No Scrubs: Breeding a Better Bull

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Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what initially hooked me about this story was that the number one ranked bull in the country, like his, with the one with the most valuable semen in all the land, was called Badger Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Speaker 6 And there was just something about the silliness of the name, like not even like a racehorse name, but just like seemingly a bunch of random words plucked from like a Wisconsin sports fan who was like thinking about the financial crisis or something.

Speaker 6 Like it's just like the strangest combination. And yet of every single bull in the entire United States, like this was the guy.

Speaker 7 That was journalist Alexis Madrigal. And he was introducing us to Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy, the most valuable bull in America.

Speaker 8 And while we're doing introductions, I'm Nicola Twilley.

Speaker 11 And I'm Cynthia Graeber. In this episode of Gastropod, we set out to uncover the big data and genomic science transforming our livestock, in particular dairy cattle.

Speaker 7 But we also get into its murky history and its deeply, deeply disturbing animal welfare implications.

Speaker 15 So consider this a trigger warning of sorts.

Speaker 4 I mean regular listeners will know that we usually take a pretty light-hearted approach, even to serious topics. And I have to admit, even just saying Badger Bluff Fanny Freddie makes me giggle.

Speaker 12 But some of the stories we tell in this episode are very dark and difficult to hear.

Speaker 11 And if you usually listen with kids, and we know that some of you do, you may want to screen it on your own first. Okay, with that warning out of the way, back to Badger Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Speaker 4 So a couple of years ago, Alexis wrote a long story for The Atlantic about,

Speaker 16 you know, can I just call him Freddy for short?

Speaker 11 Sure, why not? It's a little easier.

Speaker 6 My name is Alexis Madrigal, and I wrote a story for The Atlantic when I was working there called The Perfect Milk Machine. And it was about Holstein breeding, essentially, dairy cow breeding.

Speaker 19 And in this article, Alexis revealed something that completely blew my mind.

Speaker 9 So at any moment in America, there is one bull that is officially the most valuable bull of all.

Speaker 18 It's not up for debate.

Speaker 20 Like, I don't know, like, is Bradley Cooper a more bankable leading man than LeodoCaprio or whatever.

Speaker 9 Or, I don't know, whichever sports analogy that I, I really can't make, like a quarterback. I can't make a quarterback analogy.

Speaker 11 I know the name of exactly one quarterback and that's Tom Brady and I only know that because I live in Boston.

Speaker 14 And he's hot.

Speaker 5 That's true.

Speaker 12 Anyway, in 2012 when Alexis was writing Badger Bluff Fanny Freddie was hot.

Speaker 7 He was the most valuable bull in America.

Speaker 11 And this is a quantifiable, measurable thing. It's not some kind of critics pick.
There's an algorithm.

Speaker 6 Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy is a breeding bull,

Speaker 6 which means that he, like all other breeding bulls in the United States, is ranked on the basis of how much money he could add to any particular cow's output, milk output.

Speaker 6 And they call this thing lifetime net merit.

Speaker 6 And it takes all of these different factors, you know, their ability to increase milk production, their ability to lengthen the productive life of a cow, all of these genetic traits.

Speaker 6 And there's a really long equation that ties them all together. And at the end of it, you get this number denominated in dollars.

Speaker 6 And Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy, if you sorted that Excel spreadsheet to find the highest number, he was the guy on top. And there wasn't anybody else who was even close.

Speaker 11 Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy has a lifetime net merit score of precisely $792.

Speaker 6 That score is essentially what they would expect him to add to a cow's milk production if you were to breed him with any given cow. That's what the lifetime net merit score is.

Speaker 6 It's just a it's a dollar amount calculated by an equation that takes into account all the different types of

Speaker 6 outputs that you might want from a father, basically.

Speaker 6 And one of the interesting things about that, just a quick note on that, is that if you go watch those YouTube videos about people at dairy conventions talking about breeding, they kind of are like baseball general managers or something.

Speaker 6 They are the original kind of money ball types. They sort of seem to have sort of different opinions on what kinds of traits are going to produce the best outcomes for them.

Speaker 6 And so, not every single, you know, cow in the country is going to get the number one ranked bull semen.

Speaker 6 It's all going to be this sort of where can they get a good deal, but that good deal, their herd produces in a particular way.

Speaker 6 And so, there's actually, you know, there's a whole other level of combinatorics here, which is how individual livestock breeders mix and match the different bull semens with their particular herds.

Speaker 6 You know, you might want 20 units of that semen and 50 units of that semen and 10 of this one, you know, and they can really,

Speaker 6 they do that. They buy from all these different places and there's, you know, risks and rewards associated with different, you know, semen strategies.

Speaker 21 Semen strategies.

Speaker 4 Now there is a phrase.

Speaker 17 Okay, so when I first read about this whole lifetime net merit thing, it seemed a little, I don't know, like sci-fi.

Speaker 4 Like, how could we really put this precise dollar figure on something so organic?

Speaker 26 But when I talked about it with Heather Hewson, so she's a professor of dairy cattle genetics at Cornell University, she reminded me that lifetime net merit is just normal selective breeding with some fancy math thrown in.

Speaker 28 For centuries, people have been selecting cattle based on their production. I mean, we do this with just about any domestic animal that we breed.

Speaker 28 So, you know, what traits do you want? You select and breed those animals.

Speaker 28 But really, in the 60s, you know, the monumental thing was we started using evaluations, basically genetic evaluations, but some of this was still based on bringing in basically trait characteristics.

Speaker 28 So we would just call that phenotypic data, looking at how much milk production, how healthy the animal is.

Speaker 28 And we could basically estimate and give the animals a score, kind of their productive score.

Speaker 28 So then we could select for the animals and breed animals based on those scores.

Speaker 4 The story of how we got to the lifetime net merit score, how we got to that place where we can put a precise dollar number on the value that Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy's semen will add to his offspring over just semen from any old bull.

Speaker 4 In some ways, it's just the logical next step from a process that started 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 8 That's roughly when humans managed to transform a huge, wild, aggressive auroch into a domesticated cow.

Speaker 11 Right, but for 9,900 of those years, it was just a case of individual farmers making decisions that improved their herds.

Speaker 11 And so different breeds evolved to suit different climates and different uses, and it was pretty slow. All this domestication and breeding, it took a long time to breed for different traits.

Speaker 19 True, true.

Speaker 4 But towards the end of the 19th century, that's when you get the first herd books. So these are basically a cross between family trees and report cards for cattle.

Speaker 9 For the first time, breeders are recording parentage for the cattle, and they're also collecting data on height, weight, milk production, and so on.

Speaker 16 So that's really the start of big data for cows.

Speaker 11 And at the same time, there's something else interesting happening in science. Listeners have probably heard of Mendel.
He's known as the father of genetics.

Speaker 11 He did his research in the mid-1800s, but his work wasn't super significant at the time. But in the 1900s, scientists kind of rediscovered him.
They learned more about inheritable traits.

Speaker 11 In fact, the word genetics was first coined in 1905. And so in the early part of the 20th century, there was this focus on breeding and inheritance, and not just in cattle, but in people.

Speaker 25 And this leads to one of the more disturbing moments in U.S.

Speaker 8 history: the rise of eugenics.

Speaker 21 So, scientists at this time are learning all about genetics, and they think they can use that knowledge to improve the human race.

Speaker 4 They're in favor of selective breeding of people and also forced sterilizations.

Speaker 11 It's incredibly strange and also painful to think about that time period. It's hard to imagine how huge a movement it was in the U.S.

Speaker 18 Right, this wasn't a handful of scientists out on the fringe.

Speaker 4 In a poll that Fortune magazine did in the 1920s, two-thirds of respondents were fully in favor of sterilizing quote-unquote mental defectives so that they didn't reproduce.

Speaker 11 And obviously that sounds like Nazi Germany. And actually eugenics in the U.S.
only fell out of favor after World War II because of that association.

Speaker 11 But in the 1920s, there were even trials to determine if someone was fit to breed.

Speaker 33 And this results in a lot of high-profile public trials, in fact,

Speaker 33 where people are put on trial and the question of their fitness for reproduction is

Speaker 5 placed before the court.

Speaker 20 And that, believe it or not, brings us back to cows.

Speaker 4 That was Gabe Rosenberg.

Speaker 17 He's a professor in the women's studies department at Duke University, and he's working on a book called Purebred, Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States.

Speaker 33 Simultaneous to this, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiates a program called the

Speaker 33 Better Sires for Better Stock program.

Speaker 33 And the idea of this is that to improve the quality of American cattle, they're going to try to encourage people to use only purebred cattle and to cull defective or degenerate, what they call scrub cattle.

Speaker 33 And one of the things that they do to accomplish this is that they hold show trials of scrub cattle in which they will publicly take the cow,

Speaker 33 there's this bull, this scrub bull, and they will place him before a jury and a judge and a real lawyer,

Speaker 33 another lawyer, one will be a prosecutor, one will be a defendant, and they'll conduct a trial about his fitness to reproduce.

Speaker 33 And then at the end of which he is usually found guilty and executed. And then there is barbecue is served.

Speaker 11 I cannot believe this actually happened.

Speaker 20 I know.

Speaker 8 I genuinely could not believe it either.

Speaker 18 The lawyers actually bother making the case for the prosecution and the defense? I mean, what might one say in defense of this

Speaker 4 cow's right to reproduce?

Speaker 32 I mean,

Speaker 26 how would you make that argument?

Speaker 33 Well, so it's actually quite interesting. So the USCA has a problem on their hands.
I mean, they think it's self-evident that you should only use a purebred cow.

Speaker 33 You know, you should only use a purebred sire for stud.

Speaker 33 But for a lot of farmers, they are actually quite skeptical of this.

Speaker 33 And they believe, for example, that whatever benefit there might be in terms of an improvement in stock, it doesn't offset the additional cost that's necessary to acquire. the purebred.

Speaker 33 And in some senses, that's what's being adjudicated in the trial. In fact, the USDA, which is organizing these trials, took it very, very seriously that the scrub sire needed to have a robust defense.

Speaker 33 And they're quite clear on this matter, that it must appear to be a real trial and not merely a farce, that they don't want to make a mockery of the proceedings by

Speaker 33 not putting up a robust defense of the scrub sire.

Speaker 11 A defense, like with the real defense lawyer. And so the bull is almost a person?

Speaker 4 Yes, and that is the crazy thing.

Speaker 20 To be in front of the court, the bull actually has to be named in the indictment, in the legal documents.

Speaker 25 So Gabe told me they had to give the bulls a name.

Speaker 4 One of the examples, he told me, the bull was given the name Desperado.

Speaker 11 I am sorry, this is batshit crazy.

Speaker 34 So these trials went on for more than a decade.

Speaker 14 In full seriousness, USDA field agents would give out pamphlets of instructions on how to hold one of these scrub bull trials at your county fair.

Speaker 4 There's a whole script for whoever was playing the sheriff and the attorneys.

Speaker 20 Here's how it's supposed to start.

Speaker 14 I'm looking right now at the PDF that Gabe sent me.

Speaker 34 Hear ye, hear ye, the honorable court of bovine justice of whatever county is now in session.

Speaker 11 Bovine Justice?

Speaker 4 They have a whole list of the charges that the bull is a robber because he eats food but provides no value and that he's an unworthy father.

Speaker 25 And they even give you suggestions for a funeral oration and other quote educational entertainments.

Speaker 17 I am not kidding.

Speaker 30 Listeners, we have the documents online.

Speaker 16 You can check check it out for yourself.

Speaker 20 It is hard not to laugh at how ridiculous this is.

Speaker 14 But as Gabe points out, it also embodies a deeply unpleasant way of thinking.

Speaker 33 The general thing that it displays, of course, is that they're talking about a lot more than just

Speaker 33 cattle genetics here. They're talking about, you know...

Speaker 33 What is the power of inheritance? And how can we know it? How can we judge it? And

Speaker 33 what right does, for example, the state as an actor or a court as an actor have in making decisions, life and death decisions for people, keeping in mind that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals are sterilized by eugenic sterilization laws over the course of American history.

Speaker 33 These are really

Speaker 33 profound questions that are actually being worked out through questions about the political economy of meat and how it is we're going to get more

Speaker 33 cheap meat, to put it that way.

Speaker 11 Sometime in the 1930s, the bull trials ended, but the interest in bull genetics only increased.

Speaker 20 And a lot of that comes down to mass artificial insemination. So in the late 1940s and 50s, we finally figured out how to successfully freeze and store bull sperm.

Speaker 4 And so then breeders could use a single sample to fertilize hundreds and thousands of lady cows.

Speaker 11 Here's where the use of genetics in breeding explodes. I mean, let's take my dad.
He only had two kids, one of each gender.

Speaker 11 There's not so much DNA data you can get about him from looking at my brother and and me. But if one bull is siring thousands of offspring, you've got loads of genetic information right there.

Speaker 11 Alexis describes this one bull in particular.

Speaker 6 Okay, here we go. It was Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief.
He was the number two bull of the last century, and he had 16,000 daughters, 500,000 granddaughters, and 2 million great-granddaughters.

Speaker 34 2 million great-granddaughters.

Speaker 24 And so you have all that genetic information, and you have a ton of physical data, too.

Speaker 25 The milk production, the height, the yield, and so on, that farmers have been collecting for decades in those herd books.

Speaker 19 So you can match the two up and try to figure out how the genetics influences the outcomes.

Speaker 19 And in 1994, the USDA comes up with a calculation that combines all of that information into one single score, lifetime net merit.

Speaker 19 Side note, they actually came up with three scores.

Speaker 12 You can calculate lifetime fluid merit and lifetime cheese merit, too.

Speaker 19 Love it.

Speaker 11 More cheese.

Speaker 23 I have an extremely high lifetime cheese score for consumption at any rate.

Speaker 5 Me too.

Speaker 27 But this is the algorithm that has been shaping the American milk and meat supply for 20 years now.

Speaker 7 It's been revised a few times as we've learned more about genes and their impact.

Speaker 19 So at the start, there were only five factors, and now there are a dozen or so, including teat length, daughter calving ease, milk protein levels, and of course, foot angle.

Speaker 11 Of course. Hey, while we're on the subject of cheese, we should say we're putting together an episode coming out next month all about cheese.

Speaker 22 That is true.

Speaker 31 All the way from the invention of pottery and the very, very, very first cheeses ever made to the most cutting-edge science of cheese rind microbial life.

Speaker 11 And we want to include your cheese stories. Favorite cheese, cheesiest dishes, cheese loves, cheese phobias.

Speaker 22 That time you thought you were eating cheese and it turned out to be Capybara.

Speaker 11 Exactly. Basically anything to do with cheese.
Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at contact at gastropod.com or leave us a voicemail at 310-876-2427.

Speaker 11 As usual, we want to hear from you.

Speaker 15 But back to livestock breeding, algorithms, and lifetime net merit.

Speaker 31 So you may be wondering what this crazy experiment in quantified optimization has done to our cattle.

Speaker 28 Oh, it's increased the actual production exponentially.

Speaker 28 Once basically these genetic evaluations, particularly that genomic data, came about, over the last 50 years, we've almost increased our milk production in the U.S. by about 50%.

Speaker 28 And we pretty much have half the cows that are producing that.

Speaker 28 So it's just made us, you know, incredibly effective at selecting animals for production.

Speaker 25 In fact, if you look at USDA census numbers over the past century, the average cow produces four times as much milk now.

Speaker 11 Of course, this has come at some cost, too.

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Speaker 28 One really good example is that you have the body condition score is actually negatively correlated, so it's the opposite of milk production.

Speaker 28 So if you want to choose for animals that have a better body condition score, you're actually going to reduce, you know, selection on your milk production.

Speaker 21 So pushing in on just milk production basically means weakening the animal's overall health.

Speaker 11 They get mastitis, that's inflammation of the mammary gland, and it's super painful to the cow and costly to the farmer. They also have fewer babies and they die sooner.

Speaker 7 So there are real costs to animal welfare by breeding exclusively for yield.

Speaker 7 And the other thing that happens when you're just choosing these handful of superstar bulls to fertilize all of your cattle is that you get inbreeding.

Speaker 8 So Heather actually wrote a paper on this with some of her colleagues, and they found that in Holsteins, which is the main dairy breed in the U.S., 10%

Speaker 8 give or take of the genome is autozygous.

Speaker 30 That's the scientific word for meaning it comes from a single shared ancestor.

Speaker 11 And remember, Pawnee Orlinda Chief, that bull with 16,000 daughters? They've calculated that his DNA accounts for roughly 7% of the genetic material in Holsteins. 7% of their DNA comes from one bull.

Speaker 12 But you know, there's something more subtle even that starts happening when you put numbers on bulls and optimize cattle in this way.

Speaker 4 It's like your whole attitude changes.

Speaker 11 It's like the cows aren't animals, they're objects. They can be perfected based on what we want from them.

Speaker 12 Right, raising cattle starts seeming more like a science project than animal husbandry with a duty of care.

Speaker 11 And that leads into some very disturbing science.

Speaker 11 You listeners know we love science here at Gastropod, but science is only as good as the people who are doing it and the regulations that are constraining it.

Speaker 11 Michael Moss is an investigative reporter, and he wrote a story in the New York Times. It was based on a leak from a USDA research center, a taxpayer-supported center.
It's called the U.S.

Speaker 11 Meat Animal Research Center. It's in Nebraska, and it's been around since 1964.

Speaker 17 You should read this article, but be warned, it is really, really chilling.

Speaker 4 The examples of just casual cruelty that he documented, like a ewe starving to death because of an untreated abscess on her jaw, or cows just being sort of knocked off carts on the way into surgery.

Speaker 11 But what might be even more disturbing is that a great deal of the cruelty came about because of the science experiments themselves.

Speaker 11 So there's one scientific project that also seemed to kind of shock the industry a little bit too, and cause harm to the animals, and that was a project that went on for decades, a research on getting cows to breed more twins.

Speaker 5 What happened with that?

Speaker 36 So in the natural world, something like 2 or 3% of cows, calves born, will be twins. And the center got the idea, and this wasn't entirely the idea.

Speaker 36 I mean, you know, now and then ranchers would kind of, you know, kind of, you know, think to themselves, geez, what if we could have twins all the time?

Speaker 36 We'd have like more meat on the hoof delivered to the slaughterhouse.

Speaker 36 But at the same time, ranchers were always already leery of twins because of the higher mortality rate that we'll get to in a second.

Speaker 36 But the center decided that it had the resources to create a herd that would twin as often as 55%.

Speaker 36 And they did that through fertilization between bulls that had a high twinning rate and cows that had a high twinning rate.

Speaker 36 And they would transfer the embryos to a cow with a low twinning rate and expanded the herd to as many as 900 cows. And it was hugely successful.
Over half of the calves were being born as twins.

Speaker 11 But the cows, it's horrible to think about. There were unintended side effects.
Like nearly all of the girl calves had deformed vaginas. And then cows just aren't equipped to have that many babies.

Speaker 11 The twins would get all twisted up. They couldn't get out.
The calves died at rates more than four times higher than single births. And the craziest part is that the industry didn't want twins.

Speaker 36 Look, I mean, these are ranchers that ranch for profit, but I was really struck by how caring the commercial, you know, many commercial ranchers are about their animals, and losing just one animal is hugely painful to the ranchers I interviewed.

Speaker 36 And so they were totally unaccepting of this, this goal of increasing more meat on the hoof at the expense of pain and suffering of the cows.

Speaker 11 But, Nikki, the project still went on for decades. I have to add a note here.

Speaker 11 I think we just made it sound like these particular scientists are bad guys and the folks who own the cows are the good ones, but it's complicated.

Speaker 11 We're focusing on livestock breeding in this episode and we haven't really described a dairy or meat cow operation.

Speaker 23 And as many of our listeners know, most, I mean not all, but most meat and milk in the U.S. comes from these huge agribusinesses.

Speaker 31 They have hundreds of cows crowded into any given building, feeding on grain rather than grass, pumped full of antibiotics.

Speaker 4 And there may not be cruel handling specifically, but the situation is just kind of inherently not a great setup for the cows.

Speaker 7 They get diseases, they die early because of breeding and constant pregnancy and poor health and their overall living situation.

Speaker 11 And there are plenty of articles and books out there that document the situation for cows living in what are basically factories for milk or meat.

Speaker 11 One part of that story that doesn't get told as often is the part we're talking about today, how breeding plays into all of this.

Speaker 24 Right.

Speaker 4 So getting back to breeding, you know, the USDA scientist that Michael Moss is describing in his piece, well, in some ways it reminds me of the USDA bull trials back in the 1920s.

Speaker 31 You know, it's kind of the same way of thinking, right?

Speaker 11 Like this idea that bulls that are not worthy deserve to die. It's so utilitarian.
Thinking about animals purely in terms of perfecting them means their welfare ends up not mattering.

Speaker 36 I think that the scientists at this center who were focused on production

Speaker 36 disassociated themselves from the animals in the welfare question. question.
I mean, they would insist that they did care about the animals,

Speaker 36 they paid attention to welfare, but the evidence just isn't there.

Speaker 35 This research center has had a big impact on animal production here in America.

Speaker 7 I mean, some of the work they have done has become a huge part of our meat system.

Speaker 4 They conducted research on pigs to increase litter size, and they helped sequence the bovine genome, which has had a huge impact on breeding.

Speaker 11 And Michael told me that the beef industry certainly knew about the research there, but I found it totally bizarre that they could treat animals this way.

Speaker 11 I mean, I know a neuroscientist who works with rats in his lab, and the BBC came in to film him.

Speaker 11 He was so upset by the way they staged the shot because he was worried people would think he mistreated the rats. Scientists generally don't mistreat the animals they work with.

Speaker 27 Because there are really strict regulations around animal welfare.

Speaker 25 But get this, the USDA is given itself an exemption from the Animal Welfare Act for research into livestock.

Speaker 26 So the rules just didn't apply to them.

Speaker 11 It's important to point out that universities that research livestock animals have signed on to agreements for better treatment for these animals and oversight of the research.

Speaker 11 They've volunteered for higher standards, but the center refused any of that oversight.

Speaker 4 I have to say, the USDA is not coming out of this looking good.

Speaker 11 Not at all. I asked Michael how the USDA sets its priorities, and he said they basically sit down with big agriculture.
Tom Tholpot, he's another reporter.

Speaker 11 He wrote a response to the story in Mother Jones, and he pointed out how important publicly funded agricultural research is, but it shouldn't just be for big ag, which we agree with 100%.

Speaker 11 Breeding research is important for smaller farmers too, but they might want to know, say, if a particular breed is better adapted to cold or to heat or to more diverse ecosystems.

Speaker 24 Exactly.

Speaker 23 And Heather Hewson at Cornell, so she started her career at the USDA headquarters in Maryland, but she is not at all like the researchers Michael describes at that USDA facility in in Nebraska.

Speaker 14 With Heather, one of her big dairy cattle research projects is focused on the genetics of Latin American heritage breeds.

Speaker 13 They have this slick coat that helps the cows deal with heat.

Speaker 25 And she has an awesome goat breeding project in Africa.

Speaker 25 She's working in collaboration with selected villages to identify important traits, not just yield, but things like, are the goats good around children?

Speaker 4 Because that's who mostly takes care of them.

Speaker 11 I love the idea that she's trying to breed friendly goats, lifetime net friendliness, as opposed to fluid merit.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, she's using the same tools, but it's a totally different approach.

Speaker 25 And it's a USDA-funded project, too.

Speaker 8 Cynthia, is there any update on what is going to happen to this USDA facility in Nebraska, the one that Michael wrote about?

Speaker 11 Yeah, he told me the article got a lot of responses, and he said they weren't just from vegans.

Speaker 36 The Secretary of Agriculture's office put out an email saying they were going to set up for the first time an ombudsman for animal welfare issues at the department, someone who could be there to take the concerns voiced in this case by the veterinarians at the center who felt really helpless in trying to bring attention to the situation they were sort of seeing over time.

Speaker 36 There's also been a number of members of Congress who are sort of looking to close the legislative loophole and do something like extend the Animal Welfare Act to farm animals,

Speaker 36 which ultimately was sort of at the root of the situation.

Speaker 11 Since I spoke to Michael, there's even more news. A bipartisan group in Congress has already introduced new legislation.

Speaker 11 It's called the AWARE Act, and its goal is to extend the Animal Welfare Act to agricultural animals and to these types of federal facilities. No more exceptions.

Speaker 13 I know I'm an incurable optimist, but I do feel as though things are starting to get better in the world of livestock breeding.

Speaker 13 That scientists are starting to think more holistically and optimize for health and well-being as well as just yield.

Speaker 11 I think so too. Michael said that the tides kind of turned in how we see animals.
We used to see pigs and cattle and sheep as totally different from, say, cats or dogs.

Speaker 11 And now, as a country, we're starting to recognize that we want them to be treated more humanely. And that plays into the breeding, too.

Speaker 9 And actually, you know, remember our friend Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy?

Speaker 4 Alexis told us that he was sort of a symbol of this shift in priorities, too.

Speaker 6 And what was so fascinating about him is that there were other cows,

Speaker 6 sorry, geez, there were other bulls

Speaker 6 that

Speaker 6 had much

Speaker 6 higher milk output, like that their genetics would lead cows to output more milk.

Speaker 6 But Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy would have given them other traits, and those other traits are actually much more valuable within the scheme of this equation.

Speaker 6 And so what he became symbolic for, for me at least, was that

Speaker 6 quantitative genetics, this field of livestock breeding, was turning away from just wanting to pump out ever more milk and needing to incorporate other types of genetic traits in

Speaker 6 the bull semen.

Speaker 35 Well, Alexis, I don't know.

Speaker 31 You might want to sit down now, but I have some Freddy-related news to break to you.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 18 So I was doing some research, and

Speaker 29 I hate to tell you, but in April 2013, he got toppled from his perch.

Speaker 32 the new guy is Disu Observer ET called observer to his friends his grandfather is Freddy's dad oh as it turns out yeah so but he is much he's he's much better than than Freddy and Freddy's full news

Speaker 6 he is i know well and i i wrote that article knowing that he would be toppled and i did think in some you know wacko way that like so writers can be sometimes I did think like well this will be his monument you know like even after he's not like you know on the USDA website anymore and like he's been scrubbed from all the trade journals as they all go offline you know there'll still be this one Atlantic article about him

Speaker 6 when you search his name or you search something related he may come up you know oh man

Speaker 6 sorry sorry I'm such a tough team I'm actually a little bit embarrassed to admit that I was thinking that about this cow but it's definitely true Like, sorry about this bull.

Speaker 11 I know that sounds like the perfect ending, but we have one bit more of futuristic science to bring you.

Speaker 15 So the latest thing is that there is now a move away from proven bulls.

Speaker 7 That's bulls that have grown up and shown us what they can do by fathering some daughters.

Speaker 4 Basically, we can scan so much genetic information so quickly now that breeders are moving to something called the genomic bull.

Speaker 35 So that's where you have a bull who has never fathered any calves, but you put his DNA on something they call a bovine chip, and it lets you look at 800,000 different genetic markers.

Speaker 10 And all of that information allows you to give the bull a lifetime net merit score, even before he's ever sired a calf to prove his worth.

Speaker 16 It's a huge cost saver for artificial insemination companies.

Speaker 4 They can cull males whose genomes don't look good at under a year old, rather than having to spend money for food and housing until the bulls are five and can reproduce.

Speaker 11 In a weird way, it's like plant research. With genetic markers, we don't have to grow a full corn plant to know what it's going to be like.

Speaker 11 That technique has become really important in agricultural research. But applied to cattle, it's efficient, sure, but it's also kind of disturbing.

Speaker 23 Yeah, kind of like a Gattaca thing where there's this genetically inferior underclass that gets cold.

Speaker 25 And you know the weirdest thing about it is that in some ways with these genomic bulls, we're just getting further and further away from seeing them as an animal, which brings us back to the difficulty of treating animals well when we're seeing them as numbers on a spreadsheet rather than living, breathing creatures.

Speaker 11 It reminds me, you know, Alexis got into this story because of the funny names and the whole idea of this fast-paced bull semen market and so on.

Speaker 11 But he ended up finding the story about Badger Bluff Fanny Freddie kind of sad.

Speaker 6 He's been dematerialized completely. Like he is more than any other creature in the world perhaps.
He is his genetic material. Like, that's what he is.

Speaker 6 And he produces it in his testicles, and then somebody extracts it and starts sending it around the country. But he himself, like the bull himself, like, no one cares.
There's no pictures of him.

Speaker 6 There's no like sweet stories. It's just like he is his semen.
And his semen is the thing that is famous. His semen is the thing that's really worth a lot.

Speaker 6 But as long as he's still alive and producing it, like no one cares where his body is.

Speaker 6 It's kind of, you know, in some like awesome 1960s like proto-cyber feminist manifesto, like it's actually kind of an awesome model, I think, in that

Speaker 6 line of thinking for the future role of men in the world. But I found it a little bit sad because you realize that...

Speaker 5 Well, you're a man.

Speaker 6 Well, yeah, I'm a man.

Speaker 5 I am more than my seaman, Nicola Twilly.

Speaker 5 Good to know.

Speaker 6 I think.

Speaker 6 And yeah, and

Speaker 6 he's going to be replaced by the next

Speaker 6 model. As soon as he starts to fall down, you know, the Excel spreadsheet rankings, like, no one will care about him anymore.
His, like, semen won't be as valuable.

Speaker 6 And, like, that'll be the end, you know? And it just, it really reminds you, like, these animals are on a plan of planned obsolescence. And, you know, maybe that's okay.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's certainly probably a better life than many other factory animals. But, like, there's something about like, he's the best.
Like, shouldn't we know him better somehow?

Speaker 11 Now we kind of do know him better, at least a little.

Speaker 15 Thanks this week to Alexis Magical, former senior editor at The Atlantic, where he wrote The Perfect Milk Machine.

Speaker 15 There's a link on our site to that story and to his new projects at cable news company Fusion.

Speaker 11 And thanks to Michael Moss, he spent a year reporting on the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center for the New York Times.
You should definitely read it. We have a link on our website.

Speaker 15 Thanks also to Heather Hewson, who explained the basics of genomic breeding to me and gave me a tour of her lab and the Cornell University Dairy Herd.

Speaker 10 She is doing some really, really awesome research there. And to Gabe Rosenberg at Duke University.

Speaker 7 His first book, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, is out this year.

Speaker 31 You'll have to wait a little bit longer for his next book on eugenics, cattle breeding, and the bull trials of the 1920s.

Speaker 11 Till next time.

Speaker 19 Oh, look at that guy.

Speaker 37 You can tell these guys are fairly well socialized.

Speaker 37 Oh,

Speaker 18 They're all coming over to say hello. I love it.

Speaker 18 This 1206 wants to be a radio star.

Speaker 28 I think so. I think so.

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