chicken feed / wheat _Totally_ off topic

[Susan Kline]

At 05:05 PM 06/15/2000 +0000, you wrote:
>This is a wonderfully weird thread.
>
>You know, I heard that somewhere, chicken were being fed ground animal 
>remains and that in about 50 generations they would become meat- eating.
>
>Kristinn

This is, truly, a weird and wonderful thread. Chickens already eat animal 
protein in nature, because they peck at lots of bugs, if given the chance. 
The idea that they will change that quickly seems sort of like Lysenko's 
theories to me. (This is not a good thing to say about a theory.)

On the other hand, it is a terrible mistake to feed animal remains to 
ruminants, like goats, cattle, etc. It should not have taken mad cow 
disease to show this to farmers. When animals have lived solely on 
vegetation for as long as cows have, they have lost the adaptations to 
resist meat-born diseases and parasites. Humans, on the other hand, have 
not. In fact, I've recently been reading that one cause of our many health 
problems late in life is that we now don't usually carry the parasites we 
were evolved to coexist with, so we collect and store more iron than we 
should. Usually the germs and worms stole some iron from us. So, give blood 
to the Red Cross! They'll give you a sticker saying that people should be 
nice to you.

Off-topic frolics .... thanks, fun list.

Susan