Moose Club report 2014

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach him to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. -Chinese Proverb   

 “Oooh gross!” she said.  

    “No, no, no, you can’t use the ‘G word in here.”  I said.   It was a SuValley Moose Club session.  This was our second moose of the year and thirteenth overall since we started three years ago.   

    There were five kids working today.  The six of us had made arrangements to stay after school to volunteer our time butchering a roadkill moose.  Some of the meat would be donated to charity, some would go to the kids that were helping, and some would go to the school for special events like a chili feed for open-house, taco night for visiting basketball teams,  and meat for the culinary arts program.

   The little girl was thirteen years old and was standing in front of a huge chunk of moose flesh that weighed over half her bodyweight.  There was a small pool of blood on the table with a few blood clots from where the moose had been hit.

   “Is this okay?”  She said.  She was stuck on a questionable piece.

   “Not quite, remove all that hair and if you turn your knife-blade flat you can cut that blood right off.”  I reached over and demonstrated how to trim it.

    “Do you know what is really gross?” I asked the group.  I didn’t pause too long for a response.  Who knows what they would have come up with with such a baited question.  I had already endured conversations of alien-bow hunting, cannibalism, and the culinary delicacies of ostrich and alligator meat.  Who knew how cultured and diverse junior high students’ conversations could be?  I figured that just maybe, it was time for me to steer the conversation a bit as we hacked away.   My crew was as green as grass and I realized that it was up to me to shed light upon their understanding of the bigger picture.

    “If you knew how beef is produced you might re-think your definition of gross.  Most commercial beef is produced in large factories called AFOs where cows are fed food they weren’t meant to eat; namely corn.  Since their guts were never meant to digest corn they become prone to infections.  As a fix, they are fed antibiotics to ward-off infection and to fatten them up for the slaughter.  In the meantime they are often ankle deep in their own manure and penned in enclosures barely large enough to hold them.   Our moose here, on the other hand, has been grazing on willow bushes its whole life and is a lean healthy and cheap alternative to beef.”  

    “My mom just got off the anti-bionics.”  

     “My dog ate his own manure once.”

    “I never eat beef ramen, I like the chicken.”

    I quickly realized that I had a long way to go with this group.  That’s okay, I was whittling them down.  Eventually they would see the light through the foggy existence of adolescence.    

   The AFO or animal feed operation and its big brother the CAFO, concentrated animal feed operations are an interesting manifestation of America's insatiable need for cheap meat.  It is estimated that over fifty percent of all U.S. produced beef comes from these mega factories. An exact number is hard to pin down because those who own and operate these CAFO's aren't exactly advertising their existance and would be quite happy for their CAFO meat to keep its low profile. It's all quite secretive. The most recent example of the beef industries lack of transparency is called the Farmer's Privacy Act of 2012 which, if passed by congress, would disallow the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from flying over to check on CAFO's. The term mystery meat comes to mind.
According to the EPA, on its website, AFOs are agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations. AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure, urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.

    To meet the definition of an AFO animals must be confined for at least 45 days in a 12-month period, where's there is no grass or other vegetation in the confinement area during the normal growing season.

  Let’s see, no grass or vegetation, just urine, manure, and dead animals. Sounds delicious.  What about the issue of antibiotics?  I found this on the Union of Concerned Scientists webpage:

“...While some uses of antibiotics in livestock operations are a matter of animal health, other uses have an economic motive. Especially troubling is their use not to cure sick animals but to promote "feed efficiency," that is, to increase the animal's weight gain per unit of feed.  These drugs are also regularly added to the feed and water of animals that are not sick in order to prevent diseases caused by overcrowded and unsanitary CAFO conditions. These nontherapeutic uses translate into relatively cheap meat prices at the grocery store.”

    Additionally in a thesis called Understanding CAFOs and Their Impact on Communities, author Carrie Hribar MA writes this:

  “There is strong evidence that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is contributing to an increase in antibiotic-resistant microbes and causing antibiotics to be less effective for humans.  Resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria in animals, which can be transferred to humans through the handling or eating of meat, have increased recently. This is a serious threat to human health because fewer options exist to help people overcome disease when infected with antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The antibiotics often are not fully metabolized by animals, and can be present in their manure. If manure pollutes a water supply, antibiotics can also leach into groundwater or surface water.”

CAFO cows grazing

    Unlike the secretive process of making beef, the production of moose meat is quite plain. I don’t need to do any research to find out what’s in my moose meat. I am part of the entire process post-mortem and I know the moose’s diet. There are no questions left unanswered.  No mad moose disease, no antibiotics, no pink slime, no salmonella, no campylobacter, no E-coli. Just moose.

Moose grazing

     The more I learn about mass production of meat in the U.S. the more I value what we have right here in our own backyard.  We are so fortunate to have access to such healthy untainted food sources.  From the wild salmon rich in omega 3 fatty acids to the antioxidant rich berries and all the abundant lean wild game, we are truly surrounded by some of the healthiest food sources in the world.  It’s tasty too.  

    For those willing to learn the skills involved in the harvest and who aren’t afraid of the hard work involved the abundance of the land is a true windfall.  The students that have been working in the Moose Club are in the process of gaining some of these valuable skills and will hopefully have the confidence to someday do this on their own, for the benefit of their own.  

       Work was slowing.  The kids were spinning tangents again;  Zombie warfare, drunken uncles, tidal waves.  There was a sense of one-ups-manship going on. “Ok guys” I had to step in again.  “ Let’s not forget the Moose Club motto;  If you can’t talk and work, then just work.”  several of them refocused and got back to the work at hand.  We had to finish this last hind-quarter before we could quit.  There was a lot of work left to be done and it was up to me to keep them on-task.  I wanted them to learn as much as possible about the process but one thing I knew for sure: When the dust settled and kids had all been swept away with their rides home, I didn’t want to be the lone soldier left standing there to finish up and clean.

      

     SuValley's Moose Club would not have been possible without the generous startup support from the community councils of both Talkeetna and Sunshine along with many other private donations including an annual one from the Talkeetna Bachelors Society. Moose Club is alive and well.  My partner Bryan Kirby and I wait by the phone with baited anticipation for the next midnight call.  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but we’ll go get it anyway and do it all over again.

Gross? You decide. Check out our sweet trailer set-up.  We winch the moose onto the black sled then right up onto the tilt trailer.  Thanks to the Talkeetna Bachelors Society we now have awesome new LED rechargable road flares for safety.