Where’s the beef?

On May 14, 2007, our Guernsey, Josey, gave birth to Chucky Joe, a little bull calf. It’s been something watching him grow during the last 19.5 months. I banded him when he was a couple of months old (he was just about too big at the time) in order to make a steer out of him. We’ve raised him for beef. Sometime in the next two weeks, we’ll butcher him. I know that to some that may sound like a harsh thing, but that’s what he was created for – to become beef (and to provide the materials to make two powder horns).

Chucky has lived a good life. He’s had plenty of grass and hay to eat and good clean water to drink. He’s gotten to be with or near his mother his whole life. In fact, he still nurses. She never kicked him off. It’s something to see a 900+ pound steer nursing. Josey is just too patient and kind to wean him. I tried to wean him, but it just didn’t work because Josey wouldn’t help. Even those weaner things you put on a calf’s nose didn’t work. He found a way to work around it. I even kept the two of them separate for two and a half months, but when they were together again, it was like they’d never been apart. Finally, I gave up.

If we put off killing Chucky for beef until next winter, I’m sure we’d get more out of it. He’s got the frame to grow quite a bit more, but, I don’t want to keep feeding him for another year. So, his time is coming soon. Dad, Danny, and I will do the job. Mom and Anne will help with the processing, too. We got fewer deer this year than usual, but with the addition of the beef from Chucky, we’ll have enough meat for the coming year.

We don’t buy and eat conventionally raised and processed meat from the store. The way animals are treated and raised and what they are fed and injected with in order to provide that unnaturally-colored meat in the supermarket is horrible. I don’t want to consume it, let alone support the industry and its practices.

I want to know how my meat is raised. I want the animal from which it comes to live a good live, eating good food, and to not be filled with antibiotics and hormones. A cow is not meant to eat a diet of corn and corn products; it is a grass eater. Chucky has eaten grass and hay his whole life; he has lived naturally. The meat we get from him will be healthful and will have been gotten in an ethical, humane fashion. And, apart from some labor and a little fuel and string for making bales of hay to feed him, it’s free meat. In my book, that’s good.