#AnimalHarvesting #Livestock #AnimalRights
Can’t you just wait for an animal to die naturally to harvest? 🤔
When it comes to the concept of harvesting animals, there is a lot to consider – both practically and ethically. While many people are in favor of keeping their own livestock for various reasons, including self-sustainability and knowing where their food comes from, the issue of harvesting animals is a complex one. Let’s dive into this topic and unravel the various facets associated with it.
## The Ethical & Moral Dilemma
### Separating Animals for Harvesting
One of the major ethical concerns when it comes to harvesting animals is the separation of the mother and offspring. Many animal rights activists argue that it is morally unethical to separate a mother and her offspring, especially in the case of mammals. This is a valid concern and one that should be taken into consideration when engaging in animal husbandry.
### Natural vs. Forced Death
Some individuals advocate for waiting for an animal to die naturally before harvesting it. While this may seem like a more ethical approach, it’s important to consider the quality of life the animal would have in its natural state versus a life where it is being kept solely for harvesting purposes. This brings us to the question of animal welfare and quality of life.
## Practical Considerations
### Health & Quality of Meat
The health and quality of the meat harvested from an animal that has died naturally versus one that has been raised and cared for properly is a crucial factor to consider. Animals that have lived a healthy and well-cared-for life tend to produce higher quality meat, which is a significant consideration for those who are consuming the meat.
### Food Production & Sustainability
From a practical standpoint, waiting for an animal to die naturally may not always be feasible, especially for those who rely on their livestock for food production and sustainability. It’s important to consider the balance between practicality and ethical considerations when it comes to livestock management.
## Alternatives to Harvesting
### Donating Organs
While it may not be applicable to all mammals, some individuals have raised the question of whether it is possible to donate organs from animals after their natural death. This concept is similar to human organ donation and may serve as an alternative to harvesting the entire animal for meat consumption.
### Respectful Slaughter
In cases where harvesting an animal is necessary, it is crucial to approach it with respect and dignity. Employing humane slaughter methods and ensuring that the animal is not subjected to unnecessary suffering is an important aspect of responsible animal husbandry.
### Alternative Food Sources
For those who are concerned about the ethical implications of harvesting animals, exploring alternative food sources such as plant-based diets or sustainably sourced seafood can be viable options. These alternatives provide a way to meet dietary needs while minimizing the impact on animal welfare.
## Conclusion
In conclusion, the question of whether to wait for an animal to die naturally for harvesting is a complex one that encompasses ethical, moral, and practical considerations. While there may not be a one-size-fits-all answer, it’s important to approach the concept of animal harvesting with thoughtfulness and consideration for the welfare of the animals involved. By weighing the practical and ethical aspects of animal harvesting, individuals can make informed decisions that align with their values and beliefs while also meeting their food production needs.
Sure, although depending on the eventual cause of death you may not want to actually eat the meat.
Problem for meat production at a large scale is that animals reach their adult size quickly but usually stubbornly refuse to die for many years. You’re spending an enormous amount of money feeding this animal and getting no additional meat.
Cows can easily live 20-30 years, sometimes over 40. Pigs routinely hit 25. Turkeys can get over 10.
But you’d slaughter a meat cow before age 2. Ages 3-45 are money lost.
As the animal ages and before it dies the body converts the muscle mass for other purposes meaning old animals have less meat to harvest than most farm animals, in addition the major input in farming costs for meat production is providing food for the animal to eat, the longer the animal lives the more it eats the more expensive the meat is.
Donating organs works, but only sometimes and only some organs. You’re much more likely to get usable parts from a young person who died in an accident than from an older person who died naturally. The heart of an older person, for example, likely isn’t going to do a ton of good.
As you might imagine, the peak of meat quality coincides pretty solidly with the peak of health quality in an animal.
Are you wanting to donate a pig heart to another pig?
You don’t want to eat meat from an old animal. Theres a reason animals are slaughtered when they are. Nobody wants to eat old tough meat
Couple problems.
If you’re raising the animals for food, waiting for them to die of old age means that you’ll need to feed them more (a lot more) before you can harvest them. It’s inefficient, though that might not be a problem for you personally.
Secondly, if you wait for the animal to die naturally, that can mean disease, or other various forms of rot and infestation. Even if the sickness doesn’t kill the animal, living longer just gives it more time to pick up a parasite or something that could be passed along.
Meat on an old animal tastes awful. Also, old animals lose muscle mass. Unless you just want soup bones there won’t be much there.
Thanks everyone for the responses and being so kind. Definitely all makes sense. I wouldn’t want tough or contaminated meat. Would have just been nice if there was a more humane way of harvesting live stock.
You technically can. I have done this before. However you need to know why an animal dies to make sure it does not have any big infections that could transmit to humans. Often when an animal dies of old age they die from a combination of illnesses. One illness often weakens the animal to infections. So even if you for example manages to find widespread cancer in a dead animal it might have died from pneumonia and that bacteria can spread to humans. Or it might have a parasite living in its weakened muscles that could infect you.
The cases where it is generally safe to eat the animal is when it suffered a quick death and did not show any sign of infection before. Mostly this limits it to accidents, complications during birth, etc.
There are much better ways of farming then what modern cost optimised farms are doing, but it does sometimes include killing animals for harvest. You are right that you should not separate piglets from their mothers until they are ready. But when pigs grow up they will naturally separate from their mothers, just like juvenile humans. This happens to be the optimal time to harvest the piglets as well as their growth slows down. So keep the piglets with their mother until they naturally separate and then harvest them.
My grandparents always had chickens for personal eggs and meat consumption. They always keep them in 2 different pens.
There’s some that they keep for years , mostly untill they die from natural causes and those are kept for eggs. Then there’s the “meat” pen, where they keep them at the most 2 years, whatever passes that and it wasn’t needed to be cut for meat, goes to the eggs pen.
That’s because the meat of older animals is rough. Cooking and eating it is a hussle. Also, the longer they live, the more likely they are to be needing different vaccines and even antibiotics, and you’d probably preffer not eating those.
In addition to the points made about costs feeding an animal a long time and quality of meat from older animals, the lack of predictability would be a problem for scale.
Right now, there are things that a chicken farm can’t predict, but across the large scale of their operation, they can plan when they’re steadily slaughtering animals, the timing, location and volume of those animals is planned for with their transportation and pricing etc.
If they had to monitor every chicken to see when it dies, and then transport all those chickens who died in their cages (or random places on the farm if you’re smaller and trying to give them more free rein) at scale that’s a hugely less efficient process.
In the US, we’re talking almost 10 billion chickens a year. A process of not knowing when they die and having to locate, move and time processing and transportation to stores for their meat would add another massive cost in addition to the feed costs of raising them longer.
Wasted resources, and also Jews and Muslims can’t eat Carrion. Also it has a bunch of health concerns and taste issues. Old meat tastes tough. And old age might have given the animal many diseases. And also unless you stand there and immediately butcher up the animal the moment it drops dead, It’s gonna have pathogens and maggots all over it.
No. But there are always an over abundance of males of any species. So those are the ones we mostly kill and eat.
In most cases you’ll be able to eat the meat of a naturally diseased animal, as long as you take care of it immediately after death. There are various issues with this though.
Chiefly economics. Say you need two cows worth of meat a year to keep yourself and your family fed. If you slaughter them when they’re around one (at which point they’re almost fully grown, you wont get significantly more meat by waiting another year) you can sustain your meat needs with just 4-7 cows; one or two fertile cows to produce 2-4 calves every year, and 1 fertile bull to impregnate the cows.
If instead you’ll only eat animals that died naturally, you’ll need a lot more animals. If your cows live an average of 15 years, you’ll need 30 animals in order for two of them to die naturally every year. That’s 30 cows in need of feeding, watering, vet visits, etc. It would be crazy expensive meat.
Secondly, animals who die of natural causes are typically ill in one way or another. Sometimes it will be inadvisable to eat meat from such animals. But perhaps more importantly, animals (like people) often lose both muscle and fat as they grow old and become ill. So a naturally diseased animal will have less meat than one slaughtered at a more opportune age, and what meat remains might be lean and stringy.
Generally you don’t just “die of old age” you die of disease processes that usually occur when you reach old age after your bodies used and abused itself for years. Heart disease, kidney disease, vascular disease and all these leading to other diseases.
Meats gonna be a bit roughed up.
Sure but it’ll taste awful. When an animal dies naturally, it’s usually of disease or starvation. The muscle and fat will be very degraded. The organs will be very stressed and this will affect flavor and texture.
When humans donate organs, it’s rarely from super elderly or sick people. It’s usually from otherwise healthy people who died tragically, or had a disease that targeted only one part of their body. The circumstances around human organ donation (usually sudden unexpected deaths) aren’t that dissimilar from killing a young animal for food, in terms of the condition of the body at death.
Let’s say we ate people. Would you rather eat your 90 yr old grandpa or a nice fresh and fit 18 yr old boy. Old meat will be tough and of poor flavor, fresh young meat is tender and delicious.
I wish you could understand how harsh the lives are of wild animals. They are not gently laying down, going to sleep and dying. A properly placed arrow or a bullet is WAY more humane than succumbing to the elements, predators, disease, injury, etc.
Old sick animals usually aren’t great to eat. Vet bills start to add up, too.
Remember that old saying “a chicken in every pot”? It’s because elderly hens are pretty much only good for making soup with, and back then many people couldn’t afford to harvest hens young enough to still be laying eggs.
It’s really expensive to keep dairy cows alive for their full natural lifespans.
I’ve read several comments and I haven’t noticed this reason yet: you can control your inventory. You might go months without an animal that dies (then you have no inventory to sell) then all of a sudden you have a shit ton of animals that die, then you have an abundance of inventory to sell off for cheap before it spoils.
Possibly. It all depends on how much time has passed and also what they does from. If you watch an animal die, then you are in time to save the meat. But I’d they died from old age, the meat isn’t going to be great… If they died of something else, do you really want to eat it?
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This is a part of ranching and livestock that you just have to come to terms with. I will tell you that when it comes to most livestock (with some exceptions) you can actually take them to the processors alive and they will do the work for you.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. The two biggest factors that keep most people from doing it though are cost and meat quality. When raising a livestock animal, a considerable amount of time, money, and resources are spent on taking care of that animal. While the animal is young, a lot of that investment is returned to you in the form of growth of the animal. I.e. you gave it food and water, and it grew more meat for you to later eat/sell. However, once the animal is fully grown, much of those resources are simply wasted since it doesn’t use that food to grow bigger, only to stay alive. This is, of course, assuming you’re not milking, shearing, breeding, or otherwise getting other useful things from the animal. Thus, many farmers, whether they’re commercial or subsistence, will choose not to raise most of their animals past adulthood. For example, if you own a bull (and you’re not breeding it), you can’t get any additional resources like milk or wool from it after it’s fully grown (though I suppose you could get fertilizer from the manure) and thus its often more economical to butcher it once it matures. Of course, there’s the obvious sentimental value of the bull that many people can’t ignore. If you spent years raising it, it may feel bad to kill it.
Next, you also need to consider the quality of the meat. For most animals, the meat is considered higher quality the younger it is. The older an animal gets, the tougher its meat tends to become as the muscles get worked more. For some species of animals, this effect is pretty drastic, particularly in poultry. Also, as an animal ages, the flavor of the meat changes as well. Most people think that older meats don’t taste quite as good as younger meats. However, some people actually find that older meats taste better than younger meats, and more and more people are pushing to make older meats more popular. In my opinion, though younger meats tend to be significantly better than older meats. This was made most apparent to me when I tried the same cut of meat from two deer, one young and one old, prepared the same way and the young meat was far better than the old meat. Lastly, you need to worry about disease. If you wait until an animal is older, it’s much more likely to pass away due to some disease that could completely ruin the meat of the animal or even get you sick as well.
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with waiting to harvest an animal until it’s older. These are just some things to consider.
Imagine the loose skin that you see on senior citizens and imagine that’s what’s for dinner. There’s not a lot of meat, just fat and skin. So it’s a lot less filling and healthy.
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Muscle density reaches peak in all creatures during young adulthood which is much earlier than death in most cases. It also costs much more and doesn’t provide a predictable amount of meat. So it is all around worse for everyone except people who want the animals to live forever.
People who donate there organs aren’t old people, or people who died from an ilness, they are usually people who died from a traumatic brain injury, and so they were declared brain dead, but there heart was still beating and there organs were still alive and healthy. If your pigs were brain dead then yes you could harvest them and eat them, but if they die from “old age” or an illness then no they wouldn’t be good for eating
Veterinarian here to add another point that I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet. Not only would vet bills add up as animals get older, but also the drugs that we use often linger in the tissues. That’s why there’s withholding periods for every drug we can use for animals that may go into the food chain. If you ate meat from a cow that was recently treated with antibiotics, you could also be ingesting antibiotic residue and causing resistance. Most animals get sickly before they die, so depending on your choices, they could be given medications from vets, making them unsuitable for ingestion, or they could be elected to be left untreated which would also be a welfare issue. My 2 cents!
Natural death means the body isn’t in good condition. Age especially does nasty things to muscles, and if you’re eating those muscles, they will not taste good. There’s a reason that human food is slaughtered at 1-2 years. It tastes a lot better. When a dairy cow or breeding cow reaches the end of it’s usefulness (usually upwards of 10 years old), it’s actually very rare for it to become food for humans. The meat has an off taste that we’re unaccustomed to. So they typically are used for animal feed. Dog food is common, but so is pig or chicken feed.
Side note, we rarely eat males for similar reasons. Male chickens are obviously killed at birth (usually). And swine or cows are typically castrated shortly after birth. Testosterone gives meat a weird gamey and metallic flavor that, at least in the west, we really don’t like.