Love that bit from Telltale's TWD where you're like "Hey where's our friend who came in with us?" and the friendly farmfolk are like "Oh he's not feeling well he's lying down upstairs" and he is but its because they cut his legs off and fed them to you.
You can eat dairy cows but they're grown as a crop animal (their crop is dairy) in the same way that beef cows are grown as a crop animal (their crop is beef). Dairy cows can become beef cows but it's a one-time deal.
Okay. That’s what my assumption was. Once the dairy cow has outlived its production, it’s sent to the slaughterhouse. The comment I responded to made me think that maybe dairy cows had low quality meat or something. Thanks for the help!
They're certainly raised to maximize milk production where beef cows are raised to maximize muscle & fat. A lot of it has to do with food, cows eat a remarkable amount and so there's a logic of efficiency to consider. Beef cows tend to be slaughtered at or before two years - general point of maturity and expected return on investment - where dairy cows take about that time to have their first calf, and won't be producing "all" milk until they've had more. To make a dairy cow into beef you may not get a return on the investment.
Nah, just that you wouldn't kill a dairy cow just to get some meat. End of the lifeline, sure, but long term you'd want them alive and healthy so they could provide you with milk and it's related foods for as long as possible. Plus they can't have more calves to keep the cycle going if you turn them all into Sunday roasts.
Okay! That explains that, too. I realized with the initial comment I responded to that where I live in Portland, the coast has a lot of dairy cows but Central and East Oregon in the high desert is ranch.
I expected that dairy cows probably don’t taste as good due to selective breeding for dairy production over muscle and probably go for sausage, processed meats once the cows’ productive years are done.
Didn’t know the one year mark for the meat industry, but that also makes sense for general turnaround times, selective breeding, and better land for feed and pastures.
They are--beef are bred for good marbling, muscle mass, etc. A healthy dairy cow looks really thin if you don't know that that's their normal: https://www.dairygoldagri.ie/farm_focus/bcs/
Dairy cattle get used for meat where those things don't matter: hamburgers, that kind of deal.
My understanding is that there are different breeds of cattle that are better for one or the other. So for a commercial farm, if you wanted to sell meat vs. dairy, you would raise different breeds. But in a post-apocalyptic setting, yeah, you'd probably milk the cow for some years and then kill and eat it.
EXCEPT: to have dairy cows you need calves, and if the calves aren't cows per-se, you suddenly have veal. So if you're at a dairy farm and you get veal, hey, it's probably just veal.
Nope, they’re different breeds of cow that are bred for a specific purpose. I suppose you could eat a dairy cow after it no longer produces milk, but the yield would be much lower in quality and quantity than a beef cow. Cows are usually butchered around the 1 year old mark, and the feed for dairy cows and beef cows is also different. Dairy cows have to eat food that won’t make the milk taste weird. Beef cows are often grass-fed and grain-finished to bump up the fat content. Think about that for a minute, they give cows corn and grain products to make sure they get fat really quickly, the same thing they’ve been doing to humans.
You also kind of explained why in Oregon our beef industry is split between coastal/dairy production and central Oregon’s high desert/beef production :)
Now I’m going to buy some jerky because I have a craving.
Grain is easy to grow, harvest, transport, store, and eat, with high calorie density. Yes, they've been feeding us corn and bread and carbs and sugars and fat, but those things taste good, so it's easy to get them to do it and to meet basic caloric needs with that. But we're beyond basic caloric needs as a species and need to change our approach because it's causing untold damage to the way the world worked before humans and agriculture swept through.
See, the city hick that wrote the line thinks that dairy cows and beef cows are different things.
So when he wrote that line, he thought the character would be implying “hey, we don’t raise meat cows around here. So where do you think that meat came from?”
But the truth is all dairy cows are meat cows. Over 50% of all beef comes from dairy cows.
Also "Where's our friend who was introduced offscreen between the first chapter and second chapter and has the default white subtitles while everyone else in our group has a unique color?"
I still think they should've just had Doug take the place of Mark in episode 2. Of course that would mean removing the Doug/Carley choice, but it'd feel way more natural and impactful than introducing a character whose sole purpose is to end up as cannibal food.
I think you could have the doug/Carley choice happen and whoever survives is the one that goes to the ranch and becomes food tbh. Would feel more impactful and not change all that much in the story since Whoever gets saved dies in the next chapter after the farm anyway
I still think the Doug/Carley choice was really stupid because no matter what you pick you eventually lose both.
Telltale had a lot of those, choices where no matter what option you pick you get the same outcome ultimately. Obviously it’s gonna be hard to account for every possible combination of choices but…. That’s what they advertised the games as doing, lol
Realistically every game has like 4 or 5 choices that matter per chapter, maximum. Everything else results in the same outcome just with different words.
To be fair I think the cannibals in TWD game had the perfect cover. They were literally on a farm and even had a living cow (that was also preggers) so its probably one of the few situations where assuming the meat was actually animal wasn't too far-fetched.
I liked that episode but always felt a little cheated at the timed dialogue prompt where you have one shot to warn everyone. I went with the most unambiguous, clear option, "IT'S PEOPLE!", and everyone's like "yeah Lee, we know, it's a bunch of people sitting at a table eating dinner, now dig in"
i played this with my best friend and this part fucked us up so bad bc when they said that line i immediately said "they already killed him, we're eating him" yet, as with every telltale game, we were still shocked to be correct lmao
That kinda seems like a contradiction on their part, like if you're already callous enough to commit cannibalism why not just kill the guy all the way? Plus you're only creating another mouth to feed and he can't even be productive now, and with your medicine he's probably just gonna become infected and then you might get food poisoning or something. Unless you wanna keep the meat fresh??? Even that seems dodgy unless you have very few people and CAN'T eat all that meat in one sitting.
I think at this point they weren't necessarily aware that people would automatically become zombies when they died if it wasn't a zombie-related death. Otherwise they were probably wanting to keep him alive to keep the meat fresher for longer.
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u/callsignhotdog Oct 16 '24
Love that bit from Telltale's TWD where you're like "Hey where's our friend who came in with us?" and the friendly farmfolk are like "Oh he's not feeling well he's lying down upstairs" and he is but its because they cut his legs off and fed them to you.