Meat packers will tell you that nowadays they save everything but the pig's last dying squeal. Naturally, the hides and skins of the animals slaughtered are worth saving. The tips of cows' horns are used for the mouthpieces of pipes; the horns themselves are split and pressed flat, and combs, the backs of brushes, and large buttons are made of them. What bits and splinters are too small to be worked up go for fertilizer.
Hoofs are sorted by colors. The white ones go to Japan, there to be made up into ornaments of artistic merit. We haven't got that far along ourselves. The striped ones stay here to be made up into buttons. The black ones are utilized in the manufacture of cyanide of potash, by which gold is extracted from low-grade ores it formerly did not pay to work.
The bones in the feet of cattle bear up a great weight, so they are hard and take a high polish. They can be used instead of ivory, which is getting scarce. Tooth-brush handles and cutlery handles are made of these bones. The others in the skeleton are built of lime stuck together with glue and molded into shape by the push and pull of muscles.
The soft bones of the head, shoulders, ribs, and breast do not need to be so stiff as the bones of the legs; they have more glue in proportion to lime than the leg-bones. The animal needs a kind of flexible, weather-proof varnish flowed over it, so to speak, to protect the tissues. Glue is what makes this coat or hide. So from bones and scraps and trimmings of hide this glue or gelatin is soaked out. Even the bones on which meat has been cooked have some little dribs of gelatin and fat in them, and these are stewed under pressure until there is nothing left in them of the gelatin, of which they now make the little capsules in which the druggist puts the medicine whose taste we don't just fancy, and fats which go to the soap-maker for the want of a better destination.
Drugs from Dead Cattle.
From the bodies of cows is obtained the tallow which is made into oleomargarin.
The prevailing ailment of the American people is dyspepsia, which is due to a natural lack of pepsin. But it has been found out that the pig's pepsin will do as well as our own, so it is prepared for the drug-trade and sold at considerably above the price per pound of the hog on the hoof.
There are all sorts of obscure nervous troubles which can be very materially helped by a substance extracted from the gray matter of calves' brains.
A growing child should make red corpuscles in his blood at a great rate. All the processes which construct his bones and his flesh and his various organs should be working full-powered. The red rib-marrow of freshly killed young animals contains a substance which is soluble in chemically pure glycerin and can be digested out of that red rib-marrow, and which, if given to the child, greatly increases the proportion of red corpuscles in the blood and stimulates all the constructive processes of the body. This will sell for a much larger sum a pound than veal.
And so there are various other substances taken from the sweetbreads proper, the neck-and-throat sweetbreads, the thyroid gland, the parotids, and the suprarenal capsules which can be used in medicine and can be sold at a large profit to people brought up to believe that "eating the part strengthens the part."