[j.p.s]

I'm reading Frostbite by Nicola Twilley, a journalist and food writer. It's a non-fiction story of refrigeration with plenty of background, including this grisly and wastful example of motivation for for accepting the expense, unreliability, danger, and ungainlyness of early refrigeration.

Spoiler:

Frustratingly, on the thinly populated Great Plains and Texas rangelands in the United States, the endless pampas of South America, and the verdant hillsides of New Zealand, there were cattle and sheep aplenty. Imagine the torments of the meat-starved Londoner when Australians slaughtered their herds of sheep for fleece and tallow and left the meat to rot for lack of sufficient local mouths to feed. Argentinians had the gall to complain of their burdensome surplus, reporting that their livestock multiplied in such numbers that, were it not for the dogs that devour the calves and other tender animals, they would devastate the country. In at least one instance, so great was the congestion that a flock of sheep was driven over a cliff, just to get rid of it.