Tuesday 21 June 2011

Threat Down: Moo-shu Man Milk?

At our home Dad's favorite morning "news" source comes through a show called The Colbert Report. It is an interesting show to say the least. Usually I find the show a bit ridiculous but when I seen a taped episode today something caught my attention on the threat down..... Moo-shu Man Milk!!!

Moo-shu Man Milk?!?!?!? I thought, what the heck is that!! It is milk made from implanting the human breast milk gene into cows so they give different milk. Chinese scientist have created it in attempts to find better ways to feed our growing world population.

I definitely understood what was happening but I didn't really understand why so like always I asked and did some research. Dad used an analogy that I could understand easily that I will share with you. In the dairy the calves are taken away from their moms at birth so that their mothers can go immediately into production towards the farm. We milk out the mothers for the first time and feed the calves their moms milk because it is a special type of milk called colostrum. Colostrum is necessary for the calf to receive in the first 24 hours because it is packed full of antibodies that will help the calves fight away diseases such as scours. Some farms however use an artificially made milk called milk replacer, which can get the job done but isn't ideal. Breast milk for human babies is believed to be similar in quality as colostrum verse milk replacer (or baby formula for humans!). Since it is a new project there isn't much tested for benefits verse downfalls and little is known about the process. I also find it interesting that Canadians are not allowed to test these practices where the Chinese do it freely, morals come into question of course and it is hard to know where to draw the line. What do you think about this?

On a side note this is what my Dad thinks: "It's cool that they have made this accomplishment but if I was to make a genetically modified Holstein and bred her and everything else I would have, at sometime, dehorned her before the video!"  haha got to love Dad!

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