No Scrubs: Breeding a Better Bull

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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.

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.

Like it's just like the strangest combination.

And yet of every single bull in the entire United States, like this was the guy.

That was journalist Alexis Madrigal.

And he was introducing us to Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy, the most valuable bull in America.

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

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.

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

So consider this a trigger warning of sorts.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Sure, why not?

It's a little easier.

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.

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

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

It's not up for debate.

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

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.

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

And he's hot.

That's true.

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

He was the most valuable bull in America.

And this is a quantifiable, measurable thing.

It's not some kind of critics pick.

There's an algorithm.

Badger Bluff Fanny Freddy is a breeding bull,

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.

And they call this thing lifetime net merit.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

outputs that you might want from a father, basically.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

Semen strategies.

Now there is a phrase.

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

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

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.

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.

So, you know, what traits do you want?

You select and breed those animals.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

True, true.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

history: the rise of eugenics.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

placed before the court.

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

That was Gabe Rosenberg.

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.

Simultaneous to this, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture initiates a program called the

Better Sires for Better Stock program.

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.

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,

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

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

And then at the end of which he is usually found guilty and executed.

And then there is barbecue is served.

I cannot believe this actually happened.

I know.

I genuinely could not believe it either.

The lawyers actually bother making the case for the prosecution and the defense?

I mean, what might one say in defense of this

cow's right to reproduce?

I mean,

how would you make that argument?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

not putting up a robust defense of the scrub sire.

A defense, like with the real defense lawyer.

And so the bull is almost a person?

Yes, and that is the crazy thing.

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

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

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

I am sorry, this is batshit crazy.

So these trials went on for more than a decade.

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.

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

Here's how it's supposed to start.

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

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

Bovine Justice?

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.

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

I am not kidding.

Listeners, we have the documents online.

You can check check it out for yourself.

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

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

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

cattle genetics here.

They're talking about, you know...

What is the power of inheritance?

And how can we know it?

How can we judge it?

And

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.

These are really

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

cheap meat, to put it that way.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Alexis describes this one bull in particular.

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.

2 million great-granddaughters.

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

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

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

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

Side note, they actually came up with three scores.

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

Love it.

More cheese.

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

Me too.

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

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

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.

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.

That is true.

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.

And we want to include your cheese stories.

Favorite cheese, cheesiest dishes, cheese loves, cheese phobias.

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

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.

As usual, we want to hear from you.

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

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

Oh, it's increased the actual production exponentially.

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%.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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%

give or take of the genome is autozygous.

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

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.

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

It's like your whole attitude changes.

It's like the cows aren't animals, they're objects.

They can be perfected based on what we want from them.

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

And that leads into some very disturbing science.

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.

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.

Meat Animal Research Center.

It's in Nebraska, and it's been around since 1964.

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

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.

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

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.

What happened with that?

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But, Nikki, the project still went on for decades.

I have to add a note here.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Right.

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.

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

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.

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

disassociated themselves from the animals in the welfare question.

question.

I mean, they would insist that they did care about the animals,

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Because there are really strict regulations around animal welfare.

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

So the rules just didn't apply to them.

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.

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

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

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.

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%.

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.

Exactly.

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.

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

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

And she has an awesome goat breeding project in Africa.

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

Because that's who mostly takes care of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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,

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

Since I spoke to Michael, there's even more news.

A bipartisan group in Congress has already introduced new legislation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

sorry, geez, there were other bulls

that

had much

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

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.

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

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

the bull semen.

Well, Alexis, I don't know.

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

No.

So I was doing some research, and

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

That technique has become really important in agricultural research.

But applied to cattle, it's efficient, sure, but it's also kind of disturbing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

line of thinking for the future role of men in the world.

But I found it a little bit sad because you realize that...

Well, you're a man.

Well, yeah, I'm a man.

I am more than my seaman, Nicola Twilly.

Good to know.

I think.

And yeah, and

he's going to be replaced by the next

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

She is doing some really, really awesome research there.

And to Gabe Rosenberg at Duke University.

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

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

Till next time.

Oh, look at that guy.

You can tell these guys are fairly well socialized.

Oh,

They're all coming over to say hello.

I love it.

This 1206 wants to be a radio star.

I think so.

I think so.

You're basking on a beach in the Bahamas.

Now you're journeying through the jade forests of Japan.

Now you're there for your alma mater's epic win.

And now you're awake.

Womp, womp.

Which means it was all a dream.

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