What Is "Bob Veal"? by Humane Press Bureau

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 26, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 13.

What Is "Bob Veal"?

By Humane Press Bureau

Bob veal is the flesh of immature calves, and is most unsuitable for food. It contains poisons which were in its tissues before it was born and which the milk of the mother cow is designed to remove.

Men in the milk business will raise no needless calves. They know that if the offspring can be removed from its dam at birth, there is almost no worriment caused the cow by the removal, and there will be just so much more milk for the market.

Even when the law prohibits the slaughter of very young calves, there are always men ready to deal in "bob veal"—shipping the animals over the border into another State if near-by officers are an obstacle in their business. The flesh often becomes sausage or "canned chicken," even when laws prevent its exposure for sale in the butcher shops.

We Are Afraid of "Bob Veal"

This traffic is vitally related to the public health. It causes serious illness and even death. Thousands of persons who do not care particularly for the calves or their shipment or semi-starvation or slaughter, are vitally concerned when they learn they are in danger themselves.

The interstate law names three weeks as the earliest age at which calves may be killed. California cities pass their own laws on this subject.

Dr. F. H. Rowley, president of the American Humane Education Society, in a paper read in San Francisco before the State Humane Association of California, said that there is scarcely a more imperative duty resting upon the animal societies of the United States than to make a united, determined effort to break up this cruel and disreputable traffic in "bob veal," hundreds of thousands of immature calves being killed and eaten each year.