Pigs are always opportunistic omnivores; they'll eat people, given the chance.

Plenty of primary herbivores will pick up a taste for meat, if it's introduced to them -- back in college bio class, we got to hear about an experiment feeding rabbits meat and then killing them and dissecting them to see the shortening of the bowel as they got used to eating meat.

Yes, but the link was about a cow that killed and partially ate two sheep... and linked to another cow eating chickens. Mutton fed beef is the much darker turducken of red meat. Kind of makes the difference between grass, corn, beer mash etc seem small.

"Don't kid yourself Jimmy, if a cow ever got the chance he'd eat you and everyone you care about." We were warned.

:D

Yes, just thread drift. And that's a much more unusual cow than pigs, but pretty much any mammal will eat meat if it learns how.

This was SOP for us at one point. We were both just out of graduate school and living on our own with very, very little money. A weekly treat was to hit the local grocery just as it opened at noon on Sunday as this was then they marked down the soon to expire beef. We took it home and cooked it that afternoon and were happy. There was generally a little crowd of people on the same mission waiting for the store to open.

We did that for quite a while when we too had very little money. :D

I still do it even if I can afford more. Further on the plus side, stores are less crowded when they open in the morning. I like shopping without competition.

Back to the original question of why beef prices are up. Here is more information than you would ever want to know on the subject.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wheres-the-beef/