How do farmers reconcile themselves to the volumes of animals they send to slaughter over the course of their lifetimes?

[Empanadas]

Hi, this is something I’ve always wondered. However, I was watching that Netflix series about Prince Charles and the Duchy of Cornwall and there was a farmer showing a whole barn of cattle he has obviously reared from birth, but quite blithely saying, “oh they'll all be off next week.”

AIBU to think being a cattle / sheep / chicken farmer takes a certain type of person and to wonder how they deal with their conscience in this depressing business?

Fur trade? You may need to Google the popularity of fur too.

It's making a comeback.

And fashion is not the same as the food industry.

@TheHateIsNotGood

A lion would probably eat a cow, maybe you would prefer we made domestic cat food out of ground up blue tits and sparrows?

Larks tongue in aspic!!

• points for not having to Google that 😁

I take the point about sterilising and I apologise for that. As I said, I’m not a farmer in any shape or form and have never been near such places.

How do dairy farmers keep manage the populations then? Sorry if this is an ignorant question, but they must do something?

Really? You need to be told about the cows and the bull?

@Empanadas They don’t anticipate in the sense that you or I anticipate. So a sheep that has a lamb won’t look forward and think that in 4 months time the lamb will be taken off me and go to the abattoir. Sheep being unloaded at the abattoir won’t think or anticipate that they’re about to die, however they will react to their environment. So, if it’s a busy abattoir with shouting, crowding and other stressed animals then they will become fearful and stressed. That’s nothing to do with anticipation and everything to do with good animal handling and husbandry. We take our lambs to a small local abattoir when we do private sales, it’s very calm and quiet which means that the animals stay calm and quiet. Sheep, and other ruminants are prey animals with a limited frame of reference, they react to perceived threats in the moment. They learn from experience and can anticipate to a degree based on that experience - so if I walk in the field with a bag of feed they know they’re going to get fed - but they have no imagination and no real understanding of concepts like life and death so their ability to anticipate is mostly limited to being fed and being moved.

Most farmers abhor the idea of their animals suffering and are very careful to handle their livestock in a way that minimises any unnecessary stress.

@Empanadas

I take the point about sterilising and I apologise for that. As I said, I’m not a farmer in any shape or form and have never been near such places.

How do dairy farmers keep manage the populations then? Sorry if this is an ignorant question, but they must do something?

It involves cows, bulls, Netflix and chilling.

@CuriousaboutSamphire I think this is the level we’re dealing with!

They think they looked after them and gave them a happy life. Farming is a business.

Netflix and chill 😁

The fur trade is still quite rife in countries such as Denmark. Hundreds of thousands of mink in tiny cages their entires lives before being gassed. The mink farmers were moaning because what a surprise, the mink got a disease and all died. But they were only worried about the money they lost of course. Couldn’t possibly be worried about anything else.

Beef from the cows reared with great care, effort and pride by my lovely farmer neighbour tastes so much better than the stuff from the supermarket. They have a great life with him (and so many other farmers like him).

You do become stoic about death when you spend most of your time around large animals, that's very true. I cried like a baby when I had to have a pony I bred put down due to health problems. I could have sold him on and made him somebody else's problem (a lot do) but that wouldn't have been best for him and I just wanted his suffering to stop. It has made me stoic and I was able to process my mother's death from vascular dementia last year quite easily. Not much quality of life left when you can't eat because you have lost the ability to swallow, can't speak and can't move ☹️ whatever the afterlife is, it couldn't possibly be any worse than the life she was enduring.

No, no. That was my point.

Yours was we once thought banning fur was a mad idea but we did it. Banning beef isn't so mad!

Don't reverse ferret, or carrot, yourself!

Sometimes the mink didn’t get killed effectively by the gassing and would be skinned alive. What a business that is.

If an animal has a good life and a humane death, what does it matter what happens to it afterwards? It certainly doesn't care. There are pets treated worse than many farm animals - should pet owning be banned too?

Also, why should beef farming be wound down? People eat beef and will do for the foreseeable I would think. If you get rid of loads of farms (as you would if you reduced animal-based agriculture), then what happens to the countryside - probably gets built on and we lose wildlife and nature.

@TheSpottedZebra an easy death? You have no fucking idea.

@ChangePart1 agreed. A very certain sort of person.

OP the answer is because they're cunts.

@CuriousaboutSamphire

Really? You need to be told about the cows and the bull?

OP is on a wind up. This is a serious question. The UK has a shockingly low level of breast feeding. If we didn't have dairy cows what would happen?

gotta love the logic - walking through death - so eating animals bad - drinking milk - bad, wearing animal products bad

so we all stop - and what - who do you think cares or rears cows, pigs,
sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, mink etc? no one - so they stop being a thing except in your city farms - glorious stuff

I love eggs, milk cheese, chicken and the odd burger - but then I spent a lot of time with dairy and sheep farmers growing up and understand the care and pride taken in their rearing

@derxa you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that my response to someone who said it was bad for the planet to be vegan (showing numerous peer reviewed articles based on empirical data that shows that’s not the case) was an indication that your farm would imminently be shut down. I didn’t say that anywhere.

I don’t eat meat but I live in the country surrounded by farmers- there’s cows at my garden fence. They are well cared for. I hate that they are killed but accept any change comes from me extending understanding not judging and shaming.

I don’t need to go to a farm to know that millions of animals are being slaughtered. Talking to those involved will not change the reality of what happens.

Actually, it could. Communicating with the actual people on ground doing this work and doing the work that enables more options would enable you to do more informed work towards the future you want.

Wanting food production to be more humane with reduced animal consumption, but not seeing a farm is like wanting to improve schools, arguing that it's grinding children to the ground, but never talking to people who do that work.

It was real easy for me to talk about ideal education in wooly theory, especially as a home educator but I was well aware I'd no idea of practicalities beyond my own household. Working in a school academy trust, doing conference and meetings with educators at different parts in of the school system, has meant I can actually dig into the reality of my own ideas, some of which have changed by coming into other people's ideas, and work with others towards improvements if only in bits within my own community.

People have become too sensitive to death.

OP
The welfare standard in this country is far better than the soon to be Australian imported meat that's for sure.

This also seems a sensible discussion point that should be talked about.

As an aside my understanding was that last time the weather was warm enough to enable hazelnuts to be part of the diet where I grew up was the Bronze Age.

In the wet and reasonably cold parts of the UK there really aren't that many arable options.

I honestly think going into the countryside a bit might do wonders for you OP, go to a country show, see the show animals, talk to the farmers.

Stop pontificating on a subject you currently know less than nothing about.

I would like to know this please -

Are dairy cows routinely slaughtered too when they reach the end of their use, or do they tend to get left alone? What happens? What is the average age for dairy cows?

[quote kikisparks]@derxa you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that my response to someone who said it was bad for the planet to be vegan (showing numerous peer reviewed articles based on empirical data that shows that’s not the case) was an indication that your farm would imminently be shut down. I didn’t say that anywhere.[/quote]
No I would just sell the fields for a massive profit. The best we could grow is turnips, cabbages or carrots. Perhaps we could cover the fields in poly tunnels. Either way all the current community activities would stop. You don't care about community. You care about theories.

People defending the meat industry by talking about cows and sheep having a wonderful time and how carefully looked after they are - what about chickens?
Near my parents ' place there is a chicken farm. There are 7 huge units that are all stuffed full of chickens. There are no windows and only a fan for ventilation. Just walking past these units, the smell is enough to bring tears to your eyes. Imagine being shut up in in the dark for weeks with thousands of other birds. They are then packed into tiny crates, loaded on to wagons and taken off to slaughter.
I don't believe this is an acceptable way for humans to treat another living, breathing animal.
Yes, in the wild animals eat each other but I'm pretty sure that they don't keep the animals they are about to eat in such awful conditions.
If we didn't eat sheep and cows et c they might not exist? So what? At least they wouldn't be suffering.

And those previous posters saying that animals are slaughtered humanely are kidding themselves. Just have a search for the huge amount of cruelty that goes on at slaughter houses - yes, it takes a certain kind of person to work there.