Animals and Technology

I came across this news article - America's Elite Cows Don't Give Birth — Their Surrogates Do - the other day and it reminded me of the Pollan "Power Steer" essay we read for class. It occurred to me that both this article and the essay present beef and dairy production as rife with technology. The modern food-animal industry is heavily dependent on biological technology from inception to final product: hormone treatments, artificial insemination, embryo transplants, c-sections, antibiotics, perfectly mixed feed - and this isn't even looking at the machinery side of things. Not to argue that any of this is "bad" or "good", but it is interesting to compare to the history of ranching before these advancements.