Cows contribute to global warming.
I’m serious. I saw this on Newsround and then picked it up again at Bootiful Me. So I had a look on the BBC News site to see what I could find.
They (cows) are the UK’s biggest single source of methane - a gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming.
This seemed daft to me until I read further.
"Cows don’t ruminate anymore," concludes Professor David Beever, an expert on nutrition with feed producer Richard Keenan and Co.
He believes that their food is not chewy enough, so they do not break it down in their mouths before it gets to their rumen. It is inefficient and produces more methane.
OK. So this is another case of feeding our food producing animals (meat or dairy) the wrong food. We feed herbivores on the ground up remains of their own kind. We fill them full of hormones and unnecessary antibiotics, then we wonder why things go wrong?
Elsewhere in labs and farm yards scientists are trying out inoculations, microbes or even extracts of garlic.
Huh? There’s a problem becuse we don’t have the sense to allow these animals to feed as they are meant to and we want to fix it by interfereing even more? I don’t get it. Let them graze, let them eat grass as they should, let then stand in the fields chewing the cud, let them ruminate properly. Let them be cows. Maybe, just maybe, the milk and beef might taste a bit better too?
Watch The Meatrix. Then go and find a local farmer or butcher and ask how their meat is farmed, how their dairy cattle are kept. Buy grass fed, organic, free range, RSPCA certified. Draw a line in the dirt and stand by it.
