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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Last cattle drive in Kansas is a true loss

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An article in The Wichita Eagle is about a final cattle drive from Kansas to Oklahoma. The Cedar Creek Ranch has been conducting cattle drives the old fashion way, with cowboys on horses, until now. The recession has forced them to relocate.
In a day when chickens and pigs are kept in factory farms where they move no more than the length of a small cage their entire life, it is nice to know there are some animals that still get to lead a normal and decent life before they end up on our dinner tables. In some European countries factory chicken farms (by far the cruellest where chickens are debeaked so they can’t fight and then locked in a small cage for their entire life) are outlawed. But people in this country have scoffed at such ideas. Animals are treated as if they aren’t even alive and are just a food commodity.
On factory pig farms, pigs are shot if they step of a platform onto dirt. They are then incinerated and the bodies often pile up faster than the incinerators can operate, causing an awful stench for nearby neighbors.
So it is gratifying to see that some animals lead a fairly normal life, getting to see the sun and the grass lands their ancestors walked on before they are slaughtered for food.
The cattle in the story will now be raised and cared for in Oklahoma.
I don’t oppose eating meat, but I do believe we owe a decent life to those creatures that give us the food we eat.
Long horns were once used for long cattle drives. Now they are just kept as a curiosity. -សតិវ អតុ

1 comment:

Michael Caddell said...

Much of this article cited at the Wichita Eagle is pure hocus-pocus for the conservative tribes to weep and get angry over. There are tens of thousands of acres of grazing land available out there near Cassoday. Just ask Joe & Deb Reinert who run the Spring Creek Ranch nestled in 10,000 acres of the Flint Hills near Cassoday. This is but one that is "indirectly owned" by Matador Cattle Company a/k/a Koch Industries. The billionaires hold ownership of that acreage an additional 130,000 across 5 Texas counties that the dead patriarch Fred bought in 1953. An additional 300,000 acres are owned in Montana, but let's not get into that for right now.