Poop & Visera

I am tired of the paranoid critics of agricultural feeds slamming animal production industry for what they feed to the animals. There are a billion different things wrong with Western (and developing country) animal production models, but (for the most part) the feed is not one of them.

• Calves get their bacterial rumen from, mommy’s poop
  
• Entire African ecosystems based on hippo poop
  
• Cattle eat their own afterbirth (so do some women), they have 4 compartment stomachs, one of them is *just*like* the human stomach, able to digest animal matter.
  
• How many times have you seen fido eat or roll in poop? No, their not some rouge mutations due to domestication, the wild canines do it too.
  

The part that I will agree with is feeding ruminants to ruminants poultry to poultry etc (which is an issue that was highlighted with spongioform encephalopathy outbreak) but chicken poop to cattle or porcine offal to fish or poultry viscera to swine, no problem. My opinion is that way too much emphasis is put on things that would repulse us but in reality are harmless. Larger issues that I do not hear much about but think need to be seriously considered is livestock database so outbreaks of *whatever* can be immediately tracked, increased analysis of human and livestock feeds coming into the country, and household hygiene.

This isn’t some sort of Soylent Green type idea, we aren’t feeding people to people, or people to animals. There are loads of unused nutrients in poop/offal from many of the less efficient digesters, why let them go to waste?! When they can be utilized at many different levels of decomposition? (animal -> bio digester -> food/fertilizer).