1 64 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



consume, digest, and turn into meat. The animal is, from this 

 point of view, a machine for converting inedible waste products 

 into excellent food. To be sure, the main purpose of such a 

 machine may be to turn these waste products into milk, or, 

 when fed to fowl, into eggs ; but even the production of milk 

 and eggs requires the maturing of the bodies of the animals 

 and the fowls, and it is economical to utilize these bodies as 

 food rather than to allow them to go to waste. This applies 

 also to the production of mutton as a by-product of wool pro- 

 duction. Where the prejudice against horseflesh does not exist, 

 it applies equally well to that form of food wherever horses are 

 needed as draft animals. 



Another interesting bit of bucolic intelligence, emanating, 

 however, from urban minds, is the argument that if calves 

 were not killed as veal but allowed to grow to mature beefhood, 

 there would be a great deal more food. This doctrine has 

 actually been soberly promulgated on the floor of our national 

 Congress, and has been further expanded by certain sapient 

 editors of metropolitan newspapers. It is like saying that if 

 builders would never stop work on any building until it was 

 twenty stories high, we should have a great deal more house- 

 room. It is obviously true that if every calf born were to grow 

 to weigh a ton before he was slaughtered, he would yield more 

 food than if he were slaughtered when he weighed only 200 

 pounds. If he could draw his sustenance from interstellar space 

 while he was growing to such a desirable size, it would doubt- 

 less be economical to let him grow as big as he could ; but 

 since he has to get his sustenance from the land; and since the 

 older he grows the more food it takes to add a pound to his 

 weight, it is obviously uneconomical to keep him any longer 

 than necessary to bring him to a condition to satisfy consumers. 

 As a matter of fact, a given amount of land and labor will pro- 

 duce more food in the form of veal than in the form of beef. 



