Were I given to conspiracy theories I would conclude that there must be a shady animal rights group conducting the online campaign against Bovaer, an additive being fed to cattle in an effort to cut methane emissions from their burping and farting. They are certainly playing into the hands of extremist vegans who want to stop the world consuming meat and other animal products.
Veganism is an extreme, hairshirt solution to a problem which can be addressed in other means
Bovaer, according to the people who have been filming themselves pouring milk down the toilet, is going to give us all cancer. They cite out-of-context advice from the US Food and Drink Administration (FDA) which warns that 3-nitrooxypropanol – one of the ingredients of Bovaer – should be handled with gloves because it can irritate the skin and eyes and harm the male reproductive organs at higher doses.
You could equally well quote advice on the handling of citric acid – a common food additive and natural ingredient of citrus fruits but which can also cause serious irritation to the hands and eyes if mishandled in food factories – and use it as a pretext for chucking half the contents of your fridge into the skip, along with emptying your fruit bowl of oranges and grapefruit. There is a difference, though: in the case of Bovaer, no human is going to be consuming it. It is only going to be given to farm animals who themselves break it down completely in their stomachs, so there is nothing left by the time you are slurping your milk and corn flakes.
But even if you did consume Bovaer in the sorts of concentrations that is being fed to cows there is no evidence that it would give you cancer. The anti-Bovaer brigade likes to quote a study which found that four out of 49 laboratory rats who were fed the substance went on to develop (non-benign) tumours. A reassessment of the evidence concludes that actually it was only three of the rats, and that this wasn’t a significant proportion in any case. Numerous other studies – the Food Standards Agency (FSA) says it has assessed 58 – has cleared Bovaer of the potential to cause harm to humans.
Nor, by the way, does Bill Gates have anything to do with Bovaer. This is in spite of being accused by online loons of subsidising as part of his all-encompassing mission to reduce the human population – though he has backed an alternative additive for reducing methane emissions from farm animals.
When it comes to reducing methane, Bovaer has shown itself to be reasonably efficacious. One study showed that it reduced methane emissions by 21 per cent when fed to cattle over 15 weeks, another by 35 per cent. That still leaves some way to go, but it takes a large bite out of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions which the vegan lobby has been using as a pretext for telling us that we need to stop eating meat if we want to save the planet.
Even disregarding global warming, methane is a pollutant which we would be far better off controlling. But to advocate veganism is an extreme, hairshirt solution to a problem which can be addressed in other means. Bovaer and other food additives – adding plain seaweed to food could also be effective according to a University of California study – are not the only possible solutions. We could also potentially capture methane from animals bred indoors and use it as a fuel. Tractor manufacturer New Holland has already produced a machine which can run on methane produced on farms.
But if you are going to trample on innovations like Bovaer you are merely handing the initiative to the vegans who would love to have us eating nothing but beansprouts. The conspiracy theorists should put away their Bovaer boots and welcome the technology.
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