In article , tomj wrote:

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:09:15 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

I put a radio out in the
garden and tuned it to a station that plays a lot of Rush Limbaugh
all night. That should scare her off. *g*)
What a great sense of humor! I rolled off the office chair on that
one!

Heh. It didn't work! The moose came through, stepped on my peas and
kept going. At least she didn't stop to graze. I'm putting a fishnet fence
up today. (She's down on the lake right now, eating the water lilies...)

I'm curious about some comments I read by John Robbins and also posted
this morning.... Grass fed sounds wonderful, but I have more
questions....how do we know how the animals were butchered?

If you know the rancher, you'll know how/where the animals were butchered.
If you buy an animal from us, you pick out the one you want, live.

We butcher on our ranch, never more than two animals in a day. (It's a *lot*
of work!) The SO drives near the steer he wants, while the animal is grazing.
He stays in the pickup and shoots the animal in the forehead once with a
..300 Savage that's had the point of the bullet cut off. (Better blunt impact --
kills instantly. The animal dies with grass in it's mouth and never hears
the shot that kills it.) He discovered that if he stays in the pickup, the
animals
ignore him. If he gets out, they all come in for their (organic) barley, then
you've got a bunch of milling animals. If a stranger gets out of the truck,
the herd leaves. (They've learned that when strangers show up, someone
is going to die...) Most of our customers take everything but the hide and
the moo. Some even take the hooves, to make a gelatin-like soup. We have
lots of ethnic Russian neighbors. When customers don't want the tongue,
kidneys, liver or heart, we give those to elders in the neighborhood who
enjoy them.

We wait until there's snow on the ground, to have a clean place to work out
on the meadow. The weather is also cool enough then to hang the carcass
in our meat house for a couple of days, before it goes down to the local
butcher. (It's easier to split a carcass after it's hung for awhile.) The
butcher
hangs the sides in his cooler at a certain temp (?) for up to 10 days, then
breaks the carcass down into whatever cuts the customer has specified.
(One of the questions on the "cut sheet" is "how many teenagers are you
feeding?" because Tom will make the burger packages bigger, according
to the teenage count in a household. He also asks how much and what kind
of fat you want in the burger.)

PBS is going to run a show on friday here that was produced by
Hal Cannon. It's about cowboys. If I know Hal, he'll have stuff in there
about a cowboy's relationship to the land and to the animals. (And I do
know Hal. Met him at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV a few
years ago.) Catch that show, if you can. It might explain a lot.

Jan