Steak - Mark Schatzker [134]
Even in a small feedlot like this one, the pens of cattle stretch farther than the eye can see, so I hopped on top of a feed trough to get a better view. This spooked the cattle, which took off in every direction, kicking up a huge cloud of dust, then stopped and, as if on cue, began coughing in unison. We walked farther down the alley and neared the hospital pen. One cow had a cough that would not quit. “Pneumonia,” Grandin said. We got closer, and another cow started to panic, running back and forth from one side of the sick pen to the other. The cow was experiencing fear, and Grandin stopped us from going farther. If we spooked the sick cow bad enough, she said, it might try to jump the fence.
We’d seen enough by this point, in any case. Most of the cattle, it seemed, were not suffering. But Grandin is under no illusions, and says that if feedlots are well run, they are, as she put it, “acceptable.” “It’s like living in a really cramped apartment in Tokyo,” she explained, which is something that twelve million Japanese willingly do.
On the way back into town, we passed a herd of black Angus grazing by the side of the highway and pulled over. The contrast verged on the absurd. Birds were singing. The air smelled like cedar. The grass looked so soft and green you wanted to walk on it in bare feet. There was no coughing, no dust, and no reek, and we lingered, lulled by the periodic pauses in highway traffic.
Grandin has written that in large slaughterhouses, it’s important to rotate jobs so that the same person doesn’t end up doing all the killing. It can be unhealthy, she explained, to be around death all the time. “These people get warped,” she told me. “They get nasty to the cattle and they have to be removed.” As we stared at the grazing cows, I was reminded of Fleurance and the happy hours we spent together on pasture. I thought about her death and remembered how unexpectedly reassuring and positive it was, for me at least. It still pleased me to think how stress free her beer-and-apple-filled last day was, and that surprised me.
I mentioned the experience to Grandin. “That happens all the time,” she said. When people raise an animal and kill it responsibly, they find it uplifting, apparently. “I think you can also get too far away from death,” she observed. What people are getting too far from is nature, she believes, explaining that people in big cities are particularly susceptible. They have no connection to the meat that sits on Styrofoam trays on supermarket shelves. The mistake that vegetarians and vegans make, she told me, is that they confuse death with suffering.
We looked at the pasture again. I asked Grandin, if she had to be reincarnated as a cow at Horton Feedlot or a cow eating grass on this field, which would it be? She didn’t take long to respond. “I think I would choose being in the field.” Not all pasture is nice, she pointed out. Some cruel farmers leave their cattle outside all winter with not much to eat and little in the way of shelter. Then she returned her gaze to the field and said, “But this right here is cattle heaven.”
The problem is “scaling it up,” as Grandin put it. It’s one thing to look at a bunch of cattle idyllically grazing. It’s another to feed a nation of three hundred million that likes its steak. It comes down, once again, to quantity and its battle against quality.
Allen Williams believes the two goals don’t have to be incompatible. Tallgrass partners with ranchers in Kansas, Georgia, Alabama, California, and Nebraska to finish cattle, and every single fat cow that comes off its roughly fifty thousand