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.
It came to me overnight that the worst fate of all would be to knock your English soccer team out of the World Cup with an own goal. I am so sad for that poor girl.
But the second most terrible thing is to see money, time, talent, and other resources spent trying to mitigate a 2C rise in temperatures. Especially since there will most likely be a reduction in average temperatures rather than a rise in temperatures.
Has anyone noticed that mankind might well be near the end of this interglacial period. Wisconsin might will be under ice again someday soon. (can Milwaukee’s roads handle that?)
And besides that, the Scottish Sceptic has an interesting post on the “Haseler gap”. Well worth your time to read that short post. (should be run here perhaps)
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2015/07/02/the-haseler-gap-imminent-global-plummeting-temperatures-in-next-2000-years/
Now if they could breed a 6 winged chicken that sweats buffalo sauce…..
We have already downsized cattle by 50%.
They were domesticated from the wild Auroch.
The Auroch were wild cattle that lived in Europe, Asia and North Africa. They are featured in every cave art painting and probably formed the main part of our diet for the past 1.8 million years or so (or at least related earlier evolutionary species).
Twice as big cattle roaming the great plains and deserts during the ice ages when there was very little trees and no nuts, fruit, vegetables or roots. All there was to eat was grass-grazing herbivores. And one of them tasted like beef and was twice as big as today’s modern cattle so a single kill could feed a stone age tribe for weeks.
Humans hunted them into extinction and/or only left the domesticated kind around eventually. The last wild Auroch lived into the early 1600s and they were domesticated as early as 9,000 years ago.
The domesticated version is 50% of the size probably to make them easier to handle and/or it came along with the breeding selection for tameness.
Size comparison illustration.
there are plenty of heat tolerant cattle
featherless chickens is really dumb. They will do fine with shade and water in high heat. A featherless chicken would be half charbroiled on a hot sunny day.
Okay, how about breeding chickens with a basil or rosemary plant.
This is officially the fumiest thread evah, IMO. 🙂 I’m bookmarking this for future laughs.
The BBC enviro dept must have missed this one.
This sort of report is their usual bread & butter
Bill Illis
Would like to see the size of sirloin steak you could get off that
On ABC news this morning they said according to the government one third of polar bears will be in imminent danger because of green house gasses by 2025. I consider this good news because based on the track record of global warming predictions the polar bears are safe.
I don’ no nuffin bout that climat stuff. I just come here for the comedy. This whole thread was great, guys. Thanks!
I am waiting for the cubic eggs. The chickens will probably put up a big squack about them.
IIRC there were dwarf Mammoth on the island of Catalina at one time, they call it island dwarfism.
An area in central Europe that had been a plateau also turned up fossils of dwarf prehistoric animals of many types.
We are all “Mutants of the Monster”.
“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. ”
Oh great and I hope it tastes like crap as well.
Will people buy pet chickens/velociraptors?
Will chickens exist in the defense pet variety?