It’s not so hard to turn humans into living vegetables. Some sorts of head trauma seem to do it. How hard can it be to make that reliable (or at least reasonably reliable) for cows?
Probably not that hard. Doing it without ruining the meat or at least reducing yields sounds harder to me, though—muscles atrophy if they don’t get used, and they don’t get used if nothing’s giving them commands. I’d also expect force-feeding a braindead animal to be more expensive and probably more conducive to health problems than letting it feed itself.
To continue the ‘living vegetables’ approach, one could point out that to keep a human in a coma alive and (somewhat) well will cost you somewhere from $500-$3k+. Per day.
Even assuming that animals are much cheaper by taking the bottom of the range and then cutting it by an entire order of magnitude, the 1.5-3 year aging of standard cattles being butchered means 50 1.5 365 = >$27.4k extra expenses.
Probably not that hard. Doing it without ruining the meat or at least reducing yields sounds harder to me, though—muscles atrophy if they don’t get used, and they don’t get used if nothing’s giving them commands. I’d also expect force-feeding a braindead animal to be more expensive and probably more conducive to health problems than letting it feed itself.
To continue the ‘living vegetables’ approach, one could point out that to keep a human in a coma alive and (somewhat) well will cost you somewhere from $500-$3k+. Per day.
Even assuming that animals are much cheaper by taking the bottom of the range and then cutting it by an entire order of magnitude, the 1.5-3 year aging of standard cattles being butchered means 50 1.5 365 = >$27.4k extra expenses.
That’s some expensive meat.