Female cows OOP, OT WAS:Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: college and slaughter... (was Cooking Cats

[Mike Newton]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Isabella di Giovanni" <isabella_di_giovanni at yahoo.com>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 3:41 PM
Subject: Female cows OOP, OT WAS:Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: college and
slaughter... (was Cooking Cats


> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
>
> OK. I admit that I am clueless in some things. I had *no* idea that female
cows weren't slaughtered for human food, after their *normal* usefulness was
over.
> Isabella
>  lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:Isabella di Giovanni
> >OK, I am clueless. Why aren't cows beef? What are they?
>
> Cows are girls. They make babies and give milk, and end up in pet
> food when they get too old.
> Beef comes from boys, err, well, former boys. Actually, beef comes
> from steers, which are castrated male bovines.
> I guess you thought we omnivores were eating a lot of bull :-) Well,
> we aren't. We eat castrati...
>
Okay, I was going to stay out of this conversation, but this is somewhat
misleading info.

There are two main types of cattle bred in the US. Those for beef and those
for dairy.
While most of the meat in the stores is from castrated males (steers), good
part is from heifers - females who have not had offsprings. Bulls are
normally used in sausage - the leaner meat supposed holds binders better.

Dairy cows, which are normally different breeds than beef cattle, are
sometimes used in hambuger and sausage, but not very often. There aren't any
laws against using the dairy breeds for meat, but the carcasses normally
don't grade very high, so there's not a big market for it.

Beatrix


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