I hope I’ve not become a crotchety old man, but some people do have views with which I disagree, and when I see their facial expressions on TV, I wonder how anyone can love them. I don’t think I actually hate anything or anybody, but my ire is raised when people physically and verbally attack country folk who keep livestock for breeding, eating or for by-products such as wool. They accuse us of exploitative practices including physical and sentient abuse of our livestock, and they spend a lot of time telling the public that livestock farming is immoral and bad for the planet.
As with most groups whose views are fixated at one end of a spectrum, behind the hyperbole there is a valid point. Industrial scale livestock farming does indeed, restrict animals to living under controlled conditions and may inhibit some ‘natural behaviour.’ Some farming systems add growth hormones to livestock and use antibiotics as a herd preventative rather than an individual cure. And there is no doubt that at the industrial level of production the trend is towards less concern for the individual animal, and more concern for the maximisation of outputs from the herd as a whole.
Mind you, the same bureaucratisation goes for treatment of humans, and during my life for convenience and control purposes, they have reduced the number of registered abattoirs from 13000 to around 350, most of which now produce mainly halal meat. However, such is the scale of killing at these locations that I wonder about the effect on the human mind. I wonder because I personally kill and prepare a few Christmas birds and I know the point at which I have had enough killing for that day, it is five or six. But in the slaughterhouse, I could be tasked with killing say, 250 sheep, before the 10am cut-off time. I think that it is not so much the act of killing for food but the scale of it which can adversely affect the human mind. Killing animals, when done with the proper attitude and in the correct manner should not give pleasure, but when it is properly done in the full knowledge of its consequences for both animal and human, then there could be a sense of satisfaction. This was the feeling of our ancestors as they offered a prayer prior to killing. They wanted to show respect and gratitude to the animal whilst also keeping a proper balance in their minds between the paradox of life and death.
Most readers will understand the distinction between pleasure and satisfaction, and like me, will get no pleasure from killing, but will be get satisfaction when reducing the numbers of rodents, greenfly, leafhoppers, ants in the kitchen and silverfish in the hearth. I guess even those who dislike us, kill living organisms in their own gardens and kitchens including malign viruses.
This month’s View was submitted before we commenced our final year of lambing. But I want to tell you about fourteen-year-old Giddy; She was the result of a brief liaison between Sukie and Roly-Poly our Dorset Down Tup. She was born on the 2nd February 2007. Later that year she went down with something we could not properly determine. However, I gave her the various injections Richard the vet had prescribed, and for four days she lay in the barn without the strength to move. We hand-fed her every four hours with various grasses, ivy, willow, hawthorn, chestnut, poplar, and cabbage leaves. We doused everything with water as she could not lift her head to drink. Ewe nuts were usually refused. We spent lots of time talking to her, but on the fourth night I said to Marie, “Tomorrow morning she will be either dead or up on her feet.”
It was a sunny morning at 8:30am as we entered the barn; I saw her and my heart just leapt, and a sense of joy filled me on seeing her. She had heard us coming and was standing (albeit tottering) on her feet. We hugged her and helped her up the step out of the barn and on to fresh grass. She was alive and on her way.
Giddy taught me the difference between medical treatment and nursing care, and in her case, it was nursing care which gave her the will to live. Over many years she cared for many lambs. A few years after her retirement I should have taken her to market but, and countryfolk will understand this, she was a friend. Not a pet but a friend, and so we decided she should die on the holding. Arthritis finally struck her down and I asked the vet to confirm my feelings. He knelt beside her and said, “You are absolutely right, and whilst proffering the pistol said, “Do you want to do this?” ‘Best you do this one,” I replied. A friend then helped me take her body to the kennels where I thanked her and stroked her face for the last time.
I like to think that all countryfolk, unlike many of our critics, know the difference between pleasure and satisfaction when personally dealing with an animal’s death. The difference between medicine and nursing when personally dealing with life, and the difference between the person who apparently hates us and the views they espouse.
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