new purpose for roadkill: convert them to chicken eggs with the healp of maggots

[paul wheaton]

http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/0/RXWbBC1kQ24

[Wouter Oet]

Nice. Creative way to produce chicken food.

[Paul Anilprem]

This is interesting. I saw the video as well. I have one question though: What are the implications of this approach on diseases passed from species to species? If there are any bad consequences, how can those be mitigated?

My concern stems from what I have read about feeding dead animals back to animals. For example, dead chicken being fed to pigs and dead pigs recirculated into chicken feed. I remember reading that this closed loop practice has been banned in the US.

[paul wheaton]

Chickens and pigs are omnivores.

Half of a chicken's diet is bugs. Chickens will also eat worms, slugs, snails, snakes, mice and all sorts of other critters. Pigs will eat all of that, plus bigger game. So all of the cross-species concerns would apply there too - yet it is their natural diet.

Suppose you eat a steak. And you have another steak and feed it to the chickens or the pigs. Would there be concern with that?

I once asked this very question of Joel Salatin, and he said there would be no problem with it.

[Steve Luke]

paul wheaton wrote:Chickens and pigs are omnivores.

Half of a chicken's diet is bugs. Chickens will also eat worms, slugs, snails, snakes, mice and all sorts of other critters. Pigs will eat all of that, plus bigger game. So all of the cross-species concerns would apply there too - yet it is their natural diet.

Suppose you eat a steak. And you have another steak and feed it to the chickens or the pigs. Would there be concern with that?

I once asked this very question of Joel Salatin, and he said there would be no problem with it.

I think Paul A's question is interesting, but I don't think this is really the answer. You are talking about convergence of diet - you eat steaks, pigs eat steaks, is there an issue if you eat pig which eat steaks. I think Paul A is asking about Chicken eats Pig, Pig eats Chicken who ate Pig, Chicken eats Pig who ate Chicken who ate Pig, etc... Does this cause an issue with nutritional loss and more importantly disease spread. And more specifically, in this case are you concentrating disease agents in the Chickens which may then end up as food for the Pig - disease agents which may not affect Chickens because they target mammals for example...

[paul wheaton]

I got the question. And the answer could fill a sizable book and still be incomplete.

The short answer is that pigs will kill and eat pigs; and chickens will kill and eat chickens: which has much more danger of carrying over diseases. The risk of food-borne disease always exists, no matter what the food source. Then it becomes a matter of very complicated probability resting on the shoulders of dozens/hundreds of mitigating factors.

The maggots will be basking in rotten yuck - but they are very good at sterilizing stuff by preferring to eat the rotten yuck. And then they even eat rotten yuck off each other - so they, themselves, end up cleaner. But never perfect.

And then the general health of the chickens comes into play - if they are strong and healthy, they could probably eat the rotten yuck directly and be fine. Some people do exactly this. So, this technique is an improvement. If they are already sickly, then this could make them sicker.

It is a good question, and I can offer nothing more than a feeble answer in a forum post.

[Paul Anilprem]

paul wheaton wrote:Chickens and pigs are omnivores.
Half of a chicken's diet is bugs. Chickens will also eat worms, slugs, snails, snakes, mice and all sorts of other critters. Pigs will eat all of that, plus bigger game. So all of the cross-species concerns would apply there too - yet it is their natural diet.

Yes, and so are Humans. But does that mean recycling dead humans into human feed would be a good idea?
Please don't get me wrong. To me, this approach of turning dead critters into worms, sounds really good, ecologically as well as economically. I just hope we are not overdoing it. I guess recylcing dead stray animals this way is ok but I am not so sure about recycling dead chicken, pig, or cattle.

paul wheaton wrote:
Suppose you eat a steak. And you have another steak and feed it to the chickens or the pigs. Would there be concern with that?

This is what I gathered from the book Fast Food Nation: After the Mad cow scare, US FDA banned the practice of using dead cows in pig/poultry feed, though it allows using dead pigs and poultry in cattle feed. FDA has also banned the use of brain, spinal cord material and other high risk tissues from any form of animal feed including chicken feed.

I imagine that there would have been a lot of pressure/lobbying from Big Food against this ban. If FDA still managed to go through with this then there must have been serious issues with this practice, which would have been hard to ignore.

In general though, I love permies.com and I hope to get an opportunity to apply someday whatever I learn from here to my farm in India

[paul wheaton]

But does that mean recycling dead humans into cattle feed would be a good idea?

Why would anybody ever do that? Cattle are herbivores. That's just plain wrong.

I didn't even read any of your post past this statement.

[Paul Anilprem]

paul wheaton wrote:

But does that mean recycling dead humans into cattle feed would be a good idea?

Why would anybody ever do that? Cattle are herbivores. That's just plain wrong.

I didn't even read any of your post past this statement.

Post updated.

[paul wheaton]

Soilent green?

[fred rosenberger]

IT'S PEOPLE!!!

[Henry Wong]

On the subject of the practice of cannibalism, cannibals don't exist anymore. And they don't exist because nature killed them off. One or two may still exist, but they are, of course, statistical outlyers.

Maggots have been eating rotting meat, since there were maggots. The same is true with chickens eating insects. If these were a unnatural practices, shouldn't nature have killed off chickens or maggots off by now?

Henry

[Frank Silbermann]

Henry Wong wrote:


On the subject of the practice of cannibalism, cannibals don't exist anymore. And they don't exist because nature killed them off. One or two may still exist, but they are, of course, statistical outlyers.

One or two cannibals, or one or two cannibal societies? I believe their are still cannibal societies in the jungles of Indonesia and Brazil.

Cannabalism is quite common during severe famines. I remember reading in a recent magazine (maybe "Dicsovery") about whaling;, due to the growing shortage of whales in the early-middle 1800s an English whaling ship had to travel all the way to the Pacific Ocean to find them. There was an episode in which a large whale in the middle of the Pacific attacked the ship and sunk it (which gave Herman Melville the idea behind the novel _Mobey Dick_). Anyway, the sailors in a lifeboat chose not to row for the nearest island (maybe 500 miles away) because of the fear they'd be eaten by cannibals, so they rowed for a more distant target that was safer. They were in that boat for months before they were rescued by a passing ship. In the meantime, they themselves became cannibals. First they ate the crew members who died naturally, but eventually that had to occasionally draw straws to see who would be killed and eaten. (According to one survivor, the first time that happened it was his nephew who drew the short straw. He told his nephew, "You don't have to accept this; I'll fight for you if wish," but the suffering was so bad that the youth replied, "No, I like my lot as well as any other." So one of the other sailors shot him in the head, and they all began eating.)

Anyway, when severe famines come with regularity, I suppose people can become use to cannibalism and even grow to prefer it.

There are always certain parasites designed to pass from prey to predator, but I suspect it is easier for such diseases to develop when the prey and predator are evolutionarily close. That's why cannibalism is much more dangerous than eating cattle, and why eating carnivores is much more dangerous than eating herbivores (or carnivores that eat only fish or insects). That could be one reason that, the few species aside from fish that Orthodox Jews eat are all herbivores (if you don't count the insects that chickens eat as meat).

As for the danger of chickens that eat maggots that eat roadkill (e.g. chickens), I think that's a lot safer than chickens eating chickens. The maggots actually serve as an obtacle and filter to the diseases that affect chickens. Maybe it's not as effective a filter as feeding the roadkill as fertilzer to corn, and having the chickens eat the corn, but it's probably more efficient.