Carniverous Calf Chomps Down Chickens in India

Cattle growers in the US, infamously the UK, and elsewhere have been feeding cows food consisting of left-over material from slaughtered cows bodies for years.

In the course of things, mad cow disease - which one theory puts has having its origin somewhere along India's Ganges River, arose.

Apparently, there, human corpses, hungry cows, and chance - all come together daily in a sort of lottery for the propagation of rare, inimical pathogens.

Human corpses dumped upstream. Hungry cows dining downstream. Cattle and/or cattle feed shipped from India to UK. Then, slaughtered cattle parts in UK were essentially blended together en masse and fed en masse to other cattle.

It is not hard to see how a prionic disease or other hereditary pathogen could catch the ultimate lucky break and spread like never before.

Since mad cow disease is not spread by contagion, and humans do not eat other humans, the process outlined above really could have helped it fan out and spread. Left to nature, that would have never happened.

The first part is only someone's theory, the latter is well-established fact.

A new anomaly has cropped up in India. This one is a chicken eating cow. It is another example of another normally overlooked means of inter-species pathogen propagation could occur under extremely rare circumstances.

Apparently, the fascinating phenomenon has been caught on video and reported in the Indian news media.

In the article Meat-loving calf eats chickens", the story of the carnivorous calf is served up to the masses, thanks to web giant Yahoo and news media organization Reuters.

Local vets have a theory that the cow is suffering from a disease. The owner guesses that the cow suffers from a lack of minerals in its body. Chickens probably just wish the darned thing would just go away!

Here is a curious thought. If there were no little chickens available to it, and the little calf were full grown, would it turn to newborn calves as its source of nutrients?

Might make a good Romero film, if he decides to branch out and cover other species as his subject matter. Oh, well. I guess the cow would have to die and come back from the dead for him to be interested in that idea. Nevertheless....

Tis a bit strange.