All that aside. The text accompanying the photo says she is a new addition. . .We were buying her from a conventional farm whose pastures are heavily overgrazed and due to horrid, un-seasonal conditions on both sides of winter left most of the regions cattle looking gaunt. Our own pastures are lush, full and healthy. The photos of the two Highland cattle were both taken on the same day. Do they look malnourished? We use rotational grazing through many pastures to make sure our land is not overgrazed or overstocked–the Highlands are in a sacrificial paddock to keep the rest of the pastures nice during the winter. Neither do we have to apply artificial nitrogen, re-seed or otherwise over work our land. We also carefully manage our hay and grazing to maximize both and keep weight gain optimal under seasonal shortages. We do not have to buy feed to keep our cattle fed and they always have plenty to eat.

As for a disservice to agriculture–think that dig is a bit misplaced. I’ll take grass-fed animals, even if one is gaunt but hardly starving, any day over the shit covered, silage fed dairy cattle, or beef cattle up to their knees in muck, breathing feces in a feedlot. Yet both those practices are considered normal in 90% of agriculture. I don’t need to do a disservice to agriculture, normal, conventional, factory-farm practices do plenty of that for me.