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?

"You seem fixated on the notion that we're all terribly bothered at the idea of animal slaughter, or would be if we really saw it. But that's not at all true. "

Also:
"Not very interesting at all. They're either all vegans or they're all hypocrites.
But he vast majority of people are neither"

It is a thought evolution. Happens slowly but surely. Hopefully your descendants will feel different and care about other sentient beings.

Also, do talk for yourself. It is interesting to me...

And I guess the flipside off all of this is that a lot of people who've grown up on the land have greater trouble understanding how those who vociferously criticise farming practices on animal welfare grounds can compartmentalise and rationalise those parts of their lives and the choices that have similar or greater effects on animals than the average UK farm.

I think that's what you've experienced on this thread - cognitive dissonance around how their farms (probably the highest welfare farming systems in the UK when it comes to sheep and cattle) are seen as 'depressing' and need special understanding when they probably have a more realistic and connected view of the impact of their work and their consumption choices on the world around them than most of us do.

@Empanadas just so you are 100% clear, mice have died to make your cereal. Pigeons will have been shot. Deer will have been shot. Rabbits will have been shot and chopped up in the combine. That’s why birds of prey flock after the combine, it’s easy pickings. There is no might about it. Along with hundreds of thousands of insects if you aren’t eating solely organic. If you are eating organic, livestock or fish meal will have been used in the production. There is no might about it. Unless you have grown it yourself, animals and insects have suffered for your food, there is no getting away from it. Estimates put the deaths of wild animals from arable production at about 7 billion per year. That’s before you account for the necessity of livestock in sustainable arable farming. Everyone does what is best for them but humans kill animals whatever food they eat.

“It is a thought evolution. Happens slowly but surely. Hopefully your descendants will feel different and care about other sentient beings. “

Well we can live in hope.

Flora - yes thanks. Someone else posted about all that and i responded,. Grim.

I see now there’s another thread about non-stun slaughter and over there it’s fairly unanimous that both stun and non-stun slaughter is reprehensible, barbaric, etc. Interesting.
I've quickly skimmed the other thread and it's anything but unanimous about stun slaughter. Most people recognise that lamb chops didn't magically appear in the fridge and accept that we will need to kill an animal. Just as Ötzi was doing 5,300 years ago, only not with flint arrows.

@Empanadas

I see now there’s another thread about non-stun slaughter and over there it’s fairly unanimous that both stun and non-stun slaughter is reprehensible, barbaric, etc. Interesting.

What dictionary are you using?

How does it define 'unanimous'?

Yeah we provide them with a few days of terror as they travel to a slaughterhouse and line up waiting for their turn to be stunned (or not in the case of Halal) and be hung up to have their throats slit

I can't speak for all farms and all slaughterhouses but we generally send around 30-50 lambs every couple of weeks to slaughter from August through to February as they reach the correct size/weight required by supermarkets.

We load them into our cattle trailer they have been in many times before and take them to the local 'collection centre' (another local farm) about 10 mins away from us. They always have to be there before 10am.

At 10am a large wagon comes and picks them and all the other lambs that has been dropped off and takes them an hour down the motorway to the large slaughterhouse there.

Usually at some point between 3pm and 5pm the same day an email pings through telling us the grades they slaughtered out at using the EUROP classification grid.

Around a week later often more we get another email with our 'remittance' telling us how much they made, minus any commission for haulage and slaughterhouse costs.

Their whole 'death day' is a few hours long, sometimes the email comes through so quickly we can only assume they have gone straight off the wagon and onto the kill line.

The two slaughterhouses we use supply most of the supermarkets and catering sector between them.

The second episode of Clarkson's farm included a difficult moment where a few ewes were found to have problems with their udders and therefore deemed unsuitable for lamb rearing. They couldn't mix with the flock and it would have been unkind to keep them in such small numbers so they had to go to the abattoir for mutton. The episode showed that even for someone with such a reputation for insensitivity as Clarkson has, it was a difficult thing to do. Once it was done though, he found it less difficult than he expected to eat his own sheep.

@DdraigGoch

The second episode of Clarkson's farm included a difficult moment where a few ewes were found to have problems with their udders and therefore deemed unsuitable for lamb rearing. They couldn't mix with the flock and it would have been unkind to keep them in such small numbers so they had to go to the abattoir for mutton. The episode showed that even for someone with such a reputation for insensitivity as Clarkson has, it was a difficult thing to do. Once it was done though, he found it less difficult than he expected to eat his own sheep.

That episode also showed him dropping them off in the holding pens, going to the office to do some paperwork, coming back to say his final goodbyes only to be told they were already dead.

No 'hanging around for days' as keeps being suggested by some posters on here.

Scrowy - Thankyou for your honesty, but I feel so very sad after reading that. What a terrible, bleak world we live in.

@ChangePart1

They don't see them as living, breathing, individual beings. They certainly don't see them as having any intrinsic rights or worth beyond financial.

To them it's the same as if they were growing crops and then sending them off to distributers. They don't see themselves as having anything to come to terms with or reconcile themselves to.

And I agree, it definitely takes a certain sort of person. But I think it takes a certain sort of person to be able to eat animal products, work in an abattoir, or carry out animal testing too.

I hope you never take any drugs that are prescribed to you. Or had the Covid Jab for that matter.

But its farmers who own/run factory farms.... A broiler farm down the road from me has 6 barns which hold 10,000 chickens who are slaughtered at 6 weeks old. The farmer who owns it,loves his set up. I don't see your point.

It is a thought evolution. Happens slowly but surely. Hopefully your descendants will feel different and care about other sentient beings.
God, I hate being patronised and assumed to be an unfeeling dickhead, all at once. I do care about sentient beings. This is one reason why I prefer to eat venison above most other meats. The animal has an amazing, biologically fulfilled life. I know how people who stalk are trained (because I know several of them). I know they are taught to aim for the heart rather than the head, so that a small deflection caused by a gust of wind won't cause the deer to end up galloping away with its jaw shot off. I know they honestly want a clean kill: literally a couple of seconds from the rifle firing to the animal dropping dead.

A lot of the stalkers I know butcher the animals they shoot. They have a different attitude towards meat that they saw on the hoof. They are very, very aware that they took the life of a sentient being - which is why they try to do it as quickly as they can.

@WomenAreBornNotWorn

But its farmers who own/run factory farms.... A broiler farm down the road from me has 6 barns which hold 10,000 chickens who are slaughtered at 6 weeks old. The farmer who owns it,loves his set up. I don't see your point.

I wouldn't call him a farmer. He would be a businessman more than anything and very likely delegates the actual rearing of the animals and spends most of his time in the office. The question by the OP was about how farmers feel when their livestock gets dispatched. If you own 10,000 chickens, you're not going to get the same attachment to them as when you own 79 sheep. We all know that someone with an intensive farm is not going to have the same concern for welfare as the likes of Gareth Wyn Jones does for his stock (and for the local wildlife).

30 years ago we spent about 40 perc of our income feeding and clothing our family and about 25 perc housing our family. That has completely switched around. We now demand cheap protein so we can spend more on providing basic shelter. The only way to provide protein at these costs is by intensifying production. Intensive production is not good for animal welfare.

The bottom line is that meat is too cheap and has gone from a luxury to a cheap commodity. I think we need to eat less and pay more for it, which is easy for me to say in secure paid for housing with a good income. Not so easy if you are motgaged to the max with a young family to feed.

I am indeed making a sweeping comment that slaughtering sentient animals at this industrial scale is wrong. Obviously I'm not going to judge a person purely based on their eating habits or a farmer purely based on their job. However I believe future generations will look back at us thinking we were savages in this particular respect.

Do you seriously think industrial scale slaughtering is something new? What on earth makes you think future generations are not going to want to eat meat? How naive.

[quote 21Flora]@Empanadas just so you are 100% clear, mice have died to make your cereal. Pigeons will have been shot. Deer will have been shot. Rabbits will have been shot and chopped up in the combine. That’s why birds of prey flock after the combine, it’s easy pickings. There is no might about it. Along with hundreds of thousands of insects if you aren’t eating solely organic. If you are eating organic, livestock or fish meal will have been used in the production. There is no might about it. Unless you have grown it yourself, animals and insects have suffered for your food, there is no getting away from it. Estimates put the deaths of wild animals from arable production at about 7 billion per year. That’s before you account for the necessity of livestock in sustainable arable farming. Everyone does what is best for them but humans kill animals whatever food they eat.[/quote]
Yep humans are shit by the very side effects of their success.

But why an all or nothing approach. Something is better than nothing.

Do you seriously think industrial scale slaughtering is something new? Yeah, it's pretty new.

Industrial scale farming will have to end. It’s not a choice. In the case of beef, the planet can’t sustain the rainforests being chopped down for gazing land and the methane production.

Consumers are waking up, slowly but surely. In the next 20 years, we can’t even imagine the rate if change that is afoot. It will be unprecedented. Yes, at the moment, it’s consumers in the developed world who have the economic ability to make more ethical choices, but this accounts for billions of people.

Look at how supermarkets have adapted even in the last five years. Look at the variety of dairy alternatives now. Meat replacement products aren’t really my thing, but there’s a whole aisle of these type of products now.

There was a time hunting was acceptable, or fur farms. Not any more. I do believe the day will come when we look back on current farming practises as barbaric. And this will be soon, possibly within the next generation.

" In the next 20 years, we can’t even imagine the rate if change that is afoot. It will be unprecedented."

Absolutely. It is completely unsustainable, utterly cruel, and government bodies (have some knowledge on this) have multiple action plans they are currently pursuing to nudge the population. You are right though, it will have to include long term social engineering.

"Do you seriously think industrial scale slaughtering is something new? What on earth makes you think future generations are not going to want to eat meat? How naive."

hahaha. Sorry but you are being naive, not me. And yes, industrial scale slaughter is new indeed. If you have noticed, our population has gone through an exponential increase in the past couple of decades, and hence so did consumption.

Monocrops are just as damaging as industrial scale meat production. I've explained how but you don't want to talk about it.

You need to come up with a plan about how to feed everyone that doesn't rely on 'feed the cereals to the humans instead, simples.'

@pasteldreams my point is, it’s massively hypocritical to come on here going ‘how do you live with yourself, what monsters’ when animals and insects die for all food too.

Do what you think is best but before criticising others maybe people should take a look at themselves to ensure they are a perfect person. It’s easy for vegans to pretend they are beyond reproach because the killing is out of sight, out of mind.

It’s fine to value the life of a cow more than you do the hundreds of millions of flea beetles that are poisoned to death each year. It’s just hypocritical to preach at people when you are responsible for the death of living things for your food too.

@Empanadas I don’t know where you heard hunting wasn’t acceptable. I know loads of people that hunt, if anything hunting is a much better way of eating meat. Hunters pick deers at the right age and shoot them, butcher them and then eat it. It’s led a natural life and generally die instantly.