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Money

A Very Rough Calculation of How Many Cows Canada Has Murdered For Its Money

The bloodlust of the average Canadian knows no bounds.
Mack Lamoureux

LOOK UPON THE FACE OF YOUR MONEY CANADA! Photo via flikr

The bloodlust of the average Canadian knows no bounds.

Cow, pig, moose, elk, seal, chicken, duck, fish—if it bleeds, we will find a way to use it for something. Typically we eat the tasty, tasty creatures but hell we'll use them for leather, comforters, soap, candles, or mount their heads on the wall to make love under—you know, Canadian things.

But as we just learned, we even use them to buy shit. On Wednesday, the Bank of Canada confirmed the inclusion of tallow, an animal byproduct, in Canadian banknotes.

"Our supplier of polymer substrate, Innovia Security, has confirmed to us that these additives may include extremely small amounts of tallow," reads a statement released by the Bank.

Read More: A Very Precise Calculation of Exactly How Many Cows Are Being Murdered to Make the New Fivers

Innovia produces bills for 31 nations, the Canadian bills that use tallow are the weird plastic-y ones that we call the Frontier Series because hell yeah it is.

Now, what is tallow you ask?

Well, tallow is a hard substance that is created from the rendered down animal fat. It can be used for candles, soap (as Fight Club taught us), cooking and, apparently, money. Who would have known that bankers were so goddamn hardcore?

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDiEh9P6P8)

VICE UK did some hard sciencing and found out that it would take about half a cow to supply their country with all their £5 notes. So following suit of our English brethren, we decided to do the calculations for those of us north of Trump's eventual wall.

In Canada, by 2013, over 700 million five and ten dollar tallow-infused bills were kicking around the country and about roughly 0.00009 grams of that is tallow so you get around 63 kg. With the average cow weighing about 910 kg and having about 40 kg worth of tallow. So, with our 63 kg of tallow in our five and 10 dollar bills you get around the size of one and a half cows. If you add in the rest of the bills in circulation the amount would be even higher but probably not more than a second cow in total.

Thanks for doing the hard work England, this is why we're still a colony.

Tallow is used in various things across the board but still, the news is not something vegetarians and some religious groups have not taken kindly to. In the UK, a petition entitled "Remove Tallow from bank notes" has received more than 100,000 signatures.

"The new £5 notes contain animal fat in the form of tallow. This is unacceptable to millions of vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and others in the UK," the petition reads.

A similar petition has not yet popped up in Canada most likely because, as previously noted, the bloodlust of Canadians is unquenchable.

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