From a 1920 USDA publication titled, "Runtsand the Remedy"

A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.

Something extremely bizarre took place in the early decades of the 20th century, inspired by a confluence of trends. Scientists had recently developed a deeper understanding of genetics and inherited traits; at the same time, the very first eugenics policies were being enacted in the United States. And, as the population grew, the public wanted cheaper meat and milk. As a result, in the 1920s, the USDA encouraged rural communities around the United States to put bulls on the witness standto hold a legal trial, complete with lawyers and witnesses and a watching publicto determine whether the bull was fit to breed.

"Hear ye! Hear ye! The honorable court of bovine justiceis now in session."

In 1900, the average dairy cow in America produced 424 gallons of milk each year. By 2000, that figure had more than quadrupled, to 2,116 gallons. In the latest episode of Gastropoda podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and historywe explore the incredible science that transformed the American cow into a milk machine. But we also uncover the disturbing history of prejudice and animal cruelty that accompanied it.

Livestock breeding was a normal part of American life at the dawn of the 20th century, according to historian Gabriel Rosenberg. The United States, he told Gastropod, was "still largely a rural and agricultural society," and farm animalsand thus some more-or-less scientific forms of selective breedingwere ubiquitous in American life.

Meanwhile, the eugenics movement was on the rise. Founded by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, eugenics held that the human race could improve itself by guided evolutionwhich meant that criminals, the mentally ill, and others of "inferior stock" should not be allowed to procreate and pass on their defective genes. America led the way, passing the first eugenic policies in the world. By the Second World War, 29 states had passed legislation that empowered officials to forcibly sterilize "unfit" individuals.

Combine the growing population, the desire for cheap meat and milk, and the increasing popularity of eugenics, and the result, Rosenberg said, was the "Better Sires: Better Stock" program, launched by the USDA in 1919. In an accompanying essay, "Harnessing Heredity to Improve the Nation's Live Stock," the USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry proclaimed that, each year, "a round billion dollars is lost because heredity has been permitted to work with too little control." The implication: Humans needed to take controland stop letting inferior or "scrub" bulls reproduce!

The "Better Sires: Better Stock" campaign included a variety of elements to encourage farmers to mate "purebred" rather than "scrub" or "degenerate" sires with their female animals. Anyone who pledged to only use purebred stock to expand their herd was awarded a handsome certificate. USDA field agents distributed pamphlets entitled "Runtsand the Remedy" and "From Scrubs to Quality Stock," packed with charts showing incremental increases of dollar value with each improved generation as well as testimonials from enrolled farmers.

By far the most peculiar aspect of the campaign, however, came in 1924, when the USDA published its "Outline for Conducting a Scrub-Sire Trial." This mimeographed pamphlet, which Rosenberg recently unearthed, contained detailed instructions on how to hold a legal trial of a non-purebred bull, in order to publicly condemn it as unfit to reproduce. The pamphlet calls for a cast of characters to include a judge, a jury, attorneys, and witnesses for the prosecution and the defense, as well as a sheriff, who should "wear a large metal star and carry a gun," and whose role, given the trial's foregone conclusion, was "to have charge of the slaughter of the condemned scrub sire and to superintend the barbecue."

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Gabriel Rosenberg: Inside the bizarre cow trials of the 1920s