Everything is Relative

Know how much a cow costs, on average?
$67.00. Yup, whole cow, from horns to tail, breathing and furry, grassfed Angus beef on the hoof.
Now, few people buy one cow - out here it's small herds, from 4 to 150, that are on sale every Thursday at the auction. Then of course there are transportation costs (going up daily), feed costs (they usually go to a feed lot to prepare them for butchering), butchering costs, packaging costs, and then shipping costs of the neatly cellophane stretchwrapped, slightly bloody parcels to your favorite store.

You can buy a cow and cut out all the middlemen, take it home, butcher it yourself. Or you can pay a butcher a mere $50 to cut it into nice portions. For less than $150, you can fill your freezer with real Angus beef cuts, and even keep the horns if you want. Or you can wait until the packages show up in your grocer's handy freezer, and pay $5.95 or more a pound for Angus beef. Everything is relative.

I like turkey. Man, I will eat turkey all year long! Slow roasted, stewed, baked, broiled, smoked, covered in butter and grilled, made into sandwiches and stews and soup and even ground turkey croquettes, breaded and fried; I like turkey. It is running about $.95 a pound in the stores. But day before yesterday, the huge wild turkeymommas with their teen turkeybrats came flying back to our neighborhood. (They go down to the river 8 miles away to brood.) They are in my and my neighbor's trees. Since they don't like the taste of wild turkey, I have been given permission to go onto their property as well as my own and shoot them out of their trees before they become a real nuisance (which, apparently, they do as whole families roost in the trees).

Now I gotta admit that cleaning birds is a pain in the - um, gizzard. Steamy hot water to blanch the feathers off, after the whole field-dress thing. It's why I won't hunt doves or ducks; too danged much effort for too dang little meat. I don't care how good they taste - by the time I get done, I'd better have enough meat to not have to do it again for awhile. Cost of killing a turkey - um, less than one cent, if I only need one bullet. Time involved - about three hours all told. So while it seems that the turkey in the store is cheaper (figuring my time at minimum wage), I get to be outside, I get to shoot things, and I get the visceral satisfaction of watching a 20-30 lb turkey fall out of the tree at my feet. Whump.

You can't buy pronghorn antelope meat at any price. Pronghorns are stupid; they will stand and stare at traffic in broad daylight like cows. Daughter and I even saw a herd of them chasing a farm pickup toward a homestead! Yet I have been told they have delicious meat. So when they come back on the property this fall, BANG! More butchering time (field dressing is so messy and such a pain), but - more meat in the freezer. I'll let you know how it tastes. The huge deer out here - 150-180 lbs after field dress - I've been told is exquisite too. I'll let you know.

You see, it all depends on what you want. I'll tell you what I don't want. I don't want meat that's been passed through several hands, each one getting paid to do a job that most folk are too lazy, untrained, or grossed out to do. I don't want meat that has been tampered with by government ordinance or - yes, I'll say it - by unmedicallytreated, unsupervised, underpaid, unwashed illegal immigrants with unknown and highly communicable diseases. I don't want the hyperactive government regulation and administration of antibiotics, vitamin supplements, and overprocessed feed, in overpopulated feedlots or coops where the animals are jammed in so tightly that they can't move. As one fella from the FDA finally admitted this week, no matter what they do or whom they supervise, all of the government regulations and administrations in the world cannot bring down the average of 60,000 people a year being exposed to e. coli and other food-transmitted diseases. I want the visceral satisfaction of having a freezer full of food that I went out and sweated and hunted and shot and skinned or defeathered and cut up and put away. I want that feeling of satisfaction. And I can have that choice. And if I want beef, I can get it without all of those additives and supplements and processing, too. And I am smart enough to clean it properly and cook it to kill whatever's there.

Of course, if blood and guts and handfuls of feathers in your hair, or the occasional fat tick or fur lice disgusts you, that's up to you. Pay those prices, if it's worth it to you. Either way, an animal dies. The only question is - ultimately, which animal suffers more? The wildkill, the tortured captive, or the human who ultimately ingests all of those so-good-for-you-by-gummint-regulation additives, who pays for all of that transportation and packaging? Who is really the tortured captive here?