The thought of cows’ guts, bones and hide being inside our cars, tennis rackets and even posh plates would make most people shudder. But the farmyard staple is coming under the spotlight in a new BBC 3 series called Kill It Cut It Use It which will uncover what every day items are made up of strange animal by-products. Putting an end to preconceptions that most day-to-day products are man-made, presenter Julia Bradbury follows each leftover body part from a dead cow from the abattoir to the shop floor. Producer Clare Mottershead said: ‘We expect the contents of most of the products we use these days to be man-made; however, many every day products still use animal body parts as an ingredient with companies finding innovative ways of making sure every little bit of the animal does not go to waste.’ Last year more than two million cattle and 14 million sheep were sent to slaughter. In the first programme three young car-lovers discover how a cow is used to produce the leather interior for an Aston Martin DB7, travelling from the abattoir to the tannery before seeing it on a giant conveyor belt and ending up in a car showroom. Later on, the programme travels to the Lake District to reveal how cow horns become buttons and then to Stoke to learn how bones are used to produce fine bone china used in dinner sets up and down the country. In the final show, viewers see how one Norfolk firm collects cow intestines from local abattoirs and turns them into the kind of natural gut strings favoured by many of the world’s top tennis players. The guts are cleaned and cut into 40ft strands before being chemically treated to preserve them and used to produce the strings. In the six week process each string is made up of 15 strands spun tightly together before being dried to stop them cracking. Meanwhile, cow hooves also have an important use – find their way into fire extinguishers. Their protein, keratin, is extracted to use in foam used by fire-fighters up and down the country at airports for fires involving aviation fuel. The keratin is used to bond the foam bubbles helping to smother the fire like a blanket. The five part-series Kill It, Cut It, Use It, starts on Monday 13 June at 9pm on BBC3.
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