The reason I no longer eat veal has, sadly enough, nothing (well, at least not much) to do with the cruelty involved in raising the calves. It has everything to do with being unable to stomach the sheer grossness that is a veal calf. And for someone who has been an EMT for a long time, and has chopped up road killed animals to feed to wolves bare handed, that’s saying a lot.
When I worked at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana, most of the food for the wolves came from road-killed deer, but we were also frequently called by farmers who had lost livestock and wanted us to dispose of it. Some of our most frequent fliers were veal farmers. For our main pack, there was no problem; we’d just haul an entire carcass into the enclosure and let them go at it. However, we also had several wolves who had been chased out of the pack at some point and were living in enclosures by themselves or in small groups. For them, a whole carcass was too much to eat at one time, so we had to section them up before feeding. I became expert at quickly disemboweling and quartering deer, goats and calves (we usually tried to stay away from sheep, because the wolves would have a field day with the wool and the entire place wound up looking like a snowstorm had struck). Oh, just as a side note, our wolves refused to eat pigs – so much for fairy tales…
Whenever we got veal calves, we could always tell by the smell. There is something about a baby cow that has been fed only formula laced with antibiotics and hormones that smells wrong. Every veal calf that I ever sectioned had huge hairballs in their stomach from obsessive licking (I guess they get very bored). They also, without fail, had HUGE collections of pus around their joints – perhaps from the steroid/antibiotic combinations, who knows. But every time I disjointed a hip, there was a gush of pus.
I guess the reason I no longer eat veal is that I can’t stomach the idea of eating muscle that has been basically soaking in purulent fluids – not to mention the thought of what weird antibiotic-resistant bugs may have grown in my tasty meat dish – perhaps to be killed by cooking, perhaps not.
Anyway, there you go. More than you ever wanted to know about veal calves, I’m sure...