Researching to raise cattle for meat - Need help on butchering

misfitmorgan

misfitmorgan

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We kill any wild animal that is not acting right like coons out in the day time playing in a freshly baled hay field...no cover and daylight thats not right. At first we thought ok they are younger looking maybe they are just crossing the field but no they were out there playing for 45 minutes and needed to go. After they were shot and DH got up to them they did not look very healthy mucus coming from their eyes and nose and bald patches....they were incinerated. We have alos put down deer that appear to have survived a car accident but had a broken leg or broken hip or something. We had one that had a healed but mangled front leg she was put down as she was already skinny looking and it was coming into winter.

We have yet to raise a cow for meat but i am looking forward to it and definitely want a beef breed. We watched a friend of our raise Holstein steers and the pay off was dismal at best but she raised them on a dry lot with lots of hay and a bit of shell corn. Probly one of the worst ways ive seen to raise that breed for meat. i have heard good things about jersey but i think we are just gonna go with a colored cow steer.
 
OneFineAcre

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farmerjan said:
Can't remember all the hype but several years ago there was a big thing about the sick deer in the west and they determined they had a form of the mad cow disease. Try searching for it on the internet but I do know that here in va they had a hunter that had gotten a deer that didn't seem so healthy looking and the hunter took it to a place to be worked up, told the processor and it was taken in and determined that it had this. There is a name for the "wild" animal version of it. Signs are poor hair coat, starving appearance after killing and skinning, just not looking healthy. Hunters in va are advised in the game booklet with the hunting rules/laws on things to look for. It's been years since that huge problem in england with the mad cow problem, but what I can remember, there is a protein that causes the prions ( or prion that causes the proteins) to mutate and that causes the animal to get mad cow. It seems there are all kinds of theories, and I am not sure how much of it I even believe, but this prion has always been found in the spinal cords of mature animals that have mad cow which is really bovine spongy encephalmylitis or something like that. This caused the law that said that anything over 27 months could not have the backbone or anything attached to the spinal cord. Brain was also part of it. There have been theories of links to krone's disease, and the human version is jacob-cretzfeld or something like that. I don't have the info in front of me but do a little research on the internet. In wild herds I think they originally called it wasting disease. If you raise your own meat it is probably a moot point, but the slaughter places here have to abide by those rules and I believe they are federal.
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Chronic Wasting Disease
 
NH homesteader

NH homesteader

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I remember reading about that now. I think they may have found it in Vermont also. My apologies to Vermont if I am misremembering that!
 
Latestarter

Latestarter

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Yes, CWD. It was huge out here in Colorado starting 10-15 or so years ago. The DOW severely restricted deer hunters and went out and killed thousands or tens of thousands of deer to lessen/thin the herd to try to prevent the spread of it. Where deer used to be like rabbits out here in number... not so much anymore :( I understand the disease aspect and the fear of it jumping to humans, but out here I think they really did over-kill. They didn't care if the animals were sick or healthy, they eliminated them. Where you used to be able to buy over the counter hunting licenses for deer, there aren't enough left to do that and now it's lottery drawing by hunting zone.
 
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AClark

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The wild deer disease is called Chronic Wasting Disease - we have to have deer we take checked for it.
 
misfitmorgan

misfitmorgan

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I'm worried about the deer and cattle population here now. We just had a our second confirmed positive case of a TB cow in my county....over the past 4 months. No one wants them to go thru and mass kill whole herds like they did before...farmers lost their livelihoods and some even killed themselves.

It's all compounded by the fact that the state has been dragging their feet for years on the requests of the farmers to issue them their grants to build high fencing areas around their feed storage. One farmer we know has had the DNR out 4 times now and confirmed the presence of deer in/around and grazing/eatting his cattle feed and the state i still making him wait, he has been waiting for 4 yrs now. He is not a big big farmer he only has maybe 40 cows but he does sell hay to help pay for the farm which could be a real problem.
 
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