Well, who would have thought that a Google news search on “dual use exports” would turn up a WaPo story on the export of bulls from Virginia to Russia? Or that the story would talk about “dual use cows”? I certainly did not, which is what mooo-ved me to write this post.

According to the story, twenty-nine Holstein bulls have already been exported to Russia and another thirty are to follow. The bulls are set to, er, revitalize (at least that’s what the kids call it now) Russian Holstein dairy herds. The need for bulls with that certain American panache was explained as follows in the story:

Russian farmers want American bulls to improve dairy-herd genetics in a land hampered first by collective farming, then by the collapse of the Soviet Union. …

Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, many dairy herds were all but wiped out as hungry Russians consumed them for food.

“There was a terrible crisis, apparently, and they pretty much ate their seed stock,” said Patrick Comyn, a large-animal veterinarian with the private Virginia Herd Health Management Services who worked on the deal.

And that’s where the exported bulls come in. I am sure that the Virginia bulls will be delighted, to the extent that bulls can be delighted in the first place, that they are fulfilling both a carnal and a patriotic duty.

Of course, these mail-order American husbands may never have seen their wealthy Russian wives if they had been horses because, as all export geeks know, export of horses by sea (ECCN 0A980) requires a license from the Department of Commerce. Personally, I think this is another example of wanton discrimination against American cows in favor of American horses which are spared from both the dinner table and long ocean voyages.

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