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Kathleen Taylor's avatar

I have exhausted my vocabulary of negative superlatives to describe my disgust and horror.

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V. Dominique's avatar

As someone who has been raising dairy goats for 41 years, I must wonder how interfering with rumination could be safe for cattle and ruminants in general. These animals have a multi-chambered stomach, one chamber being the rumen which acts as a fermentation vat. Interfere with activity in the rumen and you run the risk of bloat, scours and other disorders that will require immediate intervention in order to save the animal, and even then the animal may still die. Likewise, altering the microbiome in the rumen may reduce the availability of nutrients to these animals and lead to deficiencies. This is not something I would feed to my goats.

As for the claim that "Most ruminant methane emissions come from Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)", while I support regenerative agriculture I question the validity of this statement, especially in light of several studies over the last twenty years that suggest some 75% of so-called "greenhouse" gases attributed to ruminant livestock and 56% of "greenhouse" gases attributed to monogastrics (pigs and poultry) comes from animals owned by some of the poorest people on the planet, meaning pastoralists and small land holders. (For the record, I'm also skeptical in regards to the climate change narrative.)

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