for meat and the number of beasts produced.
Do you have any figures to support this claim? I can only possibly see this as being true if two conditions are met. First that value of the hide to the abbatoir is less than 5% of the total value of the beast. This may be true but I wouldn’t bank on it. And secondly if their is no net loss from converting the hide into fertiliser or other waste product. Once again I suspect this would be true but wouldn’t count on it since the hide has to be removed thoroughly for processing and waste goods aren’t particularly high value.
There’s no easy way to answer the OP, not least because beef cattle numbers fluctuate wildly with market demand anyway. One way of calculating it via surrogate would be to find out what the actual value of the hide is to the abbatoir. One can then simply subtract that value from the current price and look at past herd numbers when the market price was at those levels. Annual herd numbers and prices are freely available on the web for most markets, but I have no idea how to find out what the value of hides is.
Not an actual cite but I think it’s almost certainly true if you think about it. Let’s assume that each cow contains enough beef to produce 100 hamburgers and enough hide to produce two leather coats. Now assume that there’s a national demand for 100,000,000 hamburgers each year and 50,000 leather coats. So 1,000,000 cows would have to be slaughtered to cover the need for beef and only 25,000 cows would need to be slaughtered to cover the need for leather. What’s going to happen is that 1,000,000 cows will be slaughtered each year; all will be turned into beef and 1 out of 40 will turned into leather. You could increase the demand for leather coats tenfold or decrease it tenfold and it would have no effect on the number of cows slaughtered - that number would stay steady at 1,000,000. But any change in the demand for beef - even a single percent - will have a direct effect on the number of cows slaughtered.
The trouble is that you haven’t adressed the actual issue, which is that the market price is determined by the price of the whole beast, not the price of the meat alone. If the price of the whole beast decreases (which it almost certainly will if there is no leather market) then either the price of beef will increase or else the profit of the producer will decrease. Either way fewer animals will be produced.
I do take your point, but things don’t work that way in practice. Abbatoirs compete agianst all other abbatoirs. They need to offer the best price they can for each animal. If they can’t make as much money per animal because the leather jacket market ceases to exist then they can’t pay as much, it’s that simple. It doesn’t matter why an individual beast is slaughtered, all that matters is the profitability of an individual abbatoir.
I’ll try another analogy. Imagine that nobody decided to buy drinks, snacks etc from gas stations. Most gas stations make 75% of their money from selling gas. Yet nearly 100% of customers buy gas. But we can’t simply say that if everybody stopped by snacks that would have no effect on the number of gas stations because the gas would be sold with or without the snacks. In fact 99% of stations would go belly up, because that 25% of revenue from snacks is the entire profit margin.
Now apply the same reasoning to abbatoirs. It’s true that only 25% of cattle need to be slaughtered to meet the leather demands, but that is not the same as saying that this will result in only a 25% loss of profit. In fact it could result in a 100% loss of profit.
The mistake you are making is assuming that you can trim 25% off the value of the component without affecting demand for the end product, provided that 100% of the component have alternative uses. That’s not the case. Even if 100% of animals are utilised for beef that 25% loss of value may be 100% of theprofit margin. Remove it and it may not be profitable to operate any abbatoirs anywhere, and hence it results in a 100% decrease in cattle production.
Now clearly that isn’t the case but I hope you see my point. You can’t simply assume that because leather represents less of the total throughput than beef that it must be insignificant it the profitability the entire enterprise. It could conceivably be crucial to profitability and hence to demand and hence to production.
Let’s imagine that an abbatoir currently makes an average profit of $50/beast, and that profit is entirely due to leather sales. Now if the demand for leather increases tenfold wouldn’t that increase the profit tenfold? And if the profit increases tenfold wouldn’t that encourage abbatoirs to compete with each other to purchase more beasts? And won’t that competition take the form of offering higher prices to producers? And if producers of cattle are getting offered more money won’t that in turn encourage more people to produce cattle?
It seems that a tenfold increase in the damnd for leather coats could have a massive effect on the number of cows slaughtered. It lamost certainlyown;t in relaity, but with no figures on what percentage of the profit is represented by hides we can’t know.
I hate to break this to you, but dairy cattle are slaughtered when they no longer produce enough milk for their existence to be profitable. When they get old, when they get sick, if they suffer from chronic mastitis – it’s off to the abattoir with Bossie. Additionally, steers from dairy herds are sold for slaughter. The majority of dairy cattle are not dying of old age. Their meat generally doesn’t go to people food, but their carcasses go to pet food, gelatin, leather goods if the hide is of high enough quality, etc. The animal is most likely going to be killed whatever its use, so if you’re abstaining from animal goods for reasons of conscience, you should really abstain from all of them, since even drinking milk and eating cheese will result in non-natural animal death. The more dairy products purchased, the more non-natural animal death, since the demand will go up, the number of dairy cattle will go up, the number of non-natural deaths will go up. Unless you have a tremendous soft spot for Bossie, she is not allowed to frolic merrily in a pasture eating her head off after her milk production goes past the point of her financial viability.
There’s no predicting whether or not a calf will be male (the ones that become steers via castration), so when one is born, you’re kind of stuck with him. Not every Holstein or Jersey or Guernsey born is female. For example, the majority of calves born this spring and summer on my family’s dairy farm were bulls (8/12, I think), but last year they were mostly heifers. Next summer, those bull calves, relieved of their testicles in March, are going to be sold, along with any heifers that Dad wants to get rid off. The steers will be sold for slaughter and some other farmer will buy the heifers.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s a little naive to suppose that by only purchasing dairy products, you’re not going to be “responsible” for an animal death. Dairying does require the animal to be killed ultimately. This doesn’t mean they’re mistreated during their lives. It just means that keeping every single Holstein alive and fat is not a financially viable option.
I don’t even want to imagine what the beef market going to zero would mean for the dairy market, since a lot of dairy farmers depend on that steer check every year. Having the hog market go to hell in the late 80s was scary enough when we were raising feeder pigs.
And you’re probably only going to get, at the most, one leather coat out of a single hide, when you take into consideration the shrinkage from tanning, following the grain of the leather, and cutting around flaws in the hide. One leather coat = one non-natural death.
I’d like to clarify one issue concerning the buying (or not) of leather coats. One of the single biggest demands for animal hides has nothing to do with what they sell down at Wilson’s Leather…you’d have to head to PetCo, WalMart and the like. The highest price per pound at the retail level for any part of the pig starts with the ears and then various bits of hide which are used for…you guessed it… doggy chew toys and treats.
That being said, the percentage of the carcass value that the hide represents at the packing plant (abbatoir for people outside the midwest) is generally on the order of something less than 1 %. (This is for pigs…cattle could be somewhat different.)
It should be noted that during this timeframe, Canadian beef was banned from US markets, and to the best of my knowledge this diminished supply even more than demand was lost from the loss of US export markets, and beef prices were actually higher throughout most of the time following the discovery of BSE in the US.
Thanks for the great discussion, guys. There’s a lot here to ruminate over A couple of thoughts in particular.
Very well put, and hopefully someone can put some numbers on how these factors play together, so we don’t have to assume one way or the other. As a point of reference, though, let me go back to the link that was posted in the very first response in this thread.
The topic here is *precisely * the market demands that will drive herd expansion/contraction in the US livestock industry. If you read through the article, there seems to be a rock-solid assumption that cow = beef, pig = pork, etc. - to the point where the terms are often used interchangeably. It just seems that nothing else really comes into play in any significant way.
Also a good point, though it occurs to me that this is a choice on the part of the farmer, not something intrinsic to milk-drinking and cheese-eating. I suppose, though, that to be consistent to this ethic one would need to be willing to pay extra for milk from farms where they promise not to slaughter the cows. Sort of like paying extra for eggs from cage-free farms.
I don’t know about the big operations, but I can tell you a lot of hides are simply thrown away because the demand/margin on leather isn’t high enough around here. I just raise a few cattle, mostly for my own freezer. The last time I had one slaughtered, neither of our local butchers could even tell me of a place to send the hide for tanning, so we ended up discarding it.
I later talked to a neighbor who sends his hides in quantity to a place four hours away and pays a bundle to get back the tanned leather.
So, around here, eliminating some demand for leather would have precisely zero effect on the number of cattle slaughtered.
But market demand takes into account all the different uses for the animal once slaughtered. Animals are referred to by the main product to avoid confusion. Instead of saying ‘calf’ you say ‘veal’ or ‘dairy’ to denote what you are using it for. Anything that you do that makes an animal carcass more profitable leads to more animals slaughtered…consider the following:
Value of carcass used for meat for human consumption only=1000
Cost to raise beef to slaughter size=950
Profit to farmer/slaughterhouse, etc=50
Cost of beef assuming 1000#usable beef wholesale=$1/#
Value of carcass used for meat blah blah blah=1000
Value of leather from carcass=25
Value of organ meats to pet food=50
Value of hooves and horns to glue=10
Value of bones to Jell-o=35
Value of suet to bird food=5
Cost to raise blah blah=950
Profit blah blah=50
Cost of beef assuming 1000# usable beef wholesale=87.5c/#
Lower beef price=higher beef demand=more consumption of beef=more cows transformed into steaks.
Either A, you are only one person and your consumption pattern doesn’t make a damn bit of difference or B, every animal product you have ever bought, borrowed, admired, etc kills a poor li’l ol’ cow.
Now, if you want to shut down the animal for food industry, hit 'em in the pocket book. Buy up all the hay and grain and water rights until you get a monopoly and sell them for an outrageously inflated price.
Though xbuckeye briefly touched on this, most posters skipped over the cost of feed. In a year with a drought, hay and grain prices go way up. A farmer who grows all his own feed might decide to keep the same size herd, but others will find they can’t grow beef or pork at a profit with high feed prices. Many will sell off more animals than usual, and some will sell the whole herd and get out of the meat business for a year or two. The extra selling drives down the prices for cows and hogs even more. High grain prices will affect meat prices for more than that year, because it takes a while for the new herds to grow to saleable weight.
Blake, I think you and I are in agreement on the facts but were talking about different issues. I certainly agree that leather demand will have an effect on market price, which is the issue you’re discussing. But I still say it has no effect on the number of cattle that are slaughtered.
If the cost of raising cattle goes up, the price of beef will also have to rise. But if people love their burgers and are willing to eat the same amount at the higher prices, then the economic factors will have all changed but there would be no change in the number of cattle slaughtered. If on the other hand, people decide hamburgers cost too much and start eating chicken instead, beef demand will decrease and the number of cattle slaughtered will decrease. And if on the gripping hand, the cost of raising cattle decreases, beef prices are lowered, and people eat more hamburgers, then more cattle will be slaughtered. But my point is that the number of cattle slaughtered is directly connected to how much beef people are eating - more beef = more slaughters; less beef = less slaughters. The money being exchanged is obviously of interest to the ranchers but doesn’t concern the cows or the vegetarians.
Leather will remain a side product of the beef industry. As long as cattle are being slaughtered for beef, a percentage of their hides will be sold for leather. The percentage might go as high as 90% or drop as low as 1%. This will affect the prices but will have no effect on the number of cattle being slaughtered - they’re still being slaughtered for meat not hides. The only way that leather demand will impact the slaughter rate is the extremely unlikely scenario that leather sales rise so high that there’s more demand for a cow’s worth of leather than there is for a cow’s worth of beef - then leather would become the determining factor in how many cattle are slaughtered and beef would become the side product that was left over after the hide was sold. But there has never been any time when the leather demand even approached the beef demand.
Can you provide one example in the entire history of the western world where people continued to consume the same amount of a product despite an increase in prices? If you can’t then why should we assume that beef is the only product to which the basic laws of economics do not apply?
I agree entirely that if the price of beef doesn’t affect the sale of beef then of course beef sales won’t decline if beef price increase. But that is tautological and goes no way towards answering the question at hand.
What we need is some evidence to suport your idea that the price of beef doesn’t affect the sale of beef. Without any such evidnece we are forced to assume that beef follows the same economic laws as every other product, namely that as price increases demand decreases.
No.
That only works if the sole profit incentive for slaughtering cattle is the sale of beef. And we both agree that leather sales may be the primary profit incentive for slaughtering cattle.
Supply and demand economics is a two-way street, as the name suggests. Supply dictates demand by dictating prices, but demand also dictates supply by dictating sales. The reaction runs both ways.
So while the number of cattle slaughtered is connected to how much beef people are eating the reverse is also true: the amount of beef people eat is determined by how many cattle are slaughtered. More cattle slaughtered = lower beef prices = more beef consumed.
If leather sales are what determines the profitability of slaughtering cattle then any increase in leather sales will increase the amount of profit to be made by slaughtering cattle and hence increase the number of cattle slaughtered. That will occur even if beef prices remain static because business enterprises focus primarily on profit, not turnover.
I think I see what is confusing you. Cattle are not being slaughtered for beef or hides. Cattle are bing slaughtered for profit. When you start thinking about it that way I believe you will see why your reasoning is flawed.
Let’s assume that leather is a side product of the beef industry, but represents 100% of the proifit of the beef industry. As long as cattle are being slaughtered for profit a percentage of the hides will be sold for leather. If the percentage goes 90% higher then profits will increase 90% and 90% more animals will be slaughtered to take advantage of the profits to be made. If the perecentage drops as low as 90% below our benchmark then profits will decrease 90% and 90% fewer animals will be slaughtered.
No. Leather will have an impact so long as it adds anything at all to profitability. I really think your confusion stems from thinking of cattle as being slaughtered for a specific reason, rather than being slaughtered to make money. Once you accept that cattle are slaughtered for profit and nobody cares where that profit comes from it should be clear that leather sales don’t need to be worth more in gross terms than beef sales, they simply need to be worth anything at all. If that worth is removed then the profit declines by exactly the same amount, and as profit declines so too will the number of animals slaughtered.
A few direct questions Little Nemo.
An ababtoir pays an average $350/beast.
They sell all the products of that beast (gut contents, blood, hooves, leather, beef etc) for an average $400.
The average amount the recieve for the leather component is $50
What is their profit per beast?
What will their profit be if leather sales are reduced 50%?
What will their profit be if they can not sell leather at all?
One of us is failing to see something really obvious. I ask these quetsions to try to find out what. This is a situation where leather is a very minor part of the turnover generated by beef production, a sideline, just as you keep saying. Yet it seems obvious that it is also the prime determinant of how many cattle are slaughtered. If you get the same answers to those questions as I got you should be able to see mypoint. If you get different answers we will know why we aren’t agreeing on this point.
They face given prices for the joint products of their cattle (that is, each farmer is too small to influence the market price).
Profit is a maximum when the revenue from one more beast equals the cost of producing that beast (otherwise you could increase profit by altering output).
So the farmer’s current output of beasts depends on the prices of leather and meat and the costs of production.
Suppose now that the demand for leather increases due to (say) a fashion for big belts.
There is now not enough leather to go around.
The price of leather rises.
Farmers now get more per beast.
The profit maximising output for the farmer increases. **More cattle. **
Now there is more meat than currently demanded at the going price.
The price of meat falls.
If smart, or assisted by a forward market for beef, the farmer would have taken 10 and 11 into account at step 9.
A couple of thoughts in particular.