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We also had to kill same with squirrels, which destroyed the hay stacks and silage pits, and jack rabbits, which carried diseases, when there were too many of them. Back in the 1960's, life on the Nelson farm centered around cattle, and to a lesser degree sheep, and pigs. Because of the cattle feedlot and the meat packing plant I learned about anthrax four decades before the terrorist scares of 2001.3.173
In the center of the farm was the Nelson Meat Packing Plant. Dad started the slaughterhouse prior to World War II. Sometimes Nelson Meat Packing plant was the only commercial source of fresh meat between Las Vegas, Nevada and Provo, Utah. At age 12 it became my summer job to drive the cattle up the killing chute, and to shoot them in the back of the head with a 22-long rifle. I recall how hard it was to shoot a steer whose mother had died and which I raised with a milk bottle and rode around the feed yard when it was growing up. During the summers I was responsible for using an electric skinner to cut the hides off of the 18-24 cattle which were killed each Monday through Wednesday. I learned a lot about biological systems looking at the insides of cattle, sheep, and pigs. It was a great resource for science projects at school, like dissecting and labeling and storing a cow heart in formaldehyde. Calculations show during my seven summers of working at the Nelson Meat Packing plant I killed somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 cattle. Rounding off the numbers, and assuming an average of 500 pounds of meat came from each of these animals, implies I helped provide 750,000 to 1,000,000 pounds of meat to folks in Southern Utah between 1962 and 1969. Eating seems the ultimate way in which biological systems are acted upon.
Over the last few years, as part of my struggle to keep my weight under control, and because I like to count things (probably from counting cattle as a youth), I have kept a daily log of how many swallows of 7 general categories of food I eat each day. The following table is derived by summing the swallows from 01 Jan 2001 to 31 Dec 2005:
|
| Water | Fruits |
Vegetables | Protein |
Dairy | Breads & Starches |
Sugar | TOTAL |
| 40,909 lb. | 29,006 lb. |
24,520 lb. | 24,525 lb. |
20,667 lb. | 52,841 lb. |
20,050 lb. | 212,518 lb. |
| (((25 swallows/pound)/(5 years))/(365.25 days/year))*(16 ounces/pound) implies ounces/day below: |
| 14.34 oz. | 10.17 oz. |
8.59 oz. | 8.59 oz. |
7.24 oz. | 18.52 oz. |
7.03 oz. | 74.48 oz. |
| Or (assuming I eat half as much ages 1-15 and 65-80) pounds eaten during an 80 year life, below: |
| 21,273 lb. | 15,083 lb. |
12,750 lb. | 12,753 lb. |
10,747 lb. | 27,477 lb. |
10,426 lb. | 110,509 lb. |
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paradoxes