Goat cheese is the new veal
I have two new goats.
In a nod to Tom Sawyer and his fence, I told my sons the goats are for me only, and I want to take care of them. When my sons thought of 100 names for each goat, I told them that the person who takes care of the goats gets to name the goats.
So the goats are named Samuel and Snowflake. And I am supervising feeding instead of feeding.
I know you’re not supposed to name farm animals you are planning to eat. But last summer my son bottle fed a calf that did not have a mom to take care of it, and now my son seems to be fine with the idea of killing the calf.
The farmer made the idea more palatable to my son by telling him that my son will get money for taking care of the calf. My son asked for $10,000. The farmer pointed out that we cannot sell a calf for $10,000 and when all was said and done with the financial lesson, it became clear that if you add labor, and milk replacer, and the small size of the orphaned calf, it costs more money to keep the calf alive and slaughter it for meat than it would have cost to kill the calf when it was born.
“We don’t kill our animals here unless they are in pain,” said the farmer to my son.
So it was easy to explain to my son why our goats were free. “The dairy goat farmer doesn’t want them,” I said. “It costs too much in labor and feed to keep the goat alive. That farmer would lose money.”
I didn’t tell my sons that farmers all over the cheese belt of America are banging goat babies on the head to kill them as soon as they are born.
If this were a PETA blog, there would be really gross pictures. But my kids go to school with tons of dairy farm kids, so I have to be careful.
But here’s the problem with the milk industry. To get milk from animals they have to give birth. And their milk slows down if they don’t give birth a lot. If the dairy cow gives birth to a girl, there’s hope that the girl cow will give milk when she grows up, so it’s not a total waste of money to keep the calf alive.
If the dairy cow gives birth to a boy, there’s not really anything to make it economically sensible to keep it alive.You have probably never had a dairy cow steak in your life—they’re just not that good. But dairy cow meat can go into low-cost food like McDonald’s hamburgers. So McDonald’s is saving the lives of tons of boy dairy cows by creating a market for them.
The dairy goats are not so lucky. Just like the cow business, there are meat goats and dairy goats. But there is not enough money is the goat meat market for people to pay a decent price to kill dairy goats for meat. There’s not enough meat on the dairy goat to make it worth raising the dairy goat.
So farmers that provide goat milk to the cheese industry kill the boy baby goats.
You can get angry at the farmers if you want, but what can they do? They could raise the prices of goat milk, but someone would undersell them. And people who are great at raising goats can’t switch their farm over to something else. They don’t know how and they don’t have enough money for a capital investment.
We have seen this business problem before. We see it in corporate life all the time. It’s much easier to make money without the burden of a moral compass. Until you go to jail. But also, most of us have our own moral compass and we are always trying to balance ethical problems: feeding ourselves and our families and being the good person we envision ourselves to be. Making real world business decisions requires a constant recalibration of the right and wrong of our own perspective against what’s at stake.
The type of business makes a huge difference. Take Bernie Madoff, for instance. It’s hard for me to understand the laws he violated and the numbers he faked. So who knows what I would have done with the opportunity to make decisions for him? But when I first met the farmer, I could look in his pig pen (technically called a “farrowing pen”) and see that I really don’t like how he’s birthing pigs. He has the moms immobilized so they don’t roll over onto babies.
My perspective: It’s inhumane to tie down an animal during birth and if pigs would roll over onto babies in natural childbirth then probably that’s why there are such big litters—because some would die naturally.
The farmer’s perspective: His whole system is set up this way and it’s too much to change right now and it’s just balancing the pain of a birthing mother versus the pain of a baby being squashed, and who am I to guess which is more painful? (This is what most animal arguments with the farmer come down to: “Don’t anthropomorphize the animals!”)
So it’s never absolutely clear to me what is right and what is wrong on a family farm. And most of these goat milk farms are family farms.
What is clear to me, though, is that goat cheese is like veal: If you had any idea what animals are going through to get you this meal, you would be horrified.
The great thing about awareness, though, is that once people understood the horrors of the veal industry, the veal industry tanked. And now a new industry of veal cows with a high quality of life has emerged.
So, I got two boy goats from a woman whose specialty is taking boy goats from milk farmers who don’t want them. Here’s a photo of Samuel today. Four days old.
The farmers control the births so they get an optimum price for milk. Milk prices are high now. So babies are being born in the coldest part of winter. They are not in heated barns because it’s too costly to heat a barn for animals that make so little money at slaughter. Of the boy baby goats that are not intentionally killed at birth, a large percentage of them die from frostbite. And even more die because when you take them away from their mother, they have no will to eat.
Because I make money from something other than goat milk, and I can afford to turn my boy goats into sort-of house pets, we have two in a small heated shed. I am having to force-feed them to teach them how to eat. It reminds me a little of feeding my own boy babies that hadn’t learned to latch onto the nipple.
Here’s my idea. I’m going to learn about how to take care of boy baby goats, and then I’m going to figure out how to change the goat cheese industry so that people understand that the moral cost of goat cheese is very high right now. But it doesn’t have to be. Somehow I want to try to figure out how to make morally responsible goat cheese.
Does anyone have ideas? Also, if you want to know what it looks like to figure out a new idea for a company, here’s what looks like: Going down seemingly insane paths, learning skills that may or may not be useful in life, meeting a wide range of people who may or may not help you, and then telling everyone your idea in order to get feedback.
I think I won’t eat goat cheese. The use of male goats for keeping tall, dry grass from causing extreme fire danger in the summer seems like a very good idea. I have seen them on roadsides and they seem to be grazing–at least that’s what their keepers/herders are being paid for them to do.
Penelope, the real feat would be figuring out an economical way to leverage the goat farmers’ skills into a new business that doesn’t involve harming animals. (This would pretty much remove goat milking as an option.)
It was a similar experience of learning from a farmer about the details of cow milk production, in particular the practice of killing of male calves – incentivised by hefty government subsidy, that motivated me to spend 2 years obsessively developing dairy free chocolate truffles 13 years ago leading to the creation of The Booja Booja Company. I did not want to develop a chocolate business based on dairy as a main ingredient. The amazing thing is that the obsessive research led to the discovery that you dont even need dairy to make delicious chocolates and ‘ice cream’. By virtually all accounts, our dairy free chocolate truffles and ‘ice cream’ contain more deliciously sensuous enjoyment than their dairy equivalents.
Dairy is used as an ingredient in such a wide range of products from ready meals to desserts, biscuits, confectionery. Who actually drinks a glass of milk anymore? There is therefore huge scope to reduce the pervasive use of dairy as a food manufacturing ingredient. This would reduce a lot of the dilemmas that you identify Penelope about how we produce milk.
Your post helped me because goats cheese does appear in our house from time to time and in an omission of joined up thinking I had vaguely thought that somehow the production of goats milk was somehow more benign. They probably get to roam a bit more than cows and are less subject to routine chemicals but those baby boys are still getting bonked because they cant make milk. So, thank you.
Did you really write “Who actually drinks a glass of milk anymore?”?? Seriously? Children do, people who eat cereal do, people who eat cookies do. People who like milk do. What’s the most crowded isle in the supermarket? The one with the milk.
I agree…my husband & I go thru a gallon of milk of week. No, we do not bathe in it….we DRINK it.
Who drinks a glass of milk? The better question is who doesn’t? Most of the world drinks milk! Our family of five limits ourselves to 4 gallon a week when we have to buy it from the store. During the nine months when our goats are providing us with milk, we can easily do a gallon a day!
um, for starters, people in china do not drink milk. so that’s 20% of the world’s population right there.
“people in china do not drink milk.” Posted by kristin on February 2, 2012 at 5:39
Kristin, people in China drink milk. Maybe not as much as me, but people in China DO drink milk. Perhaps you should do some fact checking next time.
There has to be a way to keep these goat ladies fresh (a term for lactating). When I was nursing my son and my milk supply started to dwindle, I tried fenugreek, an herb, and it did indeed work. There are several plants that contain milk-stimulating hormones, but someone needs to figure out their efficacy on female goats. There are also some heavy duty drugs for people to stimulate lactation (Reglan aka domperidone), they are so strong they can make an adoptive mother who has not been pregnant produce milk, but I wonder if that drug winds up IN the milk, which would affect its sell-ability.
OK, I just looked up and found the following: Try natural galactagogues, also called lactation herbs. Many natural supplements are shown to stimulate lactation. Some herbs include: blessed thistle, fenegreek, fennel, shatavari, anise seed, cumin seed, goat’s rue, caraway and hops.
Read more: How to Stimulate Lactation | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4455091_stimulate-lactation.html#ixzz1C92vTDRt
What is goat’s rue? Is this an ancient herb for keeping goats fresh?
Rue means to regret bitterly so I highly doubt “goat’s rue” would be safe for goats. To keep dairy animals lactating enough for cheese, synthetic hormones are used which does end up in the end product which is why they now sell cow milk without rBGH (and I assume kill the baby boy cows to do it).
rBST does not show up in milk products. There is no way to tell, outside of certification by the producer, that the cow that produced the milk had rBST administered to it or not.
Using rBST costs the farmer money in reduced milk output per cow, and increases the total amount of feed required to produce a gallon of milk. Udder infections rates for cattle administered rBST are similar to those of cattle who are producing at an increased rate due to better feed, better housing, etc. The total time of lactation (roughly 10 months a year) remains about the same, with some increased retention of cows under rBST use (ie – they keep producing more and longer, so the farmer is more hesitant to send them to market.)
If people don’t want milk from rBST treated cows, fine. But they aren’t doing their pocketbook, the farmer, or the cows a favor with their choice.
Nice pictures.
I don’t have the attention span to read the whole post, but the last paragraph was insightful.
Thanks for sharing
My pet ferrets would happily eat free-range goat meat, and as long as it were relatively cheap I’d happily buy it for them. I suspect a lot of pet owners would also think the same..
We had goats for pets when I was a kid and they were great! Taking care of them taught me responsibility and they were always doing funny things. I’m really sad to hear about the farmers killing the babies, but I don’t blame them. America needs to truly look at how what they think is “fashionable” in food is causing suffering for both animals and humans (what true farmer takes joy in killing a baby? Probably not a single one.)
Enjoy your new pets because they will bring lots of laughter (and great pictures) into your life.
Thank you Penelope for bringing this to my attention. Thank you Bevin also for your response, it is very important to know that not all goat milk farmers operate in the way that Penelope has described. My question then: how do I know which goat’s cheese has been produced on a farm with the level of ethics I would expect, and which have not? I’m sure it’s not simply a matter of ‘the small farmers are good’.
You need to go to your local farmer’s market and talk to the farmers. Not just for cheese, but for everything. The American food system is completely broken and the only way to fix it is through consumer awareness. And with the total failure of so many blogs (ahem) to deliver accurate information about food, it is more important than ever.
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for the great ideas! Hearing how people think about these issues gives me lots of ideas about marketing. I think I’ll always be a better thinker about marketing than farming, but the ideas in this string help me blend the two.
For anyone who is afraid of telling their business ideas to other people, this is a great example of why it’s so valuable to get input. People always tell me they don’t want their ideas “stolen”. But people don’t steal each others’ ideas. They make them better.
Penelope
“So it's never absolutely clear to me what is right and what is wrong on a family farm. And most of these goat milk farms are family farms.”
I think the real problem (myself included) is that we are too far removed from our food supply and are not aware of general procedures or procedures specific to a given farm. When I buy a given item from a large brand and learn they don’t adhere to practices that I believe in, then I can take my business elsewhere. They have a brand to protect and are therefore usually responsive to their customer’s concerns. Not so much with a family farm. They send their product “up the line” to be processed, marketed, and sold somewhere else.
I think, at least initially, the best course of action is to keep a separate journal on the goats and monitor all aspects (economic costs, emotional benefits as a pet, trials and tribulations of various experiments to find their ‘usefulness’) of their upbringing. Then write an electronic publication and sell it. The objective could be focused on the practical awareness of the problem or it could be the joys of raising a farm animal as a pet (as a children’s book or adult how-to).
You mirror my very thoughts Penelope. My neighbour used to raise meat goats. When she and her husband had serious health issues I started going over to help with the chores, feeding little ones using the bottle, etc. I fell in love with those little creatures. There aren’t many baby creatures that aren’t adorable though are there?? I haven’t found one yet. It appalled me (hypocrite that I am, being a meat eater, but NO veal…haha) that she could raise them and sell them to be eaten, as well as eat them herself. Her last babies were three adorable males, and they were so entertaining. Bottle fed babies definitely bond with the human who feeds them and these guys were hilarious in their antics. I was so driven to stop their deaths that, I did the research and found out you could castrate them (wethers) and they were terrific farm animals, without the odour that an ‘entire male’ carries about him. I went so far as to offer to purchase all three at market price, which she turned down, telling me I couldn’t save them all. I’m a total “save the animals” type of person but I also recognize we all don’t eat tofu and beans. Where do we draw the line? Ethical treatment, good farming practices, check out your local farmer and how they do their business, etc. I think that is the best we can do and have folks like you with a larger contact base to spread the word of change. We as humans do some really nasty things to ‘lesser’ creatures on this planet to satisfy our desires and needs. We need to re-think those practices (look at Temple Grandin’s affect on the beef industry!!) There will always be those who are what I see in my rural location, the typical old-timer farmers who farm in the old methods, but hopefully with a new crop of young farmers and the effects that consumer power can bring, we can change these methods to enable all creatures to have a better life, as well as allow our farming neighbours to make a good living.
it is funny that you call them the “old methods” because a generation ago they were the “new methods”
Give ’em hell.
I’ve been hard on you in the past. This is a terrific blog entry. I hope you follow this thread up.
Hey Penelope,
Greets again from Germany!
I’m a huge fan of goat cheese–Feta, Chavre, Ziegenkaeserolle….all of it….but I didn’t realize that the Billy boys got axed at birth to save resources. Such great pix of the little guys, thanks for your latest blog.
Anyway–you’ve probably already seen this story http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/living-lawn-mowers-goats-rent-12157420 about the woman who has started a lawn-care / landscaping biz with her goat herd……I hope this catches on in a big way, both here in Europe and there in the USA. So hope THAT’s the biz idea you’re looking for to keep humans and male goats employed up there in (?) Wisconsin!
I’m a fan of people naturescaping their yards in lieu of horrible green lawns (which aren’t sustainable in huge swathes of the USA anyway!), but if you’ve just gotta have the lawn, then get goats to keep it taken care of.
Check out Dee Harley’s operations at Harley Farms in Pescadero CA. She raises goats humanely and makes goat cheeses that are the best.
http://www.harleyfarms.com
I love goat cheese and had no idea it was a cruel business. I am behind you improving it 100%. I’ll be looking forward to hearing what you come up with and I hope you’ll post requests for help for random people across the country like me who’d like to get involved!
People have pretty well covered the goat issue, but there’s more to the pig issue too…
I read a lot of farming blogs, and I don’t think farrowing crates for otherwise free-range pigs are as evil as they seem. A lot of small scale and backyard pig farmers have tried it both ways, and farrowing crates really do cut down on mortality. A LOT. A sow can easily squish 90% or more of her piglets in that first couple of days. No matter how you market it, you can’t make a living if your pigs only raise one piglet each farrowing. The better pork producers only use the crates for the first couple of days, until the piglets get more mobile and smarter and are able to evade the sow when she flops down. Far better to lock mom in a cage for three days than to have squashed babies :(
And you’re right, the solution to the economically unviable males thing is marketing. People have to stop buying the cheapest food.
Farrowing crates are not as torturous as they look.
I worked with pig farming in Denmark for about 5-6 years when I was young, about 3 years of this time with sows, both indoor in farrowing crates and outdoor (farrowing in huts on a field).
Farrowing crates do save the lives of a lot of piglets, and indoor sows are generally more stressed than outdoor saws and more prone to lying on their piglets.
The crates are variable and is usually made to sit closely around the sow’s body for the first few days, and then gradually loosened more and more. The piglets are drawn into a covered corner with a cosy heat lamp. But yes, not much fun in life for the sow.
Outdoor, a proportion of piglets do get crushed in the farrowing huts, no doubt about that. However, the rate of accidents varies greatly between sows. There are sow who never crush a single piglet in their “career” and others who crush every single one they make (usually they get max. 2 chances).
Yep, I really don’t get all the hate for farrowing crates. Wild pigs, like warthogs, WANT a narrow, confined tunnel to raise a family. It is easily defended and holds heat. I work at a 3200 sow farm and the pregnant sows run down the hall from the pens to the crates. They know they are close to having babies and want a safe place, away from other sows and with food and water, to give birth and raise their pigs.
This is crazy timely. A friend just rescued an unwanted boy goat. Explaining the boy goat dilemma to me, I wondered why we couldn’t just keep the boy goats separate (due to their ‘rapey’ behavior). My friend explained we would eventually end up with a huge barn akin to the environment of a male prison. Don’t have the answers yet, but am happy to see the discussion, and will definitely share any bright ideas (and look forward to seeing others).
No, you castrate the billies when they are young. A pen full of wethers is no worse than a pen of steers, for the same reason.
Besides brush clearing, a wether makes a good bellwether for a herd of sheep. Goats are a lot brighter than sheep but they get along well with them, and that wether (yes, commonly it wears a bell) can guide the sheep to the water trough and manger and generally keep them out of trouble.
That is interesting. I remember puzzle images with a goat with a big bell around its neck… so is that why? Supervising sheep.
Penelope, here in Northern California it is a common practice for sustainable/organic vineyards to employ a herd of babydoll sheep to control the weeds in the vineyard. Less commonly used are goats, which can do the exact same thing. You could have a goat rental service to eat the weeds in vineyards, not only increasing the sustainability of the vineyards but also lowering pesticide costs. I’d love to investigate this with you!
Here is an example of a company that uses goats for fire prevention:
http://www.elmgoats.com/
These are not the local company our town hired to clear brush, but just what I found when I did a quick search on this. I have no idea if this works with all male (or even formerly male) goats.
If you are willing to eventually eat the bucks, I recommend raising them for halal processors who happily pay more recognizing the time and labor that goes into the full process. There is a growing Muslim population in the Midwest that should offer processors and a potential market.
I also liked the light bulb going off on telling the story – that’s a big part of marketing humane and ethical products is explaining why people should care. Some won’t, but you don’t need 100% of a market to make a good business out of it.
I am puzzled why it is wrong to slaughter a baby goat but not an adult goat. Why?
The idea is that adult animals are slaughtered humanely after they live a full life (or what looks to us like a full life).
But, sure, it’s also that babies are cuter.
A big issue with animal rights these days is their quality of life before they die, as opposed to the mere idea that they get slaughtered (people are more accepting of that fact). Veal still seems a bit more harsh to me- those calves are not just killed at birth, they are tortured from birth until they are ready to be killed, in order to get that nice soft meat. I suppose I’m a bit less bothered by the fact that baby goats are killed immediately or are left to die, but I am still, at the very least, going to eat a whole lot less goat cheese.
Pasture-raised veal is delightful.
I grew up in South Spain, where kid (young goat, about 2-6 months old) meat is greatly appreciated. Its price goes pretty high around Christmas season, as it is pretty popular for certain meals. I have to say I find it the most delicious meat around. And here comes my point. Why is it wrong to eat younger animals? The economic and environmental costs are lower than if the animals are raised to full size (and the meat is tastier). I can understand if you’re against meat eating in general, but I don’t get the distinction. It is possible to raise farm animals in a humane way for a reasonable profit. I know because members of my family have been doing it for generations. Perhaps the problem here is the narrow American take on what meat is edible (pork, beef, chicken, turkey) and what is only good for pet food, as someone suggested above. That view is not only harming the environment and wasting the lives of animals, but also robbing the experience of tasting the most sublime meat I have had in my life.
I agree with the people who question why you think it is better to kill an adult goat than a baby goat. Try to save every goat and every kitten and every piglet (they’re cute too!) – you will just end up with a farm full of pets that cost a lot of money to raise and produce nothing useful. A farm is an artificial ecosystem where you are the top predator. They may be picturesque but farms are about raising things and killing them. You want to avoid cruelty but whether the animal lives a day or a year, you created it to kill it and there is nothing sweet or inherently moral about that. I get the impression that you think farmers are not very smart and that you could create something better if you applied your big city smarts to the problem. Try it. I strongly suspect that you and most of the business people you most admire would not be able to farm well enough to feed yourself, much less make any profit.
I suppose I have a broad (philosophical?) view, working for years in the animal products industry: people in our culture (and other cultures) are GOING to consume animal products. Food, apparel, things we don’t even know about. Unless we stop eating meat worldwide – even cheese and egg consumption will create some discomfort and loss of animal life – there’s no real way around it. We don’t like to see pictures of the peaceful animals or their babies. But it’s the “Law of the Jungle”, customized a bit for humans. In nature, death by predators or the elements is generally more cruel than farming. Just a couple thoughts.
I’m a not-quite vegetarian consumer in NC, wondering what the difference is between killing goats as babies and killing them as adults…they still end up dead. More important to me, would be how they are treated while they are alive.
Awful. I can give up my goat cheese, no worries. Gee, maybe we can send the boy goats to China in exchange for girl babies; it makes just about as much sense. You’re on the right track,this needs to be broadcast. I’ll be posting this. Hey, I grew up on a large pig farm, and yes, we had farrowing houses. Although, to be fair, the sows were let out to get exercise before, during and after their litters were born. Sad to see that other practices aren’t so humane.
Cheese 101: “rennet”
http://www.google.com/search?q=rennet&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
Cow cheese, goat cheese and sheep cheese all = death of baby cows/goats/sheep. Hello!!! I’m a vegan w/ Aspergers and it has always puzzled me why more Aspies are not vegans, especially Temple Grandin who “thinks [enough] like a cow” to better facilitate their slaughter, but not enough to consider that perhaps animals should be allowed to live for their own purpose.
Mine will not be a popular statement here, but consumption of animal products is *not* necessary for human survival. Also see http://humanemyth.org
Not to be argumentive, but I am curious: Do vegans where anything leather, such as shoes, gloves, belts? I know it’s off-subject, but I remain curious.
Penelope: How about another side business for you? That is, train the male goats (this will probably involve castration to make them more manageable) to forage in California where the grass and brush create fire hazards during fire season. I know this has been tried and it has some challenges but I think outside-the-box entrepreneurs (who don’t give up easily)like you should give it a try. BTW – although I live in southern California now, I grew up on a family farm in Indiana. I love seeing how your kids are enjoying the farm, it’s a great way to grow up.
Penelope,
Thanks for the great word “anthropomorphize”.
-Dave
Vegans do not eat or wear any animal products.
Do goats eat Kudzu?
Organically raised goats might make better goat curry. We don’t have (except maybe in NYC) a fast food chain for curry and Indian food: that could make a market.
One last thing – for those even mildly disturbed by what Penelope has brought to light re: baby goats & cheese… This is only a fraction of the business-as-usual cruelty necessitated by the consumption of animal products. Items as innocuous as jell-o, marshmallows, even cosmetics are all part of the same cycle of unnecessary cruelty (fret not, though – as there are many animal-free versions of all of these products). Please be aware of the realities of even “humanely raised, free range” products: http://humanemyth.org. Then comes steering clear of companies which engage in animal testing (ie, Procter & Gamble).
Be kind, not a wee bit less cruel.
It breaks my heart to know of the suffering that these animals go through. I became a vegetarian a few months ago and I’m seriously about to become a vegan.
Penelope,
You're most recent post prompted me to want to share a photo of my own goat. His name is Dug and he came from a Dairy farm as well. This photo is one of my favorites. You’ll notice the diaper, it was too cold for him outside in the barn the first week so he spent about a week in the house and this was my solution. It didn’t work to well and trying to figure out his size at the store was highly entertaining. Today Dug is about a year old and a great addition to my small ranch. He’s basically like a dog but more mischievous and I’m grateful for my day job so I can have him as a pet of sorts.
Keep up the great work on your farm!
Kristi
Ideas to goat-ethical business:
1. A brand of goat meat from boy goats, marketed as natural, gourmet, animal welfare-correct, and telling the story (without pissing the industry off).
1a. Product development, develop delicatesse food products from boy goats and create a brand.
(Doesn’t need to be meat, necessarily. Goat hides?)
2. A certification for goat cheese where the production lives up to certain ethical standards. Here under that the off springs are taken proper care off, get to spend x weeks with their mom, or maybe even raised to x age. If the “ethical” products are reasonable priced and take hold, it can completely dampen the industry of the “unethical” practices, as has happened for battery hen production in many countries.
3. Promote baby goats as pets – make it trendy. Not sure how viable that is though. How long do they live?
4. Some people mention they are good at brush-cleaning. Find other things they are good at and establish a hype little business, renting them to people who would find it entertaining to rent a goat to do something for them.
By the way, excellent post! Great balance between personal angle with the 2 pet goats, explaining the problem well (understanding the farmers’ side as well) and “crowd sourcing” a solution!
It’s possible (though hardly cost-effective) to fertilize an egg using only female DNA. For instance, that is how they make clones. This makes it impossible to produce a male.
So your solution is genetic engineering.
Just saw this article about production of Bobby Veal in Australia
Bobby veal is the slaughter of very young calves, down to 5 days of age. I worked with export of this product in the past. I knew it was from young animals but I didn’t really consider the animal welfare issues with handling & transport. Terrible.
My husband and I just recently rescued two goats… beautiful and intelligent animals. Reading this article, I can’t help but wonder how in the world we have come to a place where life is commodified to such an extent that stewardship and a respect for natural processes is completely overlooked, in the name of paying the mortgage. There is a flow in nature that we, as humans, seem to think we are privy to altering for our monetary gain. Anyways, it occurred to me that there in fact IS a great market for living male goats… goats are amazing for land management in fire-prone areas. Herds are rented out to land owners and cities for this reason all over the country. My male goat seems to love the gnarly kinds of growth, whereas my female shows very little interest. Worth a try..?
To everyone who thinks the answer is to give up goat cheese or to quit eating meat: what happens then to the *female* goats? Do you think the farmer could afford to keep and feed his Angus cattle only for pets or decoration if there were no market for them? It’s great to promote good treatment, but if everyone went vegan tomorrow, farm animals would be extinct in months.
Extinct eventually, though not in months. First there would be generations of severe overpopulation of farmed animals everywhere, on highways being run over, in cities damaging property, and everywhere.. you get the idea… until natural AND human forces could reduce the populations. It could take years. And at the end of this difficult transition, you would have many displaced farmers who have farmed for generations themselves looking for another line of work. Just extending your *hypothetical* a bit!
Do you know if this type of farming is used with organic products?
Farm animal extinction is a weak argument against veganism…. Statistically speaking, everyone going vegan overnight is highly unlikely. This kind of widespread dietary change would be gradual, and there would be a sizable section of the population who would never, ever, ever change their diet. Gradual shifts in the market allow time for businesses (ie, farmers) to re-think their business models. Also, the farmed animals we have today are hardly “natural” after centuries of selective breeding, not to mention the indigenous animals that have are / have been displaced to make way for non-indigenous livestock.
Market factors aside, how can there even be an argument against the elimination of unnecessary suffering?
Dairy goat procreation could be done exclusively via IVF in conjunction with DNA testing of the embryos prior to transfer to ensure that males are weeded out and thus never born. Embryos can be tested with results received in time to transfer them at the blasocyst stage (day 5 or 6). The male embryos can be destroyed. Yes, some folks will argue that this, too, is murder, but it is done at a cellular level and thus wouldn’t be cruel to the fully grown animal.
People all around the world make morally responsible goat cheese everyday! Why reinvent the wheel?
I’m not sure if I should comment on this, or let many of you live happily in your somewhat warped world. ;) Of course, I’m going to comment! As you’ve pointed out, the dairy goat industry is not that big. There are big players, but the majority of dairy goat farmers are backyard hobbyists. We don’t do it for the money. Therefore, we sell our bucklings (buck kids) for meat, breeding, and pets. I don’t have statistics, but I’d guess a majority of dairy goat farmers do not kill bucklings as you’ve described. Don’t get me wrong, I know that some in the dairy goat industry do. So, here’s how you make morally responsible goat cheese. Go get your milk and cheese from a small local farmer who raises his animals the way you like. Quit supporting the mega-corps by buying their products. Oh, and work on your legislators to pass laws that allow farmers to sell their products directly to you. Did you know many states do not allow a dairy farmer to sell milk directly to you?
Babies are born in the coldest part of winter because that’s when goats NATURALLY give birth! We don’t really have a choice of when babies are born. Unlike humans, our goats don’t cycle every month. If you don’t cycle, you can’t get pregnant. Most of our dairy does only start cycling in August. My educated guess is that if you kept bucks and does together all year long, a majority of the kids would be born from December to March. That’s NATURAL. It’s not our choice. Goat gestation is five months. Five months after August is January.
As for heating barns: Even if you offered to pay for it, I wouldn’t keep my goats in a heated barn. Goats are NATURALLY better at surviving cold than they are at dealing with heat. (If you offered to pay for AC in my barn, I’d probably take it!) Our goats put on a thick winter coat of hair each year that helps keep them warm. Heat breeds bacteria and encourages parasites and insects. Bacteria, parasites, and insects cause sickness and disease. Not only is heating a barn not feasible, it’s also not a smart thing to do if you care for the welfare of your animals. Goats are herd animals. That means they like being with other goats. They sleep together to conserve heat and keep warm in winter. If you only have one or two young kids, I would advise you provide a heat source for them, but that doesn’t mean you should heat the whole barn. A heat lamp will do. A herd of goats, provided with adequate shelter (draft-free) do not need an artificial heat source.
The two following quoted sentences are wrong and ludicrous and not worth my time to address. If you want to convince us that your ideas are credible, use statements that have a basis in fact. “Of the boy baby goats that are not intentionally killed at birth, a large percentage of them die from frostbite. And even more die because when you take them away from their mother, they have no will to eat.”
Yes, just like human babies, you have to teach baby goats how to drink from an artificial nipple. From your picture, it looks like you’re using a bucket where the goat has to suck the milk UP. That’s not the best way to teach a newborn to drink. (Try getting a human newborn to suck on a straw! Same idea. Not going to happen.) Use a bottle where the milk flows DOWN into the nipple.
Hope this helps get many of you out of the warp and closer to reality. :)
“So farmers that provide goat milk to the cheese industry kill the boy baby goats.”
Blanket statements are rarely correct.
Yes, some do.
Most do not.
Baby boy (and girl) goats also go to provide brush control, make great pets (once made into a ‘wether’ or neutered male), are used for breeding stock and (contrary to your assertion) do provide meat.
Did you likewise tell your son that the same dynamic is possible regarding the milk on their breakfast cereal or icecream? If you did not then you were being disingenuous in that that “cheap” meat you referred to at McDonalds comes with a high ethical price as well–none of the male goats born at our goat dairy have ever ended up at a feed lot. I am glad that you chose not to include gory pictures–but your erroneous and only minimally informed comments are not much of an improvement. Good thing for you that the dairy goat farmers and cheesemakers that I know are too busy (and do not have pockets deep enough) to sue for libel!
From one dairy goat breeder to another – thank you Vicki for your post. You sure can tell when one knows not of which they speak!
I came over here from NGIP and boy, what an education. I haven’t eaten veal in decades, and now it looks like I can live without goat cheese, as well.
Best of luck on your quest to make a more humane life for boy dairy goats and a more humane product.