On US Cow Slaughter Stats

The latest installment of Grist’s series, Meat Wagon, is called Beef Behemoth and provides some statistics you might find useful in your daily activism. Grist isn’t known for caring about animals, and there’s never any hint that using them is ever wrong, however that doesn’t mean they’re good for nothing.

I didn’t know any of the statistics in the article, probably because I don’t follow the goings on in the "meat and livestock industries," a.k.a., the business of breeding, dominating, controlling, mutilating, confining, enslaving and slaughtering beings as sentient as your precious Golden Retriever.

Here are some highlights, although reading the article in its entirety, and following the links, is most educational:

• "Just four companies slaughter 83.5 percent of cows consumed in the United States. In standard antitrust theory, a market stops being competive [sic] when the four biggest players control 40 percent."
• "JBS, the Brazil-based beef-packing powerhouse, has stormed into the U.S. market, emboldened by the U.S. dollar’s steady drop against the Brazilian real. Last year, JBS bought Swift, the third-biggest U.S. beef packer. And in the last several days, it had signed deals to buy the fourth-biggest packer, National Beef Packing, as well as the beef-packing assets of hog giant Smithfield, the fifth-biggest beef packer.

  If U.S. antitrust regulators wave the deals through — and nothing in recent history suggests they won’t — JBS will control 33 percent of the market, Reuters reports. One company will slaughter one in three U.S. cows."

• That would make JBS the biggest, with a "daily slaughter capacity" (hey, at least that’s an honest term) of 42,500 cows. Numero due, Tyson, has a capacity to slaughter 36,000 cows (actually they call them "head") and numero tre, Cargill, can slaughter 28,300. This is all in a day’s work. This big three will control over 90% of the market. And kill an enormous number of cows each day (not that that appears to be an issue).
• "Let’s hope regulators scotch this deal — not for jingoistic reasons, but because this insane level of concentration is almost sure to harm consumers and ranchers alike." Um, not to mention the cows. I’m just saying . . .
• The final section of this article is called: "Dairy farmers: squeezed to the last drop," which I found extraordinarily offensive, as it’s the cows who are actually–like in real life–getting squeezed to the last drop. Dairy farmers "sick of losing money" might go back to putting cows to pasture, "which, after all, is much healthier for the cows and the land, and produces more-nutritious milk." So if it’s worth it financially to treat cows with a modicum of dignity, they might do it? Nice.

It’s not a pretty article, and it contains no good news (and the comments section apparently has a lot of insider banter that I found odd, although at least some vegans appear to be involved), but it’s probably information that’s good to know.