Consequences of climate change has a bad taste

Now and then, animals experience heat stress during transport to the abattoir, and the quality of the meat is affected. Cattle begin to suffer heat stress already at 20 degrees Celsius and pigs at 31 degrees. In the future, heat stress among farm animals may be more common, New Scientist reports.




”The one thing we can be sure of is that they'll experience those harmful temperatures more often with climate change,” says Neville Gregory of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK.



Over a decade, Neville Gregory has studied how meat quality varies with the temperature at which animals are kept. His findings are published in Food Research International this month, and they are not particularly appetizing. Heat-stressed pork meat ”resembles soggy white blotting paper”, and a rump steak will taste blander and look darker, ”almost mahogany in colour, or umber, and in the worst case, black,” he tells New Scientist.



”The implications of global warming for animal production have not been given much thought...Hopefully, this paper will stimulate some much-needed debate among policy makers,” urges Peter Hansen, an animal scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, according to New Scientist