Page 26 - The Welfare of Cattle

Introduction

We humans tend to carefully select the materials we read, watch, and listen to based on whether
the material agrees with what we already believe. Those that present alternative positions don’t
receive the same effort from us to try to understand and to thoughtfully consider the point the author
is trying to make. You’re encouraged and we believe you’ll find it useful to read all of the book.
You’ll find some materials you like, and some you don’t. The goal is to have us all broadly think
about the issues and for each of us to apply those concepts we can to improve the welfare of cattle.
It’s my belief we as a society can have whatever kind of animal production system we want. We
can’t collectively seem to decide what that is, however, because we have not yet been able to achieve
the purposeful dialogue in order to find the common ground required to foster change. This book is
one step in the effort to achieve that purposeful dialogue.
As background know that I love cattle, especially dairy cattle. But more important than my
emotional attachment to them is the respect I have for what they are and what they do. “My girls”
produce one of the world’s highest quality and most nutritious foods, milk, in the extremes of
Nordic and desert climates, at high altitudes and at sea level, in high tech production systems and
in low and no tech grazing systems. Much of the food they consume is non-competitive with simple
stomached animals, including we humans, because the cow’s rumen harvests nutrients from feed-
stuffs we can’t digest. From 20% to 40% of the average dairy cow’s diet captures nutritional value
from recycled waste streams associated with the production of human food, fuel, or fiber products.
These products would otherwise be burned or buried, wasting their value, and contributing to envi-
ronmental degradation.
The nutrients provided by these by-products, along with nutrients coming from hay, silage,
and grain, allow cows to provide about 17% of the protein consumed in America today. They’ve
also made milk a major economic force in the USA. The number one agriculture commodity in
California, the USA’s largest ag economy, is milk. In many other states milk production is critical
to the state’s economy as a major provider of employment.
While milk and eggs provide the highest quality proteins relative to digestibility and in provid-
ing human’s essential amino acid requirements, meat from cattle is also a high quality and valu-
able protein. In North America about 20% of the beef consumed comes from dairy cattle. Cattle
butchered for meat also provide many important and economically beneficial by-products including
leather, felt, fats, lubricants, soaps, creams, buttons, glues, gelatin, and much more. It’s reported
that 99% of slaughtered cattle today are utilized commercially to make useful and salable products.
Beef production continues to operate under similar “norms” as those that applied decades ago,
but over the last 50+ year’s milk pricing policies and dairy operational costs of production has cre-
ated a situation where higher turnover rates and shorter cow longevity are economically possible
and, in some situations, are financially rewarded.
In the 1996 publication The Lost Art of Healing physician Bernard Lown, emeritus professor
of cardiology at Harvard and previously a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston, laments the industrialization of human health care and makes a passionate appeal to restore
the “3,000-year tradition that bonded doctor and patient in a special affinity of trust.” He notes
the biomedical sciences had begun to dominate our conception of health care, and he warned that

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