This Steak is better than That Steak...

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
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No, not always, in the UK there is now a whole market built up around rearing veal (pink veal) instead of killing the calf. Actually, there's a whole other thread running on that very topic :)
Yeah that’s true here as well but still, eating veal means killing the calf. In any case it has to be taken away from the mother so the milk can be collected for human consumption.
 

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
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Unless you rear the calf for meat or milk. Females become more milking cows and you can kill the males or breed for pink veal in a very ethical meat production. There's ways round this calf killing and it's only the males in milk herds that get killed. Certainly according to the milk farmer I know.
Yes (see my post above) but to get the milk for human consumption it must be denied to a calf. And we presume the ratio is about half the calves are males.
 
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santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
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How so? Can you give a Cow or Horse a remote verbal instruction and it will follow it?
Yes you can. That’s how I know. When plowing a horse or an ox the verbal commands “gee” and “ha” (left and right respectively) are used to steer them independently from reins (there usually are no reins on a team of oxen and with a plow horse your hands ate usually full of the plow handles and unable to steer by reining. Likewise with dogs pulling a sled.
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,410
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Cumbria
You mean ploughing with horses. Ploughing horses means something very much different that would get you arrested over here!!!

Sorry for lowering the conversation to somewhere below the gutter!!!
 
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TeeDee

Full Member
Nov 6, 2008
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Yes you can. That’s how I know. When plowing a horse or an ox the verbal commands “gee” and “ha” (left and right respectively) are used to steer them independently from reins (there usually are no reins on a team of oxen and with a plow horse your hands ate usually full of the plow handles and unable to steer by reining. Likewise with dogs pulling a sled.

So. You have the reins on the Horse or Ox ? But would they turn if you gave the command without you being on the reins? Am I understanding you correctly?
 

punkrockcaveman

Full Member
Jan 28, 2017
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yorks
on a side note, do you ever get the feeling that cows mature? No matter there size, they always come across like intrigued kids to me! I eat beef just to be clear. Not a big dairy user.
 
Mar 6, 2020
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Hemel Hempstead
It turns out cows are medium clever


After reading a 2017 essay called “The Psychology of Cows,” writer Marc Bekoff gleaned that “cows display the ability to rapidly learn different tasks, display long-term memory, extrapolate the location of a hidden moving object, discriminate complex stimuli and discriminate humans from one another.” Cows also experience “a wide range of emotions,” he explained, including fear, anxiety and pain — just like humans.
 

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
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Florida
So. You have the reins on the Horse or Ox ? But would they turn if you gave the command without you being on the reins? Am I understanding you correctly?
Mostly, yes you understand. Yes, you have reins on a draft horse but they respond to verbal commands and those reins are seldom used except when training a young horse. However with an ox I’ve never even seen reins even present at all. They depend entirely on the same verbal commands as a horse. Likewise with a dog team.
 
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santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
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Florida
I might add that one horse my uncle owned seemed to have an ability to count (or at least to have a rudimentary quantitative understanding) when plowing with home he always could tell when we were nearing the end of the day’s work as if he was counting the rows left to plow. He’d get more energetic on the last few rows as if he knew we were nearly finished.
 

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
16,909
1,120
68
Florida
In automated milking parlours the cows fetch themselves in and get milked with no human input
Are you sure? I can easily see how they’d learn to gladly enter the stalls once they learn it relieves the pain and pressure on their mammaries, but I can’t imagine how the milking lines would get attached to the teats without human hands?
 

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