Thread: Milk Gone Wild
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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2006-01-30, 12:25

Don't shoot the messenger! You may be ambivalent about animals in general and hate pets, but you would be foolish to think PETA is portraying unusual practices in these films. I have never seen animals being slaughtered, but as Halal and Kosher meat consumption is extremely widespread, it stands to reason that this sort of slaughter practice must be commonplace (for the Jewish and Muslim markets at least, for which the animal must be slaughtered with a quick slit to the throat, without being stunned by a bolt to the head beforehand as is the usual practice).

I have visited many cattle farms in the UK (and spent part of my childhood living next to one), and the following are not just common practice, but almost universal practice on family-run farms:

1. Castration of all bull-calves by one of a variety of cruel methods, none of which involve even local anaesthetic. The method I most often came across was so-called "bloodless castration" where the spermatic cords are crushed with a delightful device known as a burdizzo.

2. Disbudding (removal of the horn buds in calves). Government guidelines stipulate that this procedure should only be carried out with a heated iron under local anaesthetic by a trained stock-keeper. I never once saw it being done under anaesthetic or by anyone other than the farm owner. Additionally, the iron was often not heated for long enough, resulting in additional unnecessary stress for the animal.

3. Dehorning. Government guidelines state that this should not be a regular practice, and that if it must be done, that it should be done under local anaesthetic, preferably by a vet, and with appropriate after-care including pain-relief. Of course every time I saw it being performed, the horns were removed at the base with a wire saw, with no anaesthetic, by the untrained farm owner, with no after-care whatsoever. You've never seen blood until you've seen a mature cow having her horns removed by this method. It sprays like a fire hose. Even the farmers were notably perturbed by what they had done.

4. Routine injection of obscene amounts of rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) and antibiotics. In dairy cows this causes a very high incidence of mastitis. The automatic milking systems also cause teat damage which increases the risk of mastitis. On an average family farm at any point in time, at least a handful of cows suffer from mastitis.

Cattle are herbivores and natural prey for hunters, so when they are in extreme stress they do not react like a person or a carnivorous animal like a cat or dog. Doing so would alert predators to their plight and thus be fatal in the wild. Instead they suffer in silence, sometimes until they collapse (usually to the surprise of the farmer). If cattle bellowed in agony and generally caused a lot more fuss while under stress, farmers would be more inclined to switch to humane practices. As things stand, they see no point in wasting money on more expensive practices which benefit neither themselves nor their customers.

I have the feeling people generally have no idea what is involved in modern intensive farming. Hence the need for PETA.
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