Lamb is NOT Veal
Sometimes words are clear, and sometimes they cause a lot of confusion. Cattle raised for meat production are called beef cattle to distinguish them from dairy cattle, which are raised for milk production. Beef is the meat of a cow. A pig, or swine, is an animal. Actually, a pig is a young animal. Once the animal is a bit older, it’s a hog. Either way, meat from swine, whether a pig or a hog, is pork. A deer is an animal, but its meat is venison. A sheep is an animal and its meat is called mutton. Many people have a bad impression of mutton, which can come from sheep of any age. As a result, the corner butcher sells lamb, emphasizing that it comes from fresh, healthy, young animals, instead of mutton which could have come from some stringy old ram.
That’s where the problem comes in. The offspring of a cow is a calf, which we don’t usually eat. The meat from a calf is veal. To make veal, a calf, usually a bull calf of a dairy breed, is slaughtered at 16 to 18 weeks of age. Many people, me included, have reservations about slaughtering such an immature animal for meat. Pork comes from young pigs and older hogs. Once a porcine critter reaches about 250 pounds, it’s “of market weight” and ready to go to the processor. How old are cattle and swine when they go to slaughter? And how does that compare to sheep?
Typical slaughter age for beef cattle is 18 months. At that point, the animal is mature and can breed, if not fully grown. The natural lifespan of a cow is 15 to 20 years. So, they’re slaughtered at somewhere between 7% and 10% of their natural lifespan. Pigs have a natural lifespan of 10 to 12 years, and are slaughtered at 5-6 months, or less than about 5% of their natural lifespan. The lamb you buy in a grocery store is between 6 and 12 months at slaughter. Sheep have a natural life span of 12 to 14 years, so they’re slaughtered at between 4% and 8% of their natural lifespan. The lamb you buy from us is at least 9 months old when it goes to the processor. That’s about 6% or 7% of its natural lifespan.
In other words, lamb (the meat) is from a sheep that was of comparable age at slaughter to the cow that yielded beef or the hog that gave it up to become pork. You should have no more guilt about eating lamb than you might have about eating beef or pork.
Why are animals slaughtered for meat at such a young age? You might think it’s all about flavor and texture, and that’s part of it. Another reason has to do with growth rates of an animal and the cost of inputs like grass, hay and grain. Grass is not free, by the way. It takes work to maintain the forage value of a healthy pasture. If these inputs were not expensive, when would we slaughter sheep? In New Zealand, where they eat a lot of lamb and mutton, some people in the know prefer hogget, or the meat from a sheep between one and two years old.
But hogget is a word that’s only in wide use in a handful of countries (Norway, Scotland, England, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.) If we offered hogget around here, we’d only add to the confusion of words.