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Have you talked to an Indian dairy farmer before? I know a small-scale dairy farmer here in Ireland that would be loth to eat his own cattle, even though there's no taboo on beef here.
For OP it's like growing up on a stud farm and then eating horse.
What did they do with bull calves?
My grandparents owned a work horse, treated it like a tool, and when it got too old, they sold it for meat (which was apparently exported, because nobody ate horse meat in the old country, but they had no trouble with others doing so).
Horse meat is pretty good and similar to beef and when I've seen it sold it's usually far cheaper. We used to eat horse regularly when I grew up because a butcher near my father's work sold it for next to nothing.
There are about as many horses as there are dairy cows in Sweden so presumably there is a lot of horse meat out there but it doesn't really seem to get to market, maybe it goes to export somewhere.
In Finland, horsemeat is sometimes put into this sausage, which is pretty popular as a breakfast sausage.
Now that you mention it there is a reasonably popular horsemeat sandwich meat branded as "hamburger meat" lol.
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The worked on fields. Nothing was mechanized.
Cows had actual value. So a bull ox would juts get sold to some neighbor who needed one on his farm asap.
So they used the cattle to pull the plow and stuff?
Yep, this was before electricity was available in these villages & when tractors were too expensive.
Socialist India was not a great place to grow up.
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