This is for the yahoos who are considering stopping using beef from cattle that have been branded. See this L.A. Times article ( free reg. req. etc.) for more background. This rant is so that I can point out how stupid that decision would be. Its fine if you numbskulls object to the practice, becuase you think it is cruel. I think you are wrong, but hey, we all have opinions. WHy don’t you suggest alternatives, and maybe givethe issue some fucking thought before you go off and ban branded meat. Do you idiots know how you get the beef? Do you even stop and think that there has to be some sort of identification, so they know whos cow is whose. Most beef isn’t raised in a pen its entire life, a lot of it is from range cows. Who you get a better grand beef from anyway. Sure, its easy to sit there at burger king in LA or NY, and think, ahh, the poor cows, as you continue to munch on your burger, but do you have any idea on how that burger gets to you? Theres alot of hard work put into you getting that tasty steak you are grilling to you, and branding is one small, but important part of it. Well fuck you! When there is a solution to branding that would work for the ranchers, I will be the first to end branding. Hell, people are looking into it. Lots of people in the cattle industry don’t like branding because it ruins the leather. But there is no solution at this time. Banning branded meat would dry up the beef supply so quickly, that the only way to get some ribs would be to raise it yourself!
BTW, check out this thread if you want to talk about alternatives. Everyone is welcome, come on down!
All Dutch cows have bar-coded eartags. Branding is forbidden here. Sure, putting in an eartag will probably hurt the animal a bit too. But not as much.
Can you read it from a distance? I suppose if it was big enough you could work something out.
Branding was invented to deal with the problem of identifying cattle on the range, where they can be spread across 1000’s of acres. Where I grew up, sometimes our cows would get mixed in with the neigbors, and brands helped us keep them seperate. Also, as hoky as it sounds, cattle russling still happens, and brands help alot. You can’t remove a brand, though you can obscure it, an experianced brand inspector can always tell. I think cattle ranching needs a solution that does not involve branding, its too permanent, but it also has to serve the function a brand does.
So branding is wrong, but they have no problem with the whole slaughtering process? Seems like an odd place to draw a line. You’d think you’d either be against beef entirely or not.
Barcodes work OK and are used in the US, Coldfire, but not for free-range cattle. Barcodes can be removed, wheras brands cannot. Further, brands are human-readable, which greatly helps when one is trying to seperate his cows form his neighbor’s.
Good points - anyone who’s ever been to the Netherlands will understand why we don’t have free range cattle: there’s nowhere to range to.
I dunno, but reading this problem only makes me think one thing: implanted chips. How hard can that be? And if applied on a large scale, probaby not even all that expensive.
You’d need a scanner to select your cows, of course. Maybe a long range one. With a big-ass magnet.
Ummmm. By the time we buy our bloody bits of meat from the coolers in the stores, who the heck knows if it was branded or not? Besides, cows have really thick hides. Ever seen a chunk of raw leather before it has been split? Some branding these days is done with nitrogen frozen branding irons.
I don’t know, but I’ve never bought a chunk of meat with a brand on it, though I have had some with the blue USDA ink stamp.
Much of our beef in the States comes from new Zealand anyhow because the American cattle growers got greedy and cut back on the herds to increase the already high price of the stuff. So buyers went elsewhere.
I don’t see why someone couldn’t just cut the cow open and remove the chip, substituting it for his own. Same problem as barcodes (though harder to deal with, but cows are pretty valuable.)
