BQA audit

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moses388

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National BQA audit reported packing plants are finding buck shot / bird shot in carcasses. What is this from? Hunters do not know the difference between wild game and domesticated animals?
 
I have heard hunters will shoot at domestic animals just for fun. usually if he/she has had an unproductive day of hunting. pretty disgusting if you ask me.
 
It was a bit vague. It says "in the carcass", but does that only mean in the meat or does it also mean in the stomachs? I could understand if cattle commonly picked up pellets while grazing and packers finding them in the stomachs. I don't believe for one second that 100% of the packers are finding pellets in the meat on regular basis. There is zero reason for that to happen.
 
I have heard hunters will shoot at domestic animals just for fun. usually if he/she has had an unproductive day of hunting. pretty disgusting if you ask me.
Total BS. No hunter ever did this. Low-life pieces of scum in the woods with a gun...like poachers, night hunters, those who ignore seasons and bag limits, etc, are not hunters.
 
No idea where you would hear such garbage from, but I promise someone made that crap up. It simply does not happen. Ever.
Maybe it is possible that the domestic animals are shooting themselves or their herdmates.
 
I know someone who used to shoot cow's for fun with a pellet gun , then they moved up to a 22 and finally got caught and all kinds of fines, they killed a couple of cow's, I was a kid at the time, still makes me sick thinking about it.... (I may have been the reason they got caught)🤫
 
I almost shot a cow once. I packed way in with horse and mule in extreme Northeastern Washington hunting mule deer and came back to my Camp after a long day of hunting and this heifer was in my tent shitting on everything destroying everything. She had eaten all the horse feed too. I tried to coax her out of there but she put her head down and started blowing snot. Just about shot her!! A couple years later I met the rancher that had the forest lease and ran the cattle up there. I told him the story and he laughed, thanked me for not shooting her and bought me a couple shots of whiskey. 🤣🤣
 
After reading the article, I agree with @M.Magis it's vague.
It seems more like an agenda driven study with vague conclusions that don't really matchup with logic.
In my 30 yrs of being in the cattle business, I have had two, a few month old calf and a bred heifer killed by gunshot. My belief is that my experiences with having two cattle get shot are a higher percentage than average, and neither of mine went into the food chain as they were found dead.
I have heard of someone apparently intentionally using bird shot on a bull that was getting out many years ago, I would certainly think that is a very isolated incident. Definitely not a good way to handle cattle.
I would think the incidence of maliciously targeting livestock would be fairly low industry wide as well though it does obviously happen from time to time.
Seems very odd to me that issue of finding that in the carcasses would even be a high enough incidence to be noticed on such a scale as claimed.
The part stating about bruising seems suspicious. The article acknowledges that injection site scarring has decreased, and I find it odd that bruising due to loading, handling has increased as no doubt cattle handling practices at the farms and ranches along with feedlots should have logically improved at the same rate as the injection site issues.
Is it possible that there are a lot of new inexperienced cattle producers that are not aware of the BQA stuff?
Is the bruising a result of careless hired help at stockyards and trucking?
The part of the article about thin cows is obvious, the packers would rather have cows in good condition as it it means more pounds of beef.
No surprise there they want us to feed out the pound cows and wait to sell until they have dried up.
Is all of this going to be a new reason to lower prices?
 
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It's unfortunate, but cows, and other livestock, do get shot. I won't say it's frequent, but it's definitely not 'isolated' cases either and it is somewhat regular. Do 'hunters' shoot cows? Well, a true hunter doesn't, at least not intentionally. I have heard tell of farmers/ranchers that, just before hunting season, they will paint in 2 foot letters the word "COW" on the sides of their animals in florescent orange or yellow to prevent hunters from "accidentally" mistaking "Bessie" for "Bucky". And then you have poachers, who are not 'hunters' either. They at times poach livestock as well as wildlife. Then you have 'joy riders' who often have a gun and just drive around killing animals at random......deer, cows, horses, dogs, cats.....dare I say people? And then there are 'stray' bullets where the animal was never the intended target at all.

Do livestock get shot? Yes. On a 'regular' basis? I can say yes with a degree of confidence. Is it frequent? Depends on your definition of frequent, but not every day. Why are they shot? Multiple reasons.
 
I have lost 2 Jersey milk cows over the years to being shot during hunting season... and I would bet dollars to donuts that it was trigger happy hunters not being sure that the brownish tan color they were seeing was a not a deer but a cow.....
All my Jersey's are on brought home to places where they cannot be "easily" mistaken for a "deer hide color"... open fields close to the barns and on "no hunting allowed" properties... not a guarantee but it did stop my losing any more animals to a "mistake" .... and no, no one ever owned up to shooting them.... I just couldn't find them and they didn't come to call and I found them while walking the pasture looking for them.... found within less than 12 hours since these were cows that were supposed to be coming in for milking..... IT SUCKED, big time....

There was a rash of some cattle shooting here and a neighbor's bull got shot, died... and I think they finally caught someone... quite a few years ago.
 
50 years ago it was somewhat isolated but it happened. Usually shoot a bull that kept getting out and normally done by the owner. Never heard of one shot by a hunter.
 
I had a 4-5 month old registered Charolais calf that a was shot from the neighbors front porch by one of her relatives. I connected the dots to figure that one out, after she told me sometime after that that the person had visited them and had told of shooting a llama from their front porch, in a field next to where they lived in another state. After that I went to the spot where I found the dead calf and it was a clear and straight vantage point to their front porch.
The bred heifer we had that got shot was done by somebody driving down the road.
 
Beef Magazine wrote an article telling people what to think on the results of the audit. I did read a summary that came from NCBA. It clearly states large increases in yield grade 4 and 5 carcasses but the article states tremendous progress with wasteful fat.
Print the audit let me come to my own conclusion and hopefully everyone else will also.
I have my own opinions why this was done but will let you come to your own conclusion.
 

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