Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Scientists researching the underlying reason for the low methane content of Kangaroo farts, with a view to reducing cow flatulence, have been disappointed to discover there is nothing special about Kangaroo gut bacteria.
According to The Guardian;
For some time, researchers intent on breeding less windy flocks and herds hypothesised kangaroos might have a unique mix of micro-organisms in their stomachs that produce less of the gas.
The hope was by transplanting these micro-organisms, cattle and sheep might produce less methane.
But new findings suggest otherwise, and should help refocus sheep and cattle research on alternatives that might yield results.
The experiment saw red and western grey kangaroos kept in comfy, sealed chambers, allowing researchers to analyse the mix of gases going in and coming out.
“We think that the methane is low because of the way food moves through the kangaroo stomach, and not because of a unique gut fauna,” study author Dr Adam Munn said.
You might think the next step in the battle to defeat the bovine methane menace, is a transgenic KangarMoo, a cow with the gut processes of a Kangaroo. The Guardian article sadly shies away from this fascinating possibility, and kindof peters out with some vague speculation about researching possible land use changes.
There’s no legitimate science behind this of course, there’s no way near enough methane in livestock farts to affect the climate in any way. This is all about restricting or removing our meat supply to weaken and sicken the population as a means of control, to remove resistance as they move toward a feudal world government and to make the population even more dependent on big pharma.
We all know the events surrounding Stan in South Park where he stopped eating meat and gradually small sores erupted on his body that grew larger and were found to be small vaginas. Stan had contracted vaginitis. Had he kept up with his vegan diet according to the doctor he was in danger of turning into one giant pussy.
It’s all meaningless drivel when you realize that methane and all “greenhouse” gases cannot detectably warm the Earth’s surface or atmosphere. These gases, at altitude are at -17 deg C and Earth’s surface is 15 deg C. Any radiation directed downward by the gases will be rejected and reflected by the surface and lost to space. A cold gas simply cannot warm a warmer surface. Methane and CO2 have half lives in the atmosphere of about 5 years, so this is a very dynamic situation. Study these animals to find out more about them but any efforts to decrease methane from them is a theft of research money, it’s a criminal waste of time, money, and resources.
Not this nonsense again. What matters is the total flow of energy. Anything that changes that flow will change the temperature of the objects involved. Radiation from a cold source does not “bounce” off of warmer surfaces. Sheesh.
so do I and you ?
Mmmmmmm just think about jumping cows for a sec…. Milk-shakes, butter… jumping over the moon
but I worry about the kiddies…
wouldn’t want to be near where they land…
I vote for Kangamoo.
Just what are these authors breathing?
Whatever it is, they’re dangerously short of oxygen. Maybe they need to light a match to better see…
Let’s compare a two compartment roo stomach to a four compartment bovine stomach.
Oh Nooo! claim the researchers! It Must be the bacteria! We will isolate the roos and measure the room’s overall gas contents…
For all they know, the roos might breathe in methane and release CO2.
Nor did they assess the droppings for digestive efficiency nor compare the intake to output for digestive absorption preferences.
When they get to the basics, are the digestive processes of a roo adapted to drier conditions better than domesticated bovines? Perhaps studying the digestive tracts of arid creatures would be better?
And what about rabbits?
We’ll have a field of alfalfa for the rabbits …
… I get to tend the rabbits, right George?
What about milking mice? Oh wait, we’re already paying for that idea – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2789213/
“And what about rabbits?”
Yes, I had rabbits for years. They didn’t seem to emit much gas from either end, they were eerily quiet. Too quiet.
But that got me thinking. If somebody’s studying the gas emissions of ruminants by experiment, really the experiment should compare CAFO fed cows with grassy pasture fed cows. Cows didn’t really evolve to eat the complex mix of stuff that CAFOs supply to them, any more than we evolved to eat Mc Donald’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_Animal_Feeding_Operation
Studies have also shown great correlation between cow gut flora and diet. Cows are apparently healthier on grass, and of course, the grass digests differently than commercial cow-feed.
So, another relevant question about cow burps and farts might be “does it matter how they’re fed”?
Other studies have shown that grass fed beasts are healthier for people to eat, and the milk and butter have better nutrient value as well.
I’ve raised rabbits several times. I also believed that they were not gaseous; i.e. until my son came home from college with a pet rabbit.
There is a difference in animals raised as house pets versus farm animals kept and fed outdoors. Even when we raised angora rabbits, which require frequent handling, they were kept in cages outdoors.
Our new indoor pet bunny, Nina, was a spayed female who quickly owned the house, even my English Setter.
Nina quickly taught us that rabbits do sometimes have gas, perhaps frequently; but only occasionally is it potent.
One of Nina’s humorous traits was the look she would give me after a noxious gas cloud was emitted. I’d get the same look, no matter which of us dispensed the gas. After making sure I was saturated with her glare, she’d hop off with backward kicks emphasizing her dissatisfaction.
That is simply not true.
Grass does digest differently, but after traveling through a number of stomachs, any vegetative foods eaten by a cow are well digested.
I spent a good part of two years working for a dairy farmer.
Milk is sold at quite ridiculously low prices. Cows produce copious milk, all day. Milking cows twice a day is a compromise and a minimum requirement.
As such, dairy farms can not afford expensive feeds. Most farmers allow their cows to graze as weather permits. Farmers also raise and harvest fields of grass, timothy and alfalfa. The easiest and cheapest to raise and harvest is the grass. Alfalfa may be a more nutritious higher protein food, but alfalfa requires harvesting just before peak flowering. All of these crops require drying before bundling into bales. Alfalfa is the fleshiest and unlike grass, it is not partially dried while standing. Just a couple of days of inconvenient rain and an alfalfa crop is ruined for cattle. Alfalfa is also a more valuable crop and many farmers sell all they raise.
One of the first lessons a farmer teaches is how to approach and handle cows. Cows are very routine oriented and are not fond of irregular or irresponsible activity. On my first trip through a cow barn, I noticed and asked about all of the brown stains on the wall behind the cow stalls. Many of these stains were five to six feet high, four feet behind the butts of the cows.
Now these cows were 100% grass fed cows. After I asked my question, the farmer Bob, looked at me and said that if I saw a cow’s tail lifting, that I would be a lot happier if I moved and gave the cow plenty of room.
This was obvious because most dairy cows are brought indoors for milking. Since then, I noticed many grazing animals from sheep and deer through elephants have similar explosive bowel movements. The elephant was best as onlookers surrounded the elephant; those behind the elephant were not happy campers.
A McDonald’s burger is actually quite healthful. A good mix of amino acids, protein, starches and fiber, if perhaps too much food for a meal.
Your concept of a CAFO is that of a large fattening operation run by corporations that process meat for urbanites and suburbanites. People that do not raise their own food and even complain when neighbors try to raise their own food.
Green Acres star ‘Eddie Albert’ was actually a true conservationist. He turned the front lawn of his California Pacific Palisade home into a small cornfield.
These CAFO as you refer to them are strictly short term places where cattle are fattened. Fattened by organizations that earn money from buying cattle and then feeding them high starch feed for weight gain before butchering.
Don’t like their business? Raise your own, or find a local butcher. I often buy a quarter steer from a farmer who is also a butcher. He not only raises cattle, but also farms. If demand is higher than his cattle herd can supply, he prefers to buy animals from the local 4-H clubs. Excellent quality animals raised by children learning husbandry. Most of these animals are raised as kings of the farm since the kids enter the animal in contests for best grown.
Arguing that meat is the problem is not a solution. Many of the grass crops, including forage crops like alfalfa are raised on land lying fallow or are poor land unsuitable for human food crops. If you’re insisting on the finest grown veggies, you are one of those who determines that land is unsuitable for human food crops.
Farmers operate on a desperately thin budget. Every inch of the property is raising one kind of crop or another. The recent push for ‘corn ethanol’ has caused many of the larger farms to literally plow to the edge to maximize crop and earnings.
Decades of true conservation organization work and efforts have been destroyed in a few years. These conservationists, mostly hunters, have worked directly with farmers convincing them of the necessity to leave edges and plots of land devoted to “Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP)”. You’ll never see anyone from greenpeese or WWF talking or presenting to farmers information about these programs, yet these are critical for wildlife support.
That is false and falsehoods. Personal opinions masquerading as science is very typical of many promoting their pet lifestyles.
Selling organic began as a program in the USDA back in the 1960s and 1970s. Before the current POTUS, one could actually call up and review the original slideshows used by USDA to bringing farmers into selling organic foods as a niche product. Same crops, higher prices. Organic is a personal choice that is completely devoid of any difference to health.
USDA, (United States Department of Agriculture), is responsible for maintaining the ‘Nutritional Database’. If you want the absolute accurate facts on foods, you’ll find it in this database.
Eggs, a favorite discussion.
Organic, another favorite topic. Searching the food database for ‘organic’
Pork One of the few papers on organic meats.
The term ‘Organic’ is a marketing term, tool and ploy. The ploy is to sell the same product at higher prices. Yes, there are differences in how the crop is raised, but generally the cost differences favor certain crops being organic raised, branded and sold for a higher farmer profit.
Would it be safe to milk Kangarmoos? The “Kangar” part has a nasty kick! Is our milk supply in danger?
Why not just eat the kangaroos then? Get the government to remove the legislation restricting killing them. Get rid of govt tags and let an industry develop. The roo numbers in rural areas of eastern Australia are insane, wth more roos to the acre than sheep in large areas of the country. They are excellent lean meat, very well adapted to the environment. They produce top quality thin tough and flexible hides (ask any leather plaiter, blame Beckams wife for pressureing Nike to stop using it in shoes).
Eat the roos instead is such a simple and obviously green solution that they hate it.
Main reason is that it is not politically correct to do the screamingly obvious.
Its no good, Roo meat will make people fart. Mind you so does muesli.
Cheers
Roger
as I wrote above..there IS legal roo meat supply but there could bee a lot more.
on farm you can cull excess but are supposed to shoot n drop n leave
like the morons ruled on feral goat culls
odd thing is leaving high nitrogen corpses near native plants…kills the plants!
the proper Greentard solution would be use as pet meat n hides for leather on roo n goat
the tapeworm/Hydatids is the ONLY problem with wild roos
do not EVER cook it as suggested here;
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Patrick
November 6, 2015 at 1:41 am
Marcus…it may have no fat…but it is a good eat, try it but do not cook it like a steak. You then may as well eat a used tyre. Basically cook it “blue” or rather just show it the flame.
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oil or butter the pan properly!!!! and COOK IT THROUGH tapeworm in humans isnt pleasant, Hydatids is a whole load of grief…really!
like Deer theyre liable to stress panic and muscle breakdown following, so dont make for easy herd management as captive.
I never said *WILD* roos. WILD anything has many similar problems too. Pork of years ago, you had to cook it to death. Not so these days, you can cook it “pink”. Properly farmed/supplied roo CAN be cooked rare. I do it all the time…and I sure don’t have worms.
Termites , don’t forget the termites. them little fellows fart a lot.
You’re right, nc. The world needs termaroos!
A low-methane farting kangaroo-cow hybrid would churn as it hopped and produce butter as well as milk.
I hope to bring in a patent intended to reduce the harm resulting from the cow’s farts that as everybody knows is containing a high percentage of methane. Indeed this highly efficient greenhouse gas may be burnt and converted into carbon dioxide, a much less dangerous greenhouse gas through a simple device placed close to the cow’s anus, with a gas detector that will trigger a piezo-electric spark to set the fart ablaze as soon as it exits.
I am looking for funds to develop a prototype.
Seriously though, in my country the government has comissioned university research for ways to reduce methane from cows and sheep. Havent herd (pun) how they have got on yet though, but I bet the universities are enjoying the budget.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
“Beano” is the solution to this stenchesential problem.
I have it on good authority that geneticists are hard a work on a “cowroo”. Milking an animal that leaps into the barn rafters may present problems. I designed a cow-fart afterburner years ago, but my research was terminated after it cost my uncle a perfectly good barn. Also lost a couple of cows to low earth orbits, thanks to a “delayed ignition” glitch I could have solved, given more time.
Yes, the main problem with these fart-burning devices is the flame that may be dangerous in some circumstances..
I suggest an exhaust tube made with a flameproof material.
Quite often I think “I wish I’d been better at maths. Then I could have been a scientist instead of a philosopher.”
Then I read “Scientists researching the underlying reason for the low methane content of Kangaroo farts…” and I find it easier to accept my innumeracy.
I will now reveal the true nature of the “Great Green Disappointment.”
http://s17.postimg.org/7xvglj2gf/IMG_0815.jpg
These modern cows produce twice the milk they did in the 60’s.
breeding would have been enough
but add BgH and make the cows produce more…and give them crippling arthritis and other problems with hooves n legs..they die early worn out and in pain
thanks to monsanto/ eli lilly posilac and variant names for their crap products.
oh and more milk with a lot more pus from Mastitis, yummy!
and increased antibiotic use to try n combat that.
another fine manmade solution to a problem…that was NOT a problem..till they could make megabucks.
Now if erudition and humor were grass we would have an endless supply of hamburgers and ice cream here.
But these environmentalists know a little more about cows than you do.
Have you ever asked yourself, “How does that bull reach 2,000 pounds in just three or four years? Are they not vegetarians, eating grass and grain? That is a lot of protein in a short time. Also milk has a lot of superior proteins, so where does it all come from?”
The cattle are not only using the microbes to break down the food, but they also then move them to the next stomach and digest the microbes themselves. It is a stunning fact of symbiosis. The bacteria that help the digestion of food in the rumen/first stomach use simple nitrogen compounds to build proteins in their cells. The ruminants then digest the bacteria. This is the source of the proteins in the cow’s diet.
So a change in the stomach microbes used by cows will more likely than not starve the cows to death. They will not reach their full size nor produce the meat and milk they did before the microbes were altered by the environmentalists. And whether this reduces the methane emissions or affects weather patterns on earth I will leave to the people with the proper scientific paradigm to model, but I do know that the destruction of cattle would fit the vegan/vegetarian psychotic manias that the Cannabis Generation attempted to foist on the me.
As the next generation, I hate to have to be the ant at the picnic. But this is a profoundly fiendish environmentalist plot against the bacteria cows digest for protein. And foithermore, only the most spoiled rotten, corrupted generation that ever walked on the face of God’s green earth would ever, ever even think anything like this.
Spot on Zeke
++++ well said
The lead author got his Bsc in 1996. He looks remarkably young for a hippie.
Steve P says, “The lead author got his Bsc in 1996. He looks remarkably young for a hippie.”
He clearly has a very long road in front of him if he ever wants to disabuse himself of Boomer philosophies! It can be done however. All it takes is a decade of life experience and hitting the books for every decade one was under the educational influence of the Cannabis Generation as a youth.
It is a monumental and lonely task to straighten oneself out, but personally rewarding.
So all I am requesting here is this: let’s not all pretend we have never seen science used for extremely negative vegetarian/vegan/organic-only/local only activism before. It’s been going on for decades now. The outcomes will certainly be destructive and catastrophic — but starving cows by altering their rumen bacteria is a truly low and slinking and revolting plan, even for hippies and their fresh-faced followers.
Zeke
November 7, 2015 at 9:56 am
Yeah, every time I smell patchouli incense, I recall that famous day-glo poster of the cow’s 4-part stomach that all the hippies had under their black lights as a central fixture in their smoking areas, and the many articles in Rolling Stone about the Kangaroo’s flatulence, but before you get any more carried away with your attempts to blame everything you don’t like on the Baby Boomer generation, just remember, we didn’t have mosh pits.
Zeke
November 7, 2015 at 9:56 am
“…it’s been going on for decades now.”
Wikipedia has a long article on The history of vegetarianism, which begins:
The history of vegetarianism has its roots in the civilizations of ancient India and ancient Greece.
While it is true that the Baby Boomers are getting up there, I don’t think we go back quite that far.
.
And taxes paid for this. At least it was Aussie taxes.
Sent from my iPhone
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I would propose that it’s not the flatulence of an animal that creates methane, as much as its dung. This is a more continuous source which takes some time to dissipate. Does kangaroo dung not emit CH4 as it rots?
Actually the problem is climate researchers. I could show you a graph that maps the increase in methane and CO2 in the atmosphere against the number of climate researchers. Virtually a straight line. So obviously the climate researchers are causing the increase in greenhouse gasses.
In truth, it is microbes in the animal’s digestive tract which produce the methane. Apparently, in cows, most of this methane-producing microbial action takes place in the rumen, whose contents are regurgitated as cud to be chewed again.
The question arises: is the cow’s moo also the cow’s belch? If not, could any of the cowboys or cowgirls here provide further information on the cow’s belch, including transliteration into English.
Thanks.
“The best laid plans of mice and men…”
“What do men have to do with it?”, the mice (Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy).
Corr blimey!! Kanga farts? Seriously? These guys are f____n’ nuts!!!
I live on a 20 acre lot that is frequented by the giant jumping mice (nah, they’re cute’n’cudly, them kangas) and I should mention that I am yet to smell them coming, as the dent in the bonnet of my car will attest. In fact, the cows over the road still haven’t curled my nostril hairs in even the slightest way.
When idiots in government are paying other idiots who call themselves ‘syontests’ to examine roo farts, you can be sure that the end of the world is indeed nigh!!!
Kangaroos are not mice.
I have two reasons why roo is good. Firstly, I have high cholesterol (Actually, it’s just below “normal” now). Secondly, I live with people who have a child who has a product in the arterial tract (Aorta) that was made from material from a cow. So no beef in this house.
Does soilent green taste as good as cow meat?