Guest essay by Eric Worrall
It would be wrong to think that the governments of the world are solely focussed on reducing CO2. Just in case the Paris conference fails to deliver, our selfless government scientists are spending your money, exploring a diverse range of strange mutant varieties of every day farm animals, to ensure world stays fed in the midst of soaring temperatures.
The latest focus is the Dwarf Cow.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald;
… the solution to the problem is simple and small, livestock experts argue: heat-tolerant dwarf cows.
A team of researchers from Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University and the state government’s Animal Husbandry Department are now promoting a switch to Vechur and Kasargod cattle, two local varieties known for being easy to raise, resistant to diseases and – most important – better at tolerating high temperatures than the more popular crossbred cattle.
“High-yielding crossbreed varieties of cattle can faint or even die during hot and humid summer days,” said E.M. Muhammed, an expert on animal breeding and genetics at the university. “Our natural breeds can better withstand the effects of climate change.”
Dwarf cows, on the other hand, appeared to carry a “thermometer gene” that allowed them to better tolerate high temperatures, researchers said.
Dwarf cows were already gaining popularity among some farmers because they consumed less food and water than conventional cattle varieties, the experts said. Small-scale farmers needed only one or two dwarf cows to meet the milk needs of their households, they said.
The Dwarf cow will no doubt find a place in the cattle yard, next to the Featherless Chicken, another government science favourite.
According to New Scientist;
Featherless chickens could be the future of mass poultry farming in warmer countries, says an Israeli geneticist who has created a bare-skinned “prototype”.
The new chicken would be lower in calories, faster-growing, environmentally friendly, and more likely to survive in warmer conditions, claims Avigdor Cahaner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He created his red-skinned chicken by selectively crossing a breed with a naturally bare neck with a regular broiler chicken.
But critics say past experience with feather-free chickens resulting from random genetic mutation shows they suffer more than normal birds. Males have been unable to mate, because they cannot flap their wings, and “naked” chickens of both sexes are more susceptible to parasites, mosquito attacks and sunburn.
“Featherless birds would also be very susceptible to any temperature variations – especially as young birds,” says Tom Acamovic, of the Scottish Agricultural College in Ayr.
The chicken is “disgusting”, says Joyce D’Silva of Compassion in World Farming. “It’s a prime example of sick science and the suggestion that it would be an improvement for developing countries is obscene.”
Read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2307-featherless-chicken-creates-a-flap.html
These tentative steps are nothing compared to the efforts of Palaeontologist Jack Horner, to do a full conversion on modern Chicken breeds, to revert them back to ancient forms.
A genome does not evolve in a tidy fashion. Old genes are not always discarded when they fall out of use. For example, there may be a whole host of genes that direct the growth and movement of a dinosaur’s arm and fingers. If another gene evolved to fuse some of those bones into a wing during embryonic development, many of those arm-and-finger genes would be pushed to the sidelines. But the potential for a dinosaur arm could still be there. If you can identify the newer gene that causes bone fusion and disrupt its expression, those sidelined genes may suddenly start producing arms.
Horner posits that three primary engineering tasks will lead him from a conventional chicken to something resembling a miniature velociraptor (a small predator that became famous in “Jurassic Park”): creation of a long tail; the development of a toothed, beakless head; and the fashioning of arms with fingers and claws instead of wings.
Perhaps Horner has missed a bet – if he had framed his grant application as an effort to produce heat tolerant chickens, chickens fully adapted to +4c Cretaceous conditions, we’d probably all have little pet dinosaurs by now.
Precious……..HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA,
Can’t stop laughing….
Dwarf Cows and Featherless Chickens
Thanks for posting this article – made my day
Don’t laugh, my grandfather had a featherless chicken but we think it just had the mange.
Ken Dodd has a great story of someone breading a 3 legged chicken.
James Bull
All chicken becomes featherless before I eat it.
The stupid no longer hurts. I’m just numb.
They can join the brainless scientists…..
Well cattle bred in the top end of Australia, they don’t suffer from heat. Brahmans. Come from Africa and India.
I didn’t know a cow could feel a 1/2 degree change in temperature?
Look at where beef cattle are grown in Australia.
http://greycliffspermaculture.com/pic_news_land_use_plan_cows_map.jpg
Now tell me they can’t cope with heat !!
Not only that, but many of these Australian cattle are Brahmin cross breeds, originating from India. They tend to be quite massive cattle. The less massive cattle tend to originate in more temperate regions such as Jersey, Norway and Scotland.
Perhaps it is all psycowlogical?
Oh dear God. Please can someone genetically engineer zero emissions climate scientists so we don’t have to put up with all this poop.
I recommend adapting by wearing a pair of sturdy leather boots and carrying a shovel. It’s what I do whenever I visit an oil refinery or coal fired power plant… Well, actually, I supervise those carrying the shovels. Wouldn’t want to get my hands dirty after all. /sarc
“zero emissions climate scientists”?
Whoa, that could mean tens of billions of dollars each year being spent on something useful, the greenies in government would never tolerate that.
…except that some coverings are designed to keep an animal cooler under hot conditions compared to bare skin.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/why-did-the-elephant-have-thin-hair-12-10-12/
Silver ants, anyone?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/22/silver-ants/
Silver cattle would probably be rather pretty… 🙂
Perhaps Garry Larson will finally see his boneless chicken ranch. 😉
To stop poaching, we could engineer hornless rhinos and tuskless elephants.
Umm, and maybe finless sharks?
Toothless sharks would be an improvement.
Good call. I never liked shark tooth soup anyway.
Caleb
But did you ask the sharks union about this?
Toothless sharks an improvement!! – Not for the sharks
Bring on the Turducken..
And leafless plants to cope with hot dry conditions and they could be called sticks!!! Come to think of it I have a few in my garden all ready…
Lets see – most ranchers are still breeding their cows to calve in February when it is 20 to 30 below C. I understand why, but somehow I don’t imagine most ranchers worry much about a couple of degrees. Now rain, that’s another matter … Sheesh.
Then there is the three legged free range chickens bred around Pincher Creek, Alberta for KFC – extra drumstick. Trouble is, they are so fast we’ve never been able to catch one … 😉
We have unicorns in our neighborhood but they are so darn fast and we have never caught one. I got some pictures though.
KFC is breeding six leg, six wing chickens for the market in China.
But the big breakthrough still had to be the development, for the Fridays Restaurant chain appetizer menu, of chickens with those huge all white meat boneless fingers.
Compared to breeding a chicken with six inch long fingers, all the rest of those projects are amateur hour.
They are now working to develop a chicken with the layer of breading instead of skin.
Sorry, but to combine “revert” and “back” in the same sentence is an egregious tautology, no matter that it’s a favoured combination of commentators everywhere.
Agree. And it is also an unnecessary redundancy.
Agree. And a superfluous pleonasm.
But so is my phrase…
Square trees are next. Instead of pesky round logs, they grow with square sections, with the trunk the same size from base to tree top. Perfect for the mill, and they don’t roll when felled, which is an important safety factor.
http://designcrack.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/square-tree-trunk.thumbnail.jpg
I suppose they do great swaying in the wind. 😉
Yeah, but how is Michael Mann going to count the tree rings to come up with temperatures a billion years ago.
Easy!
With the Tijander maneuver, you take the square of the log and discard the least squares.
Simple…
It’s “LOG”rythmic, doncha know? 🙂
With the usual computer models!
Why not? Pi are squared already.
I’m not certain but paleontology may be one of the “disciplines” to influence the new tendency in science to “model” reality. I don’t know if it has ever occurred to any one else that there is an awful lot of prehistoric theory built on pretty scant evidence when it comes to even number of specimens and time between them.
I wonder if Brahman cattles, commonly found in hot and semi arid conditions in Australia OutBack will be able to take the higher rainfall and Humidity, with all the grass growing expotentially higher and better they’ll probably spend more time producing marbled meat……..
You nailed it.
From http://www.brahman.org/about/benefits-of-brahman/:
“The Brahman F-1 (first generation hybrid with European cattle) is also very popular because these cattle display many important characteristics of their Brahman parent, such as drought resistance, heat tolerance, disease and parasite resistance and increased longevity.”
Who knows? Once perfected it might be delicious…..
Like the square hogs in “Space Truckers”.
The Japanese grew square watermelons years ago, they could pack more melons in a smaller carco area that way. They just put square plastic forms around the melons while they grew.
I am going to splice the genes of tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic, and get a plant that makes sauce.
Go all the way and splice in some spaghetti genes.
https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU
The funniest thing about the spaghetti harvest documentary was that it was once broadcast on South African TV as a serious item. The mention of the last two weeks in March should have been the give away!
Cheers
A similar item was broadcast in NZ in the late 60’s but it was about the threatened macaroni harvest. Apparently (please forgive my failing memory) it was because insecticides such as DDT were killing off the insect larvae that drilled the hole through the middle.
Under Stalin a scientist was planning to cross radishes and cabbages, and get a red, fat, delicious root and a fat, scrumptious cabbage top. He did succeed in crossing the plants, and wound up with something with the root of a cabbage and leaves of a radish. Wound up in Siberia, as I recall.
Scientists need to be careful, when they mess about with the Left, and that includes climate scientists.
G. D. Karpechenko was murdered in 1941.
In recent decades, more useful hybrids of radishes and cabbages, ie not just new species but genera, have been developed.
Various estimates of the proportion of plant species which evolved as a result of hybridization and polyploidy exist, but they range from 30 to 70% just for the latter.
My cartoon loses its humor when it is associated with a real man’s name. Karpechenko was an associate of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who got in trouble because he had the nerve to criticize the politically correct bozo, Lysenko. Vavilov was arrested August 6, 1940, and Karpechenko in October. They were sentenced to die the following July; and on July 28, 1941 Karpechenko was executed. Vavilov was “pardoned” and his sentence reduced to 20 years, but prison was such that he starved to death in 1943,
The insanity of this situation is that Stalin was still destroying his nation’s most brilliant minds even after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 21, 1941, with the intent of basically destroying ALL Russian minds. Even insaner is the fact Lysenko glides through this monstrous madness, with an army of 3 million clashing with an army of 3 million, purring like a cat in the cream. It was a calamity so horrible that to truly fathom it would create an anguish that would kill you, and therefore I defend myself with humor and by turning things into a cartoon. Forgive me.
But I will stand by my final paragraph, “Scientists need to be careful, when they mess about with the Left, and that includes climate scientists.”
There is a certain portion of the population of industrialized nations which has an overwhelming need for security. For those, the word “change” means facing their own mortality. They will always be with us, they will always be in a state of panic over any events which mark the passage of time; and they’ll bust a hame trying to hold back progress.
http://rateeveryanimal.com/2014/10/22/platypus/
Looks to me tht the government is staffed by people with ‘dwarf brains’
Well you get what you pay for. Government jobs for scientists acts as a filter, where the less intelligent work for the government and the more intelligent go work for private industry. You end up with a society where the less intelligent scientists are the ones making the regulations that hinder the work of the more talented private industry scientists. And ultimately you end up with the situation that we currently have in society, junk science rules.
https://www.ida.org/~/media/Corporate/Files/Publications/STPIPubs/ida-d-4740.pdf
Ah, if only Diogenes had lived in modern times he’d have had no need to pluck a chicken to screw over Plato’s definition of a human. (At least we still have those “broad, flat nails” to distinguish us.
“the solution to the problem is simple and small, livestock experts argue: heat-tolerant dwarf cows.”
Plagiarism!
This is an idea taken from the Miami Vice episode titled “Cows of October” where a scam artist is trying to sell bull semen that will produce dwarf cows for third world countries. It was a scam on the episode and it is probably a scam now.
If they’re gonna miniaturize cattle,they better get to work on miniaturizing Coyotes and other predators, too.
Better yet, forget the whole thing.
In India the issue is Tigers. Doesn’t much matter what kind bovine genes you try to stack up against that.
Not any more.
If any of these ideas can fill a niche and can be used to meet demand and create wealth, then go for it. Hair brained ideas in the real world either fall apart or make something out of nothing, all the time. These ideas aren’t part of the real world, but are coming from academia, so if past is prologue, their chances of viability are slim without further rifling through the pockets of taxpayers.
Or some Government useless idiot decides to pick it as “the” right answer, and subsidizes it, with our money. And it turns out to be as useless as the bureaucrat.
Government incentivized science is absolutely the problem. That’s how we end up with higher food prices so that we can burn engine-damaging ethanol as a fuel and higher energy prices so that we can construct bird chopping wind mills. Some politician may decide that, for the sake of the planet, we must subsidize miniature cows, you really can’t put it past them.
Actually Brahma cattle are generally used in breeding to increase stamina to hot weather and drought. They are in no way miniature!
It’s a good thing they’re so good natured, as big as they are.
Not necessarily!
Helps if they’re treated right – similar with humans I seem to notice
Well, us humans should also get on the bandwagon of this genetic improvement program.
With increasing temperatures, there will surely be more poolside cocktail and BBQ parties. As anyone who has ever attended such an event knows, it is physically impossible to manage a plate of food, a glass of wine and a fork with which to eat the food all at the same time. Clearly we need three arms.
This design oversight on the part of the Intelligent Designer will compromise the conversational, and thus reproductive success, of future generations living under the scourge of almost daily pool parties in the warming world.
In fact, you might be interested in joining my class action lawsuit against the Almighty for this blatant and damaging design defect in the human species.
Animal engineering has such a long successful history.
Bulldogs who can no longer birth their big-headed pups.
Toy white poodles that are now dumb as a post.
Animal skin and eye cancer because we don’t like dark colored animals (how stupid is that!).
Inbred diseases because we want the perfect example of a species.
Honey bees that aren’t so sweet because we want more honey.
Tasteless strawberries and peaches because we don’t want bruised ones shipped from far away places.
The list goes on.
Pam, I hate to tell you this but strawberries and peaches are not animals.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. Best wishes to a cool one.
“…strawberries and peaches are not animals.”
One day the global warming will change that.
Who knew?
Oh, but I knew this girl in college and, oh boy, was she a tomato!
Fifty years ago, before suburban sprawl wiped out open spaces near our home, my little sister discovered wild strawberries in one of those fields. She dug up a couple and transplanted them to our yard in a sunny patch near the house. Well the berries were only about as large as the end of your little finger, but WOW! the flavor was intense. I’m ruined for the golf balls they now sell by the pint and claim are strawberries; they just don’t seem to have any flavor at all.