This is large scale Matrix-like exploitation at its finest like only humans can do.
Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.
I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.
I hope that the 2020 updated new dietary guidelines will reflect the fact that dairy is completely optional for a healthy diet even for infants, and even not recommended for most non-caucasians as they are usually lactose intolerant.
Necessary/unnecessary, when it comes to food matkets, is a problematic way of thinking. It's ultimately preference, not necessity driven and our food culture is very complex.
Completely necessity driven (calories, nutrients and such)... the food market could be much tinier than it is today. We'd be getting our animal proteins from insects, our fresh vegetables from a small collection of locally efficient species, etc.
Dairy is a long tradition in a lot of places, and an important (culturally, but also nutritionally in-context) food. So is beef. So are spices. Increasingly, things like almond milk and avocados, for newer cultural movements.
Sure, dairy is not necessary. Neither are avocados. People like them though.
In any case, long history and tradition of cattle. The "matrix" problem is mostly a problem of agricultural policy, corporat farming and technology.
I live in Ireland. We have a big dairy industry. Cows eat mostly grass and live mostly in fields. Antibiotics are for sick cows. The medium sized farmers are still strong and I feel fine about the ethics of dairy, at least from an animal welfare perspective.
There a newer reasons for change. It might be a good idea to plant forest, instead of grassy fields and to be concerned about atmospheric methane. That said, if we are to reforest, we might use the forest to farm pigs the old fashioned way. Pigs are factory farmed, and animal welfare is a problem.
And it couldn't be any other way, its economics. If one farmer starts feeding the animals with cheaper food and have better milk yielding cows, he would have a competitive advantage over other farmers, and start taking over a larger part of the market.
As, I and you link say... pork (and poultry) is a different story. Dairy, beef & lamb are farmed differently here. There is nuance.
This is a disingenuous way of making an argument. Existence of factory farming isn't in dispute. It exists. ...as does regular farming! How can you possibly argue that decent farming (eg dairy) doesn't exist. Decent farming exists. Widely. Profitably. I'm looking out my window at decently raised cows right now.
If you think farming is wrong in principle, that's fine. We can debate this. Arguing that farming is inevitably dominated by bad factory farming practices is nonsense.
Depends on what you call decent. I mean for the cow it might have more space to walk around and eat grass.
Still, it will have their child taken at birth, shot, plugged into a milk machine daily, etc.
Farming if left to the natural economic forces in the market will lead to factory farming, unless regulated which is usually not the case. It's on the rise in Europe for example.
It's about supply and demand, and about producing the cheapest product at the highest margin, spending the least amount of money. People at the supermarket will often just choose the cheapest option.
Also, there is the need to feed a lot of people, and with animal products its hard to do that with traditional methods especially given the current levels of meat consumption.
>Depends on what you call decent. I mean for the cow it might have more space to walk around and eat grass.
Basically, yes. I can see how opinions would differ, that human exploitation makes it wrong. I do see farming involving raising animals for milk & meat as decent if done decently. It's a big question, and imo, fundamental in that it doesn't have deeper reasons.
Singer (you mentioned above) is famously utilitarian (in the bentham sense). So he does go one deeper. Right & wrong = pleasure and pain. For cows specifically, the question gets too weird to do the utilitarian math... for me.
In some senses, cows wouldn't have exist separately from farming, and for the most part won't. They did in the aurochs sense, but auroch are extinct and were probably pretty different. Would the world be better without cows...
Anyway, a lot of this relates to where I live. Visit Ireland, you will encounter cows. Decent farming is more than viable. I'm not even sure feedlots is what you would get in an unregulated market. All agg markets are subsidized & regulated, so who knows. It's even possible to do pork and poultry well, though here it generally isn't.
I also think as knowledge spreads surrounding broader ecosystems and micro-nutrient balance in the food we grow (animal and plant) and how they are needed together and work better together, the perception will eventually change.
Unfortunately overcoming years of marketing and influence peddling in the government is hard to overcome. Look how long it took to overcome the disinformation on fats and dietary cholesterol, and it still persists to this day. People are still afraid to eat too much salt, fat, cholesterol.
At the same time, look at how many people think it's fine to consume over 100g of sugars a day (mostly refined). It's kind of nuts when you think about it.
I agree, there are lots of responsible and ecosystem driven farms practices out there, it's just hard to convince a lot of people about the value. Aside: I did love the most recent South Park episode, Cartman's apology on processed (vegan) foods was hilarious.
Almost everything you listed in your opening post is all but completely absent here in cattle production, including soy, corn, hormones, antibiotics, and I could bet cows here don't descend from the same bulls either.
So yes, your little vegan rant is a thing of the US.
> And it couldn't be any other way, its economics. If one farmer starts feeding the animals with cheaper food and have better milk yielding cows, he would have a competitive advantage over other farmers, and start taking over a larger part of the market.
I don't think this is really true. people tend to associate "ethical" products with higher quality and are willing to pay more for them if they can afford it. this is the whole business model for stores like whole foods. of course whole foods sometimes misleads customers regarding how "ethical" the sourcing really is, but that's more a problem of marketing/advertising.
I think the truth is, most people don't care. They just go to the supermarket and throw in their shopping cart the cheapest option, and that's about it.
Its too much work and unrealistic to think people will be that aware, read labels, compare options, etc. It needs to come from the law.
> I think the truth is, most people don't care. They just go to the supermarket and throw in their shopping cart the cheapest option, and that's about it.
sure, all I'm saying is both can be true. most people can not care and just by the cheapest stuff and you can have upmarket suppliers for whole foods and farmer's market.
obviously this is not a solution for all the animals. that probably does have to be some sort of law. good luck to any politician who campaigns on pricing poor people out of meat.
Of course it can. You just regulate the market and don't allow it to operate completely freely because it's well understood that if you do do so everyone will quickly converge on the lowest common denominator.
> Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.
I'd just like to point out as you seem to be (wilfully?) unaware - there are far more ethical and natural ways of producing cows' milk commonly practised all over the world as they have been for centuries.
I'm also horrified by the abomination that is the modern US intensive factory model but it's disingenious to claim that this is the only way. Consumers can easily avoid it without cutting out dairy altogether as long as they're informed.
I don't know the specific numbers, the US does a LOT more cattle farming than a lot of places. But there are naturally raised cattle in the US as well.
Sure, the US does. Go and look at dairy imports/exports. We farm a lot because we also export a lot. At least, that's been my working understanding. My parents have a dairy near them, nearly 8,000 head of cow, all of the milk production is sent to the Netherlands.
FWIW, when my grandparents ran a dairy, in the 40s-70s, they peaked ~300 head of cow and all production remained local -- within 50 miles of the farm. They went out of business because they couldn't compete with the global producers. The farm was eventually sold at auction to a coal mining operation.
If the world wants to engage in better farming practices, it's a global problem. It's not going to be solved by Americans alone.
Given they're exporting to the Netherlands, don't they have to meet those standards? I'm not sure if they require grass raised in seasons permitting or not, I do know some places do.
One thing implies the other, as it's impossible to produce enough dairy for so many people using the methods you mention, that is why most dairy people consume comes from factory farms in the first place.
Dairy price would sky-rocket and become a luxury item, and few people would be able to afford it several times a day every day, as its so common today.
> One thing implies the other, as it's impossible to produce enough dairy for so many people using the methods you mention, that is why most dairy people consume comes from factory farms in the first place.
This is simply not true. What you probably mean is it is not possible to achieve the same results while not caring how it is done (ie. going about our lives).
Throughout the history people relied on dairy way more than today. In some places it was almost life or death as during winter grain and dairy was the only feed available.
Of course, today, you don't want to spend your entire day tending cows and the field.
But don't try to imply that our way of life is the only one possible.
There exists whole industry of keeping cows and producing diary in humane way. It costs more, true, but not nearly as much as to make it impractical.
It is simply our choice -- people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
> people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
When vfc1 says "One thing implies the other", the charitable interpretation of that statement is likely "given the way our society is structured at this time, it's inevitable that this result will obtain".
When taking care of cows means spending more money on their welfare than some competitor, and when people are willingly disinterested in the welfare of the cows whose milk they consume, we have a good-old-race-to-the-bottom.
The most powerful work I've read on the topic is the 1975 classic "Animal Liberation" by a philosopher Peter Singer. In it he uses excerpts from literature written by the industry (presumably the most-rosy picture you can find of the conditions of animals in the factory farms) to show how horrible the conditions are (and to make an argument why we ought to abstain from consuming and why we ought to try to dismantle the system).
The context OP was speaking to is factory farm conditions relative to animal welfare on the "traditional" 100 herd farm. Fields, grass, no hormones or unnecessary antibiotics.
Singer argues that these conditions aren't good enough, agriculture inevitably leads to stuff he can't live with. That's a reasonable thing to argue. I disagree. It's not reasonable to argue that these conditions are a practical impossibility. That either prices skyrocket or cows can't fields. It's not true. It is possible, and common.
This doesn't help actually fix the problem, because you have equivalent problems with irresponsible production of plant based food (soil erosion, destruction of entire ecosystems and replacing them with plant fields and so on).
If we keep attacking the problem from the wrong angle, we won't ever have a good solution.
> irresponsible production of plant based food (soil erosion, destruction of entire ecosystems and replacing them with plant fields
In most cases, this is actually done to create feed crops like soy and corn. Most of the agricultural fields in the world are used to feed animals either used for slaughter or for dairy and not to feed people directly.
Feeding the same amount of people directly instead of feeding animals and then eating them could be done with a fraction of the agricultural resources.
Dairy production is actually one of the most environmentally impactful things that we do, if we want to go that route.
> Livestock is the world's largest user of land resources, with pasture and arable land dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of the total agricultural land. One-third of global arable land is used to grow feed, while 26% of the Earth's ice-free terrestrial surface is used for grazing.
Pasture land isn't really usable for anything else, and the level of destruction caused by converting land to monocrops far exceeds that of animal grazing.
A lot of pasture land, for example in Amazonia has actually been created by systematic deforestation, also in Europe, which was deforested a couple of centuries ago.
So a lot of that land could be used for reforesting. And if it would be so simple to use that land to raise cattle, why are there factory farms then?
It sounds cheaper to raise the cows on grass which is free food, unlike rations. Clearly the amount of meat produced that way is not sufficient for the demand.
agree 100%. I don't know of any truly sustainable farms that don't involve some nonhuman animals in the value chain. The problem is not that industrial farming is less efficient when incorporating animals, it's that we're calculating efficiency in terms of fossil fuels in > Calories out.
There are all sorts of alternatives to that paradigm, but none allow us to compare a single metric for both. The nature of the debate reminds me of the apocryphal drunk, looking for his car keys below the streetlamp even though he knows he didn't lose them there.
> There exists whole industry of keeping cows and producing diary in humane way.
These are usually market gimmicks. They say a cow is pastured raised if they leave it out an hour a day, grass-fed if it gets fed half the diet in grass the other in grains, etc.
The costs of raising cattle and producing dairy in that way would simply not allow to meet the demand and it will never happen. Factory farms are the reality of what it takes to produce dairy for so many people.
Ultimately, in the end the result the animal dies a horrible death after having lived often a horrible live, so there is nothing humane about that.
> These are usually market gimmicks. They say a cow is pastured raised if they leave it out an hour a day, grass-fed if it gets fed half the diet in grass the other in grains, etc.
This is the "market for lemons" problem: Consumers can't tell actually humane treatment from fake, which ends up economically pressuring farms to cut corners and go towards the fake.
You could register a trademark and have a certification program for "humane" milk / meat producers to use. Then go around raising awareness of what "pasture-raised" and "grass-fed" really means. If you do a good job of communicating, people will be happy to pay the extra $0.50 (or $1) to know the cows are actually chilling in the fields and not cooped up in a pen.
This is solvable problem. When consumers and producers don't have incentive to do the right thing very frequently the solution is to regulate.
As an example, if a producer declares they meet a specific standard this could mean they voluntarily undergo regular audit of their entire process including how the cows are treated.
We do this for many products and services. Here in Poland, eggs are regulated in many categories from hens kept in cages to free-range. When you buy eggs they are all individually stamped with a mark that clearly indicates how hens are kept and fed and you, as a customer, can choose the more expensive product but with a knowledge that you get what you pay for.
But I agree that packaging for products contains multitude of markings and without extensive research it is difficult to recognize which markings are regulated and which are not and what they mean exactly.
There just aren't enough pastures to raise enough cows that way to meet demand. Otherwise, it would have been done already, its much cheaper to let cows roam around eating free food, instead of having to pay for it.
The reason why factory farms exist is to meet the increasing demand. Farmers have every economic incentive to try to raise the animals in the cheapest way possible.
Still the cow is a prisioner, it has its childs taken away at birth and shot and gets impregnated immediately after, to keep producing more milk.
If the cow stops producing as much milk, it gets shot as well.
Even if the cows lived a live chilling in the fields, all of this would still happen.
It kind of exists in the UK; organic milk production involves higher welfare standards for the animals. There's also specific definitions for things like "free range" when it comes to chickens.
I always get my dairy local. Where I live I am lucky enough to have a family farm that services our area. The nice thing is that their milk isn't that much more than any of the name brands. Maybe 50 cents a gallon.
You can tour their farms and watch the process and they are very open about it.
When I saw your post I thought it would a Mom and Pa farm down the road with 5 cows, but this actually looks like a small (to medium?) size factory farm to me, well marketed.
How many cows do they have? Apparently farms with more than 100 cows make up just 0.3 percent of the total dairy farm population.
You can clearly see that it's a factory-like installation. Are all those people part of the family or full-time employees? I bet several are employees.
At least it does not come from across the world it's local so less impactful.
> use to make the richest ice cream that you’ll ever taste.
The other day I tried one of those plant-based Magnum ice creams, I couldn't tell the difference and actually liked it more.
Some of the worst practices I've witnessed (shooting/drowning male calves) existed on small family farms. The idea that these places are synonymous with humane is absolutely false. The male calves are still treated horrifically - either killed within days or sent to a veal farm. And the female calves are usually put into isolation, which is horrific for a young mammal to have to go through.
This is just untrue. Dairy was not produced differently in some ancient past. It's produced differently today, in many places, and recently even in the states. Factory farms have small cost advantages and (imo more significantly) financing advantages. Non-corporate farmers can't tap into private equity markets, bond markets and whatnot like corporate farms can.
Anyway, decent farming is as possible today as ever, even moreso. Dairy would not be a luxury item, it would cost slightly more.
It is a luxury item. In the UK dairy and meat get subsidised. A pack of sausages cost the same as a red pepper. Go figure!
At the same time farmers here moan that they aren't getting enough money per pint. They are at a loss.
Meanwhile some luxury oat milk costs £1.80 a litre. The plant milks are a nightmare when you consider transportation. Be nicer to have local bottling of these alternatives. At least traditionally dairy farms were a little more localised and smaller.
Milk costs me £1.10 / 4 pints. So that's $2.36/US gallon (why 6.6614 pints in a gallon, why not a round number??? Edit: US pints are different and smaller. 8 US pints in a US gallon)
There is this common internet illusion that these things only happen in the US. It's a myth, of course, it absolutely happens in Europe too and everywhere in the western world.
How could it not, its economics and its a business. The goal is to produce the maximum amount of dairy at the lowest possible price, to fulfill an ever-increasing demand.
Maybe the agricultural factories are usually not of the same size as in the US, but the techniques and the consequences are the same.
Inherent to dairy production is regular impregnation and separating the calves. Just like the egg industry, market pressure favors more "productive" genetics, which results in males basically being discarded early in life, and shorter productive life with higher output for the females.
Increasing animal welfare(, for lack of a better term,) results in higher environmental impact, because slower growth, longer lives and less conversion, require more feed and produce more emissions. At least globally - locally, large-scale concentrated operations have a high impact.
I can speak for southern Germany where there are still many small farms in villages. Due to space constraints, those businesses have to extract as much as possible out of every animal. I only have german sources, but this is what those stalls can look like: https://www.ariwa.org/leben-in-ketten-video/
The text says that cows are tethered like this for months or even years (basically their whole life). It's estimated that this affects about 1 million or about a quarter of the german dairy cows. I think the Matrix would compare favorably to this.
I regularly order locally-produced milk from very small scale farmers that don't use any of the things you mention and it's nearly not the cost of a luxury item. I live in a huge city, too. So something must be off in what you're saying. I don't know why you show such certainty of tone, are you a specialist?
> I regularly order locally-produced milk from very small scale farmers
Not a specialist here, but I think I'm generally well informed and just trying to use some common sense. You probably pay a bit more for that milk than at the supermarket, right?
Most people in your country don't do what you do, they buy it at the supermarket. The dairy products at the supermarket simply don't come from those farms.
Do you think it would be possible for everyone in your city to consume milk that way?
Would there be enough farms to produce enough dairy that way at a reasonable price that most people would be ready to pay? I'm going to guess that probably not that would not be sustainable.
Still, in the end, the economic incentives for that farmer to produce more milk are the same. The farmer would be incentivized to use better milk yielding cows, get rid of the males, feed the cheapest possible food to the animals.
> Still, in the end, the economic incentives for that farmer to produce more milk are the same. The farmer would be incentivized to use better milk yielding cows, get rid of the males, feed the cheapest possible food to the animals.
American here, but I feel like this has to be a very American ideal. Scandinavian countries have this idea of Lagom which is a sort of balance that's right for everything. Italians have this idea of high quality ingredients nurtured in the best way. French have this idea of doing things the exact old way and protecting that. Sure there are places in those societies still for factory farming, but the ethos that profit must rise above all reasoning is something I only see in my culture.
I'm from Europe, the culture is I bet a bit different but the laws of economics still apply. If a farmer can produce the same product in larger volumes and cheaper, it will have an advantage over the competition and start taking a bigger share of the market.
The competition will catch up, etc. it's the same thing. But there is this very powerful marketing message that these things only happen in the US, which is not at all true.
It's all these pictures of happy cows and farmers at the supermarket, that create an unrealistic perception of how animals are raised.
> This land, and other targeted subsidies for livestock, is worth between €28-€32bn (£24-£27.9bn) in CAP direct payments per year for the animal farming sector, 18-20% of the EU’s total budget.
That seems like pretty heavy subsidizing to me, although in the US I have the impression that things are worse.
I think a lot of the europeans perception of the livestock industry comes from advertising, all those pictures on the supermarket of happy farmers next to happy cows and pigs, I think that's where a lot of it comes from.
So, because you indulge in some tiny fringe practice -- the same thing my dad does in the USA --, you think "all of Europe" doesn't just buy milk in the supermarket?
I've never seen myself as a vegetarian, but increasingly as I get older I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat and my feelings about individual animals.
I mean, my fiancee and I used to rescue shelter dogs, and I can't square that behavior of putting through chickens and cows through hell in factory farms.
I still eat meat, but I feel like I'm getting closer to not doing that every day.
I'm a similar, but opposite boat. Instead of feeling like I am closer to going vegetarian, I feel myself closer to becoming a hunter. I don't like my meat coming from poor factory farm practices, and think it would be great if I could source most of my meat though hunting, and then supplement it with meat and eggs from local farms. BTW factory farming isn't just isolated to animals, there are lots of issues with large-scale factory farming crops too.
Actually, most crops (80% of the world crops) are for feeding animals.
Shooting the animals yourself is not a very practical solution, or scalable. Sure you could do it for yourself and your family at great expense of your time and even some personal risk, but what about the rest of your city and country?
That would surely not scale, there is just not enough wild game to hunt, it can only be done at certain times of the year., etc.
I consider it to be practical, enjoyable, and yes non-scalable. But I would also consider the world going vegetarian as not realistic, and just like some people go vegetarian to reduce their carbon footprint, I'm going to hunt to reduce mine.
I mean, really, if we're being honest a perfectly scalable and highly carbon efficient method of meat eating involves hunting other human beings. Think of all the environment you'd be saving!
But what will I put on my Lucky Charms if we don't have milk?
Seriously, the worst thing for me about doing away with milk/cream/etc. would be having to get all new recipes. Especially for baking. Milk is in so very many recipes and you can't just switch it out for soy milk or almond milk.
Every time I've tried any kind of baked goods that didn't use actual butter or lard are just not as good in my opinion. Of course I've gone near zero carb as I just don't seem to respond well with most foods anymore (especially wheat and other grains) and I'm allergic to legumes.
Sometimes the stuff made with almond or coconut flour is okay, but I find the closer I stick to mostly eggs and meat, the better I feel.
Actually I'll bet you can, or just omit it or even replace it with water or some other water-based liquid. Very few baked good use milk in any meaningful way, which pretty much just leaves cheese and sauces. Of those, cheese is the hard one. I've heard there are vegan cheeses on the market now that don't suck but even assuming that is true they're probably still quite expensive.
P.S. Oh right, there's butter, but shortening has been around for ages and butter-flavored shortening about as long.
Nah, I've tried since one of my kids is slightly lactose intolerant. Neither soy nor almond milk have proven to be suitable substitutes. It's not just the liquid, but something in the cow milk missing from the other milks.
I'm curious what you're making. I've done quite a bit of baking in my time and I can't even think of a recipe that uses milk as anything other than a more flavorful water.
Well Kefir is a good example of a fermented milk drink that more people should consume, instead of regular milk, really. It's got a nice bonus that any one can ingest it, including lactose-intolerant people.
Only the original recipe, which is made from unpasteurised goat's milk. The store-bought ones have practically no relation to the real thing in either micronutrient distribution, lactose quantity, or taste.
>feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet
What's a "natural diet"? I always assumed that animals (including us) ate what they could get, and their diets were perpetually evolving along with their environment.
Grass would make up the bulk of their diet. Note that corn is a grass.
Dairy cows have a diet that is strictly designed by a nutritionist. When cows are fed corn, it isn't just the corn seed, it is the entire plant. Dairy cows get the more expensive premium feed, and soy is not a large part of that.
Their diets are probably evolving but we're the ones changing the environment. Instead of grazing pasture, we feed them with genetically modified (not a bad thing per se, but not naturally available on the environment) and so much washed out that we have to fortify with B12 otherwise they would get sick.
> feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet
Yesterday I saw a documentary (Zembla) about the veal industry in The Netherlands (largest in EU, which exists mostly for export, also to US and China).
Terrible conditions for the calves, but what most surprised me is that the farmers only feed them with milk! This way their meat will have the light color associated with 'fresh, young' veal.
From the 1,500 veal producers, only a single one is biological, giving the calves proper food. Result is their meat is red in color.
Veal simply refers to meat that comes from a cattle beast that is younger than the older cattle that beef comes from. There is no specific way to feed veal, but if the veal was fed a milk diet, then that is when the colour is lighter than when it is fed a more traditional diet.
Red, Pink and white veal. The colour of the meat is proportional to the amount of milk in their diet. The most sought after and expensive is white veal which has been exclusively fed on mothers milk.
From a purely darwinistic perspective, cows have been hugely successful thanks to their partnership with humans. I am unconvinced that there is some sort of underutilized potential for dairy cows to be something other than they are.
Human neural networks are miscalibrated to trigger oxytocin around non-humans or even convincing fakes, for example many people are absolutely in love with stuffed animals too, but it's pretty evolutionarily maladapted.
>Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.
>I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.
This has been standard operating procedure for nearly a century and has fed billions of people. Over that same time life expectancy has gone up significantly and milk remains one of the cheapest and most plentiful foods on the planet.
Your complains smell more like superstition than anything supported by scientific evidence.
I can image cutting out meat from my diet, only thing I would really miss is the taste of chicken and maybe fish. Dairy on the other hand would be much much harder. Because I wouldn't just miss the taste but would have to change my entire diet.
Dairy actually has hormones called caso-morphines that bind to the same brain receptors as I believe heroine (of course not as potent).
So it's addictive in nature, this addition is probably meant to keep the calf close to the mother and away from harm.
But the addiction can be easily broken and after a while you start finding cheese actually a bit gross because its essentially solid melting fat.
As far as I know for people looking to eat in a less environmentally impactful way, eating only pork, chicken and eggs and removing the dairy and beef is great already.
>Dairy actually has hormones called caso-morphines that bind to the same brain receptors as I believe heroine (of course not as potent).
So it's addictive in nature
So is the following plant-based foods
Gluten exorphin (from gluten found in cereals wheat, rye, barley)
Gliadorphin/gluteomorphin (from gluten found in cereals wheat, rye, barley)
Soymorphin-5 (from soybean)
Rubiscolin (from spinach)
And what about relative amounts? I would expect it to be more concentrated in cow's milk than in plants. It's usually the dosis that makes the poison so it would be interesting to know the amounts and its effects in humans.
I have a hard time thinking that wheat and barley are that addictive, cheese however I can see it as being quite addictive.
>I have a hard time thinking that wheat and barley are that addictive
Suggest to a few people that their inability to lose weight could be due to a low-grade gluten intolerance, and I predict you'll start to believe it fairly quickly. I try not to evangelize anyway, but dang people get defensive around their carbs.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it repeatedly and we ban accounts that do that. Also, no personal attacks please.
As far as I know, you don't need to stop consuming dairy it can happen gradually as you are consuming it too over the course of your life.
It's not an all or nothing thing, there are several degrees to it. Some people will end up in the hospital, others with only sporadic digestive issues not that troubling at first, etc.
Calcium can be easily obtained from plant foods without any problem as well, and in a better form better managed by the human body - https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/calcium/
> "A meta-analysis of cow’s milk intake and hip fracture studies showed no significant protection"
> "milk may sometimes increase bone and hip fracture rates"
Milk and all it's derived products have lactose, so they should be avoided by people that can't digest them properly, which includes, for example, most African Americans and Native Americans among many others.
It's a gradual thing that gets worse with age, you become more and more lactose intolerant. If you find yourself having frequent diarrheas say once a month or so, consider cutting on dairy and see if it improves, you might be slightly lactose intolerant without realizing it.
You make it sound easy, but let's look at the facts. The link you posted, says you need at least 600 mg of calcium per day. 100g of brocolli has 47mg. So, you would need to eat 1.3kg of brocolli EVERY single day.
You don't have to that at all, of course. First of all, nobody really knows how much calcium you really need per day, all those estimates are ballpark estimates at best.
The estimates of 1000mg or more have been pushed for decades by the dairy industry.
You can get calcium from greens like kale etc. eat a bit of brocolli, eat pulses like beans and lentils, use tahini as a sauce, drink fortified plant-milk.
Just eat a well-balanced plant-based diet and you will be absolutely fine. Studies show that plant-based diets don't cause brittle bones at all on the contrary.
You can get all the nutrients that you need, calcium included from a plant-based diet. The only thing you need to supplement is B12, which is produced by bacterias in the dust.
And as everything is so clean, we don't eat a lot of dirt anymore so that its advised to supplement. Animals don't have it too on factory farms, they get injected with it together with the anti-biotics for health reasons.
So might as well take it directly, otherwise calcium is not an issue at all in a plant-based diet and this can and it has been easily shown.
I don't think you need fortified milk either, but if you are worried about it you can take it, that's what I meant.
There is no indication of lack of calcium in vegetarians or vegans, many studies have shown it.
Most likely, its your expectation of how much calcium is actually needed and how essential dairy is that has been shapped through years of advertising and missinformation.
And growing green things is in general more efficient than cows. There was a lot of lobbying going on to get the milk industry to what it is now in western countries.
Milk contains a lot of calcium, but scientific studies show that humans barely absorb any of it, especially if pasteurized. Even worse, milk increases calcium loss in bones, resulting in higher rates of fractures.
Modern milk is also a processed food, which brings a host of other negative associated factors.
> scientific studies show that humans barely absorb any of it, especially if pasteurized
Link?
> Even worse, milk increases calcium loss in bones, resulting in higher rates of fractures.
I would love to read some serious research on this. Some 3-4 years ago I read similar advice, stopped drinking milk for about 5 months and started having serious problems with teeth which I never had before. Started drinking milk again and a month later all the problems disappeared.
People, don't stop drinking milk just because a random person on the Internet said so.
not op but found this [1] cause I found it interesting. They found that uht milk had greater bio-availablity compared to traditional pasturization because the traditional pasturization created more maillard reaction byproducts. Didn't find anything comparing those to raw milk though.
>I would love to read some serious research on this.
Funny you ask for scientific research to support OP's argument, then you follow it up with a personal anecdote about milk fixing your teeth problem in a month (which it assuredly did not).
when you eat and drink acid is produced that eats away at enamel.. and when you brush your teeth it also brushes away some enamel.
The reason your teeth still have enamel is that they are constantly being remineralized with minerals (including calcium) in your saliva being deposited on the top surface of the tooth.
If you consume less calcium, less calcium will be in your saliva, and that’ll slow that process down, while erosion continues normally (leading to sensitivity and eventually cavities)
if the problems he’s referring to are sensitivity (not related to gum disease), and he wasn’t getting enough calcium without milk, it’s quite possible that milk (calcium) reduced the sensitivity.
Nothing funny about it. One makes it clear it's a personal anecdote, the other states that "scientific studies show" - should be easy to show these studies then
For babies, not for adults. Adult animals in most species can't even drink milk, they can't digest it anymore past infancy.
Biologically this means that the infant would release the mother so that they could have another child, so there is biological adaption on most species to not drink milk past a certain age.
And we have it too via lactose intolerance, which is normal.
However, some relatively small percentage of humans developed the ability to drink milk around 10k years ago in Turkey, but it's not perfect. It gets worse with age as one would expect.
Human babies shouldn't drink cow's milk, it's completely unnecessary and there are questions about it's effect on long-term human health.
There are questions about effects of almost anything on long-term human health. Over-stressing about what to eat like any other type of stress might not be that healthy even in the short term :)
Most of the statements there are reasonably well founded. The specifics of 'Turkey' may be a bit off, but broadly I'd agree with the comment you're replying to.
Agreed generally but as my own memory of reading these research papers and what wikipedia points out that lactase persistence is not caused by a single gene but there are several different gene variants that can produce this same effect.
And we know since the mid 2000s by a dozen or so genetic studies that these genes did not arrive from a single culture or single timeframe, but are an example of "convergent evolution" aka it was beneficial for humans generally and thus when independent random mutations occurred they persisted longer for those people were more likely to breed and thrive. This happened several times in human history and are not a singular event.
And thus individual humans may have Lactase Persistence in adulthood and other individual humans may not have the persistence. Furthermore how much Lactose you can process with the Lactase enzyme is a dependent process where some people can handle some quantities but not too much quantity of Lactose all at once.
There's an entire class of people called "children" who are neither babies nor adults who can benefit from drinking milk (or any other good source of calcium).
The rest of the absurdity of your argument aside, claiming that only humans can do a thing that humans invented solely for themselves to make your point gave me a good chuckle.
We are animals like all the others, even if a percentage of our population evolved the ability to continue to digest milk into adulthood.
The point was that its actually a very unnatural thing to be doing, and that we only evolved very recently to be able to even do it.
Also, there is a whole spectrum to it. You don't have to be 100% medically diagnosed as lactose intolerant, it might cause you ocasional digestive issues without you even know it.
Like those unexplained, once a month or once every 3 months diarrheas that many of us take as a fact of life, it's actually not normal and might very well be dairy that is causing it for a lot of people.
Most animals don't eat cooked meat but just raw meat. If you follow that reasoning is very unnatural for us to cook meat, we should switch to raw meat.
The point was that drinking milk is something humans have only very recently in our evolutionary history have adapted to doing, so we are still adapting and a lot of us can't do it very well at all.
At least, a lot of us do it a lot worst than we realize, and there are a ton of people with recurring mild digestive issues which should not be consuming dairy daily at all, but keep doing do due to the public perception that its a healthy thing to do when in fact it's not.
We evolved to do it recently, but lactose tolerance genes have been heavily selected for by evolution. It's one of the most heavily selected-for traits in the past ten thousand years.
Still the majority of the world population is lactose intolerant and should not be consuming dairy at all.
The ones that can digest it, do it usually less well than they think they do. Mild chronic diarrhea is prevalent is western countries, and a degree of dairy intolerance could very well be one of the factors.
It gets worse for most people with age, as elderly people can become lactose intolerant, fully or only slightly. This does not happen overnight, its a progressive thing, many people gradually stop being able to properly digest dairy.
There are different degrees of lactose tolerance, and a good fraction of the world's population is at least somewhat tolerant. Then there are regions of the world where almost all people are completely tolerant, like northern Europe.
There are also lots of dairy products that contain little lactose, from lactose-free milk to cheese. And of course, it's pretty simple to just take lactase pills.
From a completely subjective perspective, dairy products are some of the tastiest foods, and they're objectively a huge part of food culture in Europe. I don't foresee them going away.
One aspect the article does not fully address is why so many dairy farmers are using artificial insemination instead of bulls. Partly it's slightly enhanced milk production, but a bigger reason is the availability of sexed semen, allowing farmers to breed roughly 95% heifer calves instead of 50%. This is a big deal for a dairy farm's finances because a cow is much more valuable than a steer.
Ha. The number 1 reason AI is popular with dairy farmers? Dairy bulls are more dangerous than you can imagine. Holstein bulls, especially, have a bad, bad, attitude. 2000 pounds of territorial nastiness. Unrepentant killers. Plus, you are working with the cows twice a day, so it is easy to tell when they are in heat.
Contrast with the Aberdeen Angus beef cattle that my father bred. Beef bulls are, for whatever reason, fairly mellow. I would walk through the bull lot regularly. Now, I would always keep an eye on the bulls, and calculate how fast I could run to the fence and jump over, but I never received worse than the evil eye and a snorting hoof-stamp. A Holstein would have crushed me 3 times over by then. Also, beef cows generally are left to their own devices out in the pasture, so tracking when they are in heat is challenging making AI much less practical.
That's a good point. I'd also say that Holstein cows are pretty scary; a cow can flip from "this human is fine" to "I'm going to protect my calf by trampling this human to death" with barely any warning.
Factors like floor material also matter. On wet concrete, work boots have decent traction but bull hooves don't, so a bull with a nose ring is a little bit less of a threat. On dirt or dry manure, though, watch out.
This BLOWS my mind. We have machines that are sorting bull semen PER CELL based on the increased mass of the XX DNA vs XY DNA?! I never would have guessed that this is even possible, let alone that we're already doing it.
From your first link:
> For sex sorted semen, the ability to shift the gender ratio of a calf crop comes from the fact that gender is determined by the sperm cell that fertilizes the egg. Sperm cells that result in a heifer calf (XX) have more DNA than sperm cells that result in a bull calf (XY).
> Of the several attempts to find ways to sort XX and XY sperm cells, the only method proven to be commercially viable is flow cytometry. Before going through the flow cytometer (sorting machine), a fluorescent dye is incorporated into the DNA of the sperm cells. They pass through the sorting machine in drops of liquid containing a single sperm cell per droplet. The machine detects the amount of florescence each cell emits; an XX sperm cell will have more florescence than an XY. A positive or negative charge is applied to the droplet depending on the type of sperm cell in it. Then, the machine can sort them into different collection tubes, based on the charge on the droplet, as it moves through a magnetic field.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "widely used", but all I'm claiming is that sexed semen has had a big economic impact on the industry and helped convince more farmers to adopt artificial insemination.
It's not easy to find and correctly interpret solid numbers on this topic, but the USDA's National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS) survey appears to support a substantial increase in both artificial insemination (for both cows and heifers) and sexed semen (for heifers) between 2007 and 2014.
> Although it has been possible to sex and sort semen since the 1980s, the use of sexed semen is still not a common practice. The sorting process is extremely slow, can damage the semen, and greatly reduces the overall semen counts. Consequently, compared with unsexed semen, sexed semen costs more and contains fewer viable sperm per straw, leading to a lower conception rate. Because heifers are generally more fertile, it is recommended that sexed semen be used only in virgin heifers.
> Artificial insemination (AI) to natural estrus was used for first-service breeding for the majority of heifers on 57.1 percent of operations and the majority of cows on 54.7 percent of operations during the previous 12 months. Natural service (use of bulls for breeding) was the second most common practice used at first service for the majority of heifers and cows (33.2 and 21.7 percent of operations, respectively).
> For operations with pregnancies conceived via AI during the previous 12
months, sexed semen was used to inseminate 11.4 percent of heifers and 3.5
percent of cows. Because sexed semen costs more and contains fewer viable sperm
per straw than unsexed semen, it is recommended that sexed semen be used only
in heifers, which generally are more fertile than cows.
> The highest percentage of operations (89.3 percent) used AI for breeding. AI was used exclusively on 43.7 percent of operations. Timed AI programs were used to manage heifer and cow reproduction on 34.9 and 55.5 percent of operations, respectively. For operations that used a timed AI program, more than two-thirds (68.6 percent) had used the program for 9 years or more.
> A higher percentage of operations used sexed semen in heifers than in cows (41.1 and 18.6 percent, respectively).
> About one-third of heifers (32.5 percent) were bred using sexed semen compared
with only 3.4 percent of cows.
This seems like the kind of thing a functioning USDA would come in and help fix. The could subsidize losses of farmers who choose genetically diverse semen and then get cows that underproduce compared to average.
It's like the perfect case of encouraging something that isn't profitable for the common good.
Wait till you find out that all the world's cash crops are essentially genetic clones of each other. We're literally one superbug away from global famine.
I doubt its that dire. There are a lot of things currently that can destroy crops but they are mostly prevented from spreading by border controls on things like fruit not being able to cross over.
You're correct. Rice and corn are almost tied as staple crops. Wheat, potatoes and bananas trail those two relatively closely. There may be little genetic diversity inside any particular staple food, but there are nevertheless several unrelated staple foods that feed the world.
If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.
There will be no famine as a result of a single type of crop in a local area getting killed. It still takes at least weeks for the virus to spread around to other crops which is plenty of time to become aware of it and stop its spread. There is also nothing preventing imports of healthy foods over the border.
There is also no real incentive to bring bad crops over the border to a safe area.
Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem.
Global famine? Give me a break.
That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale.
Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?
The biodiversity issue is intraspecies not interspecies.
> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?
Simply, copies.
If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly.
Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first couple, the superbug would likely start to tailer itself to genes that many plant species share, making the next jumps even easier.
I suppose I should be sitting up in terror for the superbug that comes after us from ants, then? After all ants outmass humans worldwide by a decent margin...
Thing is, I'm pretty sure that ants and humans are only a few times further apart than potatoes and corn are. (Monocots and Dicots split ~140-150 Myr ago [0], Arthropoda and Chordata about ~1000 Myr ago [1]) (I initially thought the Monocots/Dicots split was further back... looks like a closer comparison would be to marsupials, diverging ~170 Myr ago)
There haven't been a lot of species that are all genetic clones of each other until recently, either. Such a condition makes the arrival of a superbug much more likely.
A species entirely made up of genetic clones is what this whole thread is about. I'm surprised you missed this.
You seem to be acting under the assumption that virii are actively malicious things instead of mere self-propagating feedback loops. Propagation is what causes it to grow - killing its host is a dead end for growth.
This isn't Pandemic - there is no neural or neural analog on viruses - hell we couldn't even do that with networked nanomachines.
It would be far more plauisble for all housecats in the world to coordinate and plan the conquest of humanity as they at least have the ability to think and communicate.
This is hard to respond to, because I don't know what you think I think. I don't think viruses have some sort of “neural or neural analog” or coordinate in some way, so I suspect you don't understand what I'm saying.
I just think, on average, an individual virus particle will mutate at a certain rate. If there are a million times the population, a virus as a whole will then mutate 1 million times faster. So, if a certain virus would given a certain mutation, would jump to another species, and that had a certain chance to do so, then that same virus with 1 million times its normal population would have 1 million times the chance to do so.
That's about as spelled out and basic I'm able to make it.
Especially because before 1950 the Gros Michel was about as popular as the Cavendish now. And then it got wiped out by a fungus so instead of diversifying, all banana plantations collectively switched to Cavendish. Now there is a new fungus the Cavendish is susceptible too, so perhaps in a few years we'll all be eating something else. Hopefully more than a single alternative variety is found this time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana:
"After years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel."
The veterinary science in the corporate meat/dairy business is better at disease management than the CDC. Vaccines are developed in a matter of weeks. Quarantining animals and employees is completely enforced. Culling is possible. I wouldn’t be scared. A lot of smart people are going to make sure you have real ice cream. Do you worry that some disease is going to kill off all the elite marathon runners? Not much genetic diversity there either. Genetic diversity just isn’t that important for survival with modern medicine.
About 2/3rds of China’s pork production is not modern. Too many humans involved and they roll out vaccines in 6 months rather than 3 weeks. For now it is just slow and uncoordinated problem solving.
Right. Everything you said about food supply resiliency only applies to modern production in the US. To be fair: that's the topic of the article. But it is inapplicable to 2/3rds of the world's population -- where disease & monoculture are huge threats to global food supply.
China’s agtech is modernizing, and the Americas and Europe is already modern. We divert enough calories for 1 billion people into biofuels. The only realistic thing that will cause a famine is a breakdown in global trade/markets. I think you are being overly dramatic about the disease threat. I am not quite sure why you think genetic diversity within a species is so important. What is important is to have species diversity and trade to avoid potato famines.
That's what trade is for. Trump just sold lots of pork to China. Admittedly not all places are as integrated into the world economy as China though, so not everyone can afford food, but aid programs are usually well funded and effective. Right now, the only places where people are starving are ones where aid programs don't have access e.g. because of war.
And terrible enforcement and political incentives due to decades of underinvesting in veterinary and agricultural supervision.
> Why did African swine fever spread so fast in China?
> Systemic problems in China may have accelerated the spread of African swine fever, a dangerous pig virus that has no cure or vaccine. According to an investigative piece by Chinese business portal Caixin last month, divergent interests of central and local officials, money worries and "political tasks" created incentives to hide disease reports. Lacking reliable information, farmers panicked and liquidated herds when they heard rumors of disease in their neighborhood. Big regional price differences due to localized pig liquidations and quarantines created strong incentives to truck pigs and pathogens around the country. Traders flouting bans easily evaded authorities--and were often abetted by corrupt veterinary officials who sold fraudulent health certificates and ear tags.
That was a prion disease. They were actively being stupid to try to save a quid and are still being punished in the markets for it.
It is like putting crocodiles in hotel rooms up an elevator or a foot high stack of stairs - too steep for them to climb on their own. If crocodiles eat people then it is clearly the fault of the people who put crocodiles in the hotel rooms in the first place because they couldn't get there on their own as they are aquatic ground clingers.
All US Dairy Cows are descended from the original two cows, and all humans from the first humans, and on, and on.
It is interesting how selective breeding has played a part in several industries though. This example sounds a little appalling to my mind, but I'm a fan of horse racing and all thoroughbreds have to trace their lineage to one of three horses or they're not considered thoroughbred and I'm fine with that.
What is it that makes some examples unnerving, and some acceptable?
Jallikattu protest on 2017 relating to bull breeding in Tamilnadu, India.
Selected Excerpt from Wikipedia Below
Jallikattu is cited as one of the last available ways to promote and preserve the native livestock because the other uses of native breeds such as ploughing, breeding via mating and milk is on decline due to advancement in mechanization by tractors, improvement in artificial insemination and hybrid Jersey cows respectively. Karthikeyan Siva Senaapathy, a native breed activist, has said in an interview with the BBC that "[Tamil Nadu] had over one million Kangayam bulls in 1990. The population has fallen to 15,000 now." Minor protests were initiated by cattle rights activists and farmers such as Karthikeya Sivasenapathy who has appeared multiple times on the STAR Vijay talk show Neeya Naana. Music videos, such as "Takkaru Takkaru" by Hiphop Tamizha, and on Facebook videos to talk about jallikattu and its benefits inspired the protestors. Sivasenapathy has claimed that the indigenous cattle bulls are critically endangered in Tamil Nadu and banning jallikattu will have the adverse effect of wiping them out completely. According to Sivasenapthy and other pro-jallikattu activists, jallikattu is not just a sport that is deeply entrenched in Tamil culture, but it has also inadvertently served as a scientific method of breeding cattle.[clarification needed] This view is held among a majority of jallikattu supporters. The protest is aimed at revival of the native humped bull, called the zebu. The Tamil Nadu breed of zebu is unique to India and has several advantages compared to European varieties of cattle such as the Holstein cow. The native breeds are rich in the A2 variety of beta casein protein which aides easy digestion whereas milk from European Bos taurus contain the A1 variant of the beta casein protein which is related to allergies and some serious health conditions.The Holstein breeds found their way into India as a result of Operation Flood of late 1960's through cross breeding to increase the low milk yield of native breeds. As the Jersey cow can yield nine times the quantity of milk as a zebu in the same period, there is concern among protesters that without jallikattu providing an economic incentive for the breeding of zebu, the breed will become endangered and eventually extinct.
I knew the agriculture industry was at risk due to monocultures (e.g. the banana) but I didn’t know the dairy industry was too! There’s a trade off between resiliency and performance/standardization.
Tbh, this is a little statistical misnomer. There’s a high probability that over half of us is a direct descendent of a single Roman citizen, and I remember a report that a significant proportion of Asian population can trace through one of lines to Genghis Khan.
This is simply because you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents and 8 ggp and so on. Eventually this exponential growth lead to a size greater than the world population. 30 generation would mean more than 1 billion ancestors, and a lot of that would intersect, while the chance of having a certain individual be part of your ancestry greatly increases.
This guy who said "don't stop drinking milk because some random person on the internet said so".
Dude, really need to get with common sense. Research can and is skewed everyday. You want research? Go to the factory farms where these animals suffer and die each day so you can have your milk and yogurt and whey protein trash. Don't rely on someone to spoon feed you. This is corporate manipulation at Amazon scale. Get with the program, cows milk is for calves, not humans.
I have gone to those farms. Cows die nearly everyday because there are 3000 of them on the farm and their lifespan is 5-7 years, so the numbers work out that way (in the wild it would be less). Otherwise they live in clean barns that are not too hot, have plenty of food and otherwise have an easy life. Boring perhaps, but it isn't cruel despite what you might be manipulated into thinking.
Cows absolutely do not have a lifespan of 5-7 years. Wild cattle easily live 20+ years; same for cared for domesticated species. I've been to these farms to, and I've personally cared for animals that have escaped. For many of them it really is a horrific life. Please don't accuse others of having been manipulated into their beliefs, especially when your claims on the subject are so inaccurate.
What really caught me off-guard in the I didn't see that coming sort of way was that someone named their Bull "Round Oak Rag Apple Elevation" -- that strikes me as an oddly long and specific name. Everything else is, perhaps, bothersome, but not terribly "surprise!".
Could be a path, e.g. Round Oak > Rag > Apple > Elevation. That would make sense if the earlier sites had themselves been of high value: then the name would itself be a kind advertisement.
Or you could think of it as constructing an IPv6 address by embedding the MAC in the low order bits.
I am a little fuzzy on it since it has been a long time since I thought about it, but my father-in-law was a Holstein-Friesian breeder. If I recall correctly the Holstein breed association requires pedigrees to start the farm name. Then you usually include the name of a prominent ancestor in the blood-line, and a name to distinguish the individual. So if you are in the know, you can tell a lot about an animal from the name.
My father-in-law used to get hours of joy from poring over semen catalogs. You know those really intense baseball fans that dig through page after page of player statistics, and quote them from memory to anyone who will listen? Translate that to dairy animals, and that was my father-in-law. The catalogs were full of tables of production records of each bull's progeny. He had two semen storage freezers for his speculative acquisitions. (Basically, insulated tanks cooled by liquid nitrogen. The milk hauler carried liquid N so that he could top off the farmers' semen storage as he pumped their milk into the truck.)
In the old days, you were paid by the total production with a butter-fat premium for richer milk. Then at some point they reduced the butter-fat premium but added a new premium for protein content. That caused a major reshuffling of the value of many bulls.
Bulls have wikipedia pages now? Ok, this is the thing I'm most surprised about out of all of this.
Maybe I'm just annoyed that there's a bull who's more famous than me, and that he got that famous by being a lot more reproductively successful than me.
It's not that simple. If you look back far enough, "cows" are descended from perhaps multiple species of "not really cows, yet". And the same is true for all of those species.
Yes, but that's not the main issue -- it's that thousands (millions?) of other bulls who were around during the 50's and 60's didn't get to contribute to the gene pool leading to low genetic diversity. If there was some hidden defect in the Y chromosome that happen to affect both of them, that defect would not be in most bulls in existence.
'Chad' (as a meme) refers to the archetypal alpha male, attractive, fit, and confident, who typically attracts all of the 'Stacies' (highly attractive women)
It’s not that definition. Chad is the memey name of the archetype of the good looking buff guy who pick and sleep with girls really easily (before dumping them).
This doesn't mean that the bulls in the catalog are genetically identical. They still had lots of different mothers, as well as grandmothers. But it does show that this system of large-scale artificial insemination, with farmers repeatedly picking top-rated bulls, has made cows more genetically similar. Meanwhile, genetic traits that existed in Holstein cows a generation ago have disappeared
It's like when we had to adjust all the carbon datings because techniques changed. I just don't trust everyone always coming from a handfull of people. You'd expect to see it happen in both directions.
This basically means that US beef industry is 1 disease away from being obliterated. Genetic diversity is still a requirement for the survival of a species.
For beef they don’t use milk cows (dairy cows) they use beef cattle such as angus and herford. Also there are other dairy cows like guernsey, jersey, etc.
That isn't strictly true (not in the UK anyway). I was out for a beer tonight and serendipitously bumped into the secretary for the Aberdeen Angus Cattle Society[0] and proceeded to have a discussion about the Society, cattle, beef production etc.
You'd (and I was) be surprised to know that Aberdeen Angus sires impregnate dairy cattle for offspring that end up as prime steak. And this isn't just for burgers, it's for premium supermarket cuts such as fillets.
Also (in the UK anyway), most beef that is labelled as Aberdeen Angus only need to be 50% Angus (i.e. be sired from an AA bull)...check the small print on the packaging. It's actually rarer (pardon the pun) to see 100% Angus steaks on the shelves (say as cuts of fillets or sirloin) because their muscle structure is somewhat less appealing to consumers.
Anyway, he's still in the village at the moment and can ask any questions anyone has tomorrow.
I was in Spain recently (in the Picos de Europa) and had probably the best steak I've ever had - from an Asturian Mountain beastie - we had seen (and heard) a lot of them walking in the Picos:
My village pub is quite amazing, you meet all sorts of interesting people there. A couple of months ago I met a fund manager and author of "China, Trade and Power: Why the West's Economic Engagement Has Failed":
See the other comment about beef vs. dairy. And not really, unless they're inbred to the point that most dairy cows are clones (save for a chromosome) of that bull. And there's smaller herds of other breeds, so there's plenty of genetic diversity out there.
Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.
I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.
I hope that the 2020 updated new dietary guidelines will reflect the fact that dairy is completely optional for a healthy diet even for infants, and even not recommended for most non-caucasians as they are usually lactose intolerant.