29 October 2013
The effect of fire, drought, oil prices, and, recently, blizzards, don't really slam home with most of us until we go shopping for the family groceries. The prices for all types of meat has increased, and the producers are feeling the pinch, too. But they can suffer another kind of injury - theft of their product, the animals themselves.
Now you have to realize something - there is a time lag between the mating of a bull and cow and the comsumption of the burger at Burger Diddle. A cow produces one offspring usually and that takes about a year. Pigs and chickens are a lot more prolific. Cattle are much slower to mature - unless you are raising calves for veal, they aren't marketable until about the age of four. That's a five year lag. With chickens, it's 12 months max.
There are other considerations, of course, but we are focusing on the time element here. Why? Because with the increase in prices, people are stealing young stock including calves not even weaned. That's stealing a producer's future stock that they cannot get back.
The rate of these thefts is going up at an increasing rate.How did a rancher find out about this? One woman had a neighbor call her with the news that several of her cows were "tight bagged"-they hadn't had their calves to nurse on them in quite awhile. On investigation, she realized that she was missing 25 calves just in that pasture.
It's going on all over the nation. That is just one case in California.
More reading
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/27/5850087/cattle-theft-increasing-in-california.html