To wonder if you know that the meat you buy could have been raised in a factory farm...

[MsWonderful]

And that the animals could also have been subjected to horrific cruelty even if the farm is Red Tractor approved?
www.daventry.radio/daventry-farm-suspended-from-red-tractor-scheme-amid-animal-welfare-concerns/

As you can see op, lots of people don’t care. It’s cheaper to eat other forms of non meat protein but they want the meat and don’t care about the hell on earth that these animals are living.

Most people don’t give a shiny shit about factory farming. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen - a global pandemic or something?

@Settleandcalm

It is possible to have outdoor and indoor access and in fact the majority of UK farms are, but the more we increase demand for cheap meat the more we need large scale indoor.

But again I won’t judge that, we need nutritional food security in the UK and it’s very ivory towers of people to expect everyone to be able to afford to eat without reasonably priced meat. Or to think everyone can know a farmer or afford it.

So it’s better we make sure that indoor housed animals have excellent care and welfare too, it doesn’t get them when done well.

The same as vegan/vegetarian. The UK environment doesn’t lend itself to self sufficiency on plant only, we don’t have the right land for anything but a combination of plant and animal. We are just offshoring our GGEs and issues otherwise which is very privileged.

These farms should be exposed and prosecuted and expelled from assurance schemes which allow them to trade. Which this one has been, that’s the point of having the law as it stands.

I think you are making a false choice though.

Higher standards of welfare, and just as importantly sustainability, will almost certainly mean that people will still eat meat but less of it. Which was common even two generations ago. We've become used to unhealthily high levels of meat eating that are ut of proportion in any ecological farming approach.

The other issue is that as a society we've reduced food costs to an astonishingly low level from a historical perspective. This is part of what has allowed us to spend so much on consumer goods compared to previous generations. THat's not really sustainable either. It's not sustainable for farms, and the consumption of resources in our goods isn't environmentally sustainable. We need to change the balance.

I just don't understand why people still eat meat these days: it's not healthy; it's not necessary; damaging to the environment; relatively expensive as food; cruel industry. Little going for it.

Maybe not...seemingly you’re not on your own

dont bet on that
I literally buy what looks good and is priced within budget
I dont care where its come from, never looked
Feel no guilt eating meat and have no desire to start nit picking the origins of my food*

I was responding to lljk’s post which said that maybe s/he was not compassionate because s/he doesn’t think about where food comes from. Not betting on anything.

Bold fail there. 2nd paragraph should also be bolded.

Thank you for raising awareness of this OP! Sadly I feel most people will dismiss this as being a 'rare case' as it is easier to deny the obvious than make a few lifestyle changes, or claim; ' well I only buy organic meat anyway.' Do you know how many people I have heard say that one moment only to be seen tucking into a cheap tesco chicken sandwich the next, where the chicken used comes from Thailand or Brazil with even more dire treatment of these poor animals.

Personally I think all of the misleading marketing in this country should be banned, things like 'the happy egg company' (one of the worst as far as welfare standards go!) I've even seen 'happy pig' branded bacon. It's all absolute lies, these animals are treated abhorrently and kept in squalid conditions - hardly very appetising??

Red tractor labelling is meaningless. I recently read an article by an experienced farm vet who regularly visited 'lovely' 'red tractor' certified, 'free range' farms and was so horrified by what she was witnessing she became vegan!

@Scrowy
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/goats-milk-st-helens-farm-yoghurt-hit-kick-animal-cruelty-video-a9639021.html%3famp

So that’s 3 this year, that we know of, all exposed by investigations by animal rights activists. We have no idea if there are more like this. I hope there aren’t.

@MoiraRosesTransAtlanticDrawl

These poor animals. It is so easy to find excuses to eat them isn't it?

Well if they just stopped being so bloody tasty it would help

I was responding to lljk’s post which said that maybe s/he was not compassionate because s/he doesn’t think about where food comes from. Not betting on anything.
Its a turn of phrase meaning don't be so confident in your belief that people who put other values shopping first are in the minority. Look at the shops, it's the majority who shop with price and likes first.
Questioning ones compassion levels over how they choose to eat is naive at best, rude and arrogant at worst

Well if they just stopped being so bloody tasty it would help

So true

Yes squeakums I was agreeing with that poster that she isn’t compassionate and saying that she isn’t on her own on this thread, which you seem to be confirming?
I suppose your argument is that it isn’t about compassion or lack of compassion but about taste/price/convenience, but we’ll have to disagree about that.

I’ve just found out that a farm local to me is building a slurry lagoon with a 4 million gallon capacity though and I can only imagine that this is for factory farmed cattle. That's big! The largest I know about is 40m in diameter almost 6m high and can hold over 7 million litres of slurry.

There are now new regulations about slurry pits, The Nitrates Directive, they must be bigger to prevent rainwater causing leakages and ground pollution and that the top 8 inches must be kept empty (called freeboard). In outdoor pits that freeboard must be 12 inches and have a rainfall calculation and a calculations for washing the yard and parlour, and I think they now also muct be covered - that basically renders most outdoor pits useless. Which is why so many more covered lagoons are now being built.

A farm with 80 cows will produce 140,000gal of slurry over 18 weeks and all farmers are required by law to have storage for 22 weeks worth, 26 weeks for pigs and chickens. Average herds are about 200 cows, but they may also have other animals. Locally a farm with 300 cows has put in planning for a new pit with a capacity of 1.7mill gallons.

So 4mill gallons sounds huge, but a lot of that will be for all the leeway calculations. Then again it is a really valuable 'crop', even if the application causes olfactory distress

I can only apologise for knowing any of that but I am currently helping a couple of Ag students clean up their assignments before they head back for Uni.

I must have a massive sense of humour failure here because how anyone can makes jokes after watching that video is beyond me.
And bollocks is it an isolated case. I have a farm local to me that the local residents have been reporting for over eight years, RSPCA has been out, DEFRA has too and nothing has been done. I see how those animals are treated and even the local paper ran a story, it’s still going and I will have to watch it continue again this winter when it’s always worse.

These are sentient beings, no different to the cat or dog you fuss over at home, more intelligent in some ways, left in pain and living in misery.

If it tastes nice, I will keep buying it. I dont really care how it was reared. I should imagine it's the same for most people.

Why care? The important thing is that it is as cheap as possible and tastes nice.

The meat I eat is from animals that are already dead. Better than them still being alive and living in uncomfortable conditions, surely?!

What makes you so uncaring towards sentient beings though? Were you brought up not to care? Would you not help an injured animal in the road? Do you kick a cat if it’s in your way on the pavement?
Do you go through life just not caring about the suffering of anything?

In some cases it’s systemic abuse of animals in these places and I honestly think you have to be verging on psychopathic not to feel upset after watching a video like the one posted.

I think it’s an intelligence issue actually after reading the latest post, pointless debating with someone like that who doesn’t understand basic supply and demand.

Yes I'm aware but I don't eat meat. There's no cruelty free way to eat animals.

Why care? The important thing is that it is as cheap as possible and tastes nice.

The meat I eat is from animals that are already dead. Better than them still being alive and living in uncomfortable conditions, surely?!

Please, please tell me that you’re being ironic.
That is one of the most callous and emotionally dense things I have ever heard.

If it tastes nice, I will keep buying it. I dont really care how it was reared. I should imagine it's the same for most people.

Unfortunately and unbelievably it is, yes. Can I ask why you don’t care? Do you genuinely like the taste of meat so much that it doesn’t bother you that the animal that it came from might have had a life that solely consisted of fear and pain and suffering? Does that not bother you at all?

Well if they just stopped being so bloody tasty it would help

You might finS if you stopped eating meat that it very quickly stopped seeming tasty!

I loved meat when I gave it up. Bacon sandwiches every Sunday morning and a roast in the evening, my favourite dinner party meal was beef wellington, had steak and chateaubriand when our for dinner, chicken wraps for lunch, pepperoni on my pizza, luscious tuna steaks and smoked haddock fishcakes. Absolutely loved the lot of it, and really badly missed it when I first stopped eating it.

But within a couple of months, I’d completely stopped craving it and didn’t miss it at all. Now, several years on, I find it stomach turning. I really struggle to be in a room where bacon is cooking, and when I see meat on a plate it just looks like a greasy, bloodied slab of body. I know I used to love it and that in the past it would make me salivate, but I can barely access those feelings any more because it just doesn’t seem like food to me any more.

So there you go! It may be that they’re only tasty when you’re used to eating them, and once you stop they very quickly stop seeming that way.

"Unfortunately and unbelievably it is, yes. Can I ask why you don’t care? Do you genuinely like the taste of meat so much that it doesn’t bother you that the animal that it came from might have had a life that solely consisted of fear and pain and suffering? Does that not bother you at all?"

Not in the slightest.

So the inspection removed a bad farm from the scheme.
Sounds like due diligence to me, and actually gives the scheme credibility.

Since the law around pig farming changed in this country I have seen the farmland i drive through for two hours and back every month change. Fields and fields of outdoor pigs did not used to be the case, but is now. Each with their own shelter, big shaded canopies etc. Also we then walk and see many farms with dies and litters. Pens where the sow can walk around, her own sty, but the piglets can run free under the fence. Not one isolated example, many farms I see in the area my family live.

There is a lot of high welfare pork here.

I have to admit I haven't watched the video. I spent too many years observing Ag classes where such videos were shown and students told that if their lecturers ever heard they acted in this way they would be sure to make efforts to have them fired!

Most students here work on family farms, have their own small herd of whatever animal they choose to rear, they were equally horrified (though some would probably have been capable of such behaviour, no doubt). The larger farms, more geared to factory production, seem to hire anyone who will do the job and it is often brutal, the often non farming staff having absolutely no care whatsoever!

But whichever typoe of farm it is the wages for the staff are always low, self employed farmers will be lucky to pay their bills each year, with the need for increased output an ever present evil. We simply do not pay enough for our food, meat, dairy of vegetable. The people who produce what we eat are held to ransom by our desire to eat cheaply and the supermarkets to take all of the profit they can.

So, abhorrent as I am sure that video was, we all bear some of the blame for those conditions existing - and that includes vegetarians and and vegans, as arable farming is often no more pleasant for its human workers!

Not in the slightest.