bulltox

or second title suggestion : udder implants [both provided by marty when told the following true story]

i heard the most insane story today while working on my thesis project in ag. i spent the day in hill city trying to video tape a workshop in front of 4th graders. learned a lot and most likely won't be able to use much of today for my actual project. first major life lesson i learned: get release forms in advance. second: fourth graders are hard to film. one boy was reading his paragraph in front of the camera, stopped suddenly and ran to the bathroom. also held the page directly in front of his face the entire time. while the other four next to him stare off in the distance, jump randomly, etc.
third lesson: people don't understand clearly the height of their backs when ducking. i haven't counted, as i had to leave the video tape at the school until releases where secured, but i'm estimating about 7 times people attempted to duck and walk in front of my camera and entirely blocked my shot anyway. really can get frustrating time after time.

i attended the workshop with the women presenting and we talked alot on the way back. [it was 3 hours each way] this story came up and i was particularly disturbed by it....

there is an activity in 4-H where rural youth buy a baby sheep/ cow/ other animal of their choice to raise it. they buy the feed and take care of it. the goal is to learn what it takes to make a farm work through the process. then the kids show their animal in a competition and first prize wins a blue ribbon...and more! ideally the kid who took the best care of their animal wins.

the prizes have increased significantly from the traditional blue ribbon. first prize wins a large sum of money [ballpark $5000] and gets to drive a new truck + four wheeler for 1 year. also, they can end up selling their animal which results in more money because of its new value from winning the competition. so all of this competition has led to some heavy cheating in ways i never would have guessed. maybe that was naive of me...you be the judge.

youth have turned to surgically altering their animals to win. not everyone does this, and no i don't have any facts or newslinks to back this up. just the conversation that comes from 6 hours in the car.

one example, i was told, is that on a cow, the lower part of the back gives the nicest cuts of meat. a leaner back = better meat = higher worth of cow. so people are surgically removing vertebrae to create the illusion of a longer back. i'm not sure if that is correct anatomically, but you get the general point of the goals. not everyone is doing this, but some are [more than one = crazy pills to me]. the person i was with said she began to speak against this and the result was that people told her to stop and that she wasn't supporting the community.

thoughts? am i the only one who thinks this is the wierdest story i've heard in a long time? i realize that genetics are used in ag all of the time to alter something, but cosmetic surgery is altering something based on illusion. genetics create what wasn't there, this creates the illusion of it.