The Complete Daily Cow

Anth 68
Day 14
Velten 2007 Chapter 4-6 Velton describes the impact that humans have implemented on the bull and the cow, both positive and negative. Humans started by creating the plough using the ox; we first started out by attaching ropes to the horn and then used their whole body for increased effectiveness. Cattle was also used to pull carts and as a mode of transportation. Cows were manipulated into giving milk by creating an illusion that her calf was near. These are only the beginnings of human’s manipulation of these species.
Humans played a huge role in forced breading to create a “perfect offspring” that would fulfill meat requirements. For example Robert Bakewell took the traditional white-backed, long-horned animals and selectively in-bred it for characteristics he wanted and created the improved Longhorn or New Leicester cattle breed. In the mid 1800s cattle were fatten to gigantic sizes that stood 6ft 4in tall and weighed about 5,000 pounds. These cows were so big that their feet could barely hold up their body.
As time progressed the human treatment of cows became worse. Fast food industries have endured much pain on the cow and have driven them past their limits. Companies have forced the dairy cows to make ten times the quantity of milk she would normally produce for her offspring. Humans have also affected million of cows by feeding them rotten sheep carcass which lead to mad cow disease, affecting over 500,000 cows.
Humans are now trying to preserve the rights of cows and have also started connecting the term cattle with slaves and “equating abused cow with an abused person,” trying convey a “moral message about social injustice and dehumanizing effect of cattle production” (Velton 177).
Chapter 3: Big Game Hunting in Human Evolution: The Traditional View
In chapter 3 of his book The Paleoanthropology and Archeology of Big-Game Hunting, Speth tries to map the progression of human evolution by examining the impact of hunting and meat eating on humans. The evolution of humans has struck much debate amongst anthropologists, for example Steph talks about the hunting-scavenging debate. It states that human started to put more concern with meat from bigger animals as humans ourselves became bigger; in addition, it also states that these animals were scavenged rather than hunted. Steph supports his assertion that human showed a specific interest on larger animals through archaeology findings: cut marked and humanly broken animal bones, which provided the direct evidence.
Steph also provides information of the commonly misled presumption that bipedalism developed in the Plio-Pleistocene; rather it developed in the early Pliocene or even the late Miocene. He further states that the first steps of bipedalism were not taken in the savannas but in woodlands and forest where game was scarce and animals could not possibly be the reason for bipedalism.
Another theory that Steph addresses is the reason why the brain of contemporary human is much larger than other primates and non-primates mammals. He states that the reason for this is because of our smaller digestive tract, which he presumes to be caused by increase in overall diet quality. An increase in diet quality also has resulted in a decline in gut size, and Steph attributes the increase in diet quality resulted from improved cooking and “these key shifts in hominin lifeways gave rise to our evolutionary lineage” (Steph 43).