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| One of two calves shot and butchered in the pasture |
If you wonder how bad the recession is, people are stealing meat in Spain. But not in the shoplifting sense -- they're shooting and butchering the animals right in the field. Meat isn't the only thing being stolen -- most food crops are targeted.
You'll find the details in this story, courtesy of the Seattle Times.
We do have livestock theft in the US -- when I was driving my new stock trailer back I was stopped in Montana by a state trooper who carefully inspected my trailer to make sure it was empty -- apparently large trailers with out-of-state plates are suspicious in rural areas, but I've never seen cows get butchered in the fields.
It's tough all over.
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5 comments:
The story got me to thinking about what I would do if I just didn't have anything to feed my family. I would never think of going and butchering other people's animals but I know I would be trying to fish in the lake right here and forage more. I can't think of a time during the year here where there isn't some wild edible growing.
I take it this is not the case there however of they wouldn't have had to kill someone else's cattle in the field.
In the Columbia Gorge near Portland there is a large area called the 1000 Acres. Before the National Scenic Area was designated, a rancher from Eastern Oregon rented that land for summer pasture and ran about 500 head of cattle there. It was common to see butchered carcasses there along I-84 in the 80's. He also suffered a lot of predation from the river side also. It was easy to boat there, shoot a cow, butcher it and get away undetected with the meat.
Economically I think things are much tougher now...
There's been a problem in Florida for several years now with people killing and butchering horses. Interesting link!
My neighbor has had two or three occurrences of this in the past but a cow and generally only a quarter of the animal. Not sure if anything recent but she was expecting it to happen again with the economy.
This happened to my friend in Walla Walla last year. He found one of his nice breeding rams dead in a corral and called DFW, thinking it was a predator. But when they looked more closely, it was a knife cut to the throat and someone had started butchering it out before they must have been interrupted and left it sitting there. Grr.
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