Plans to open first massive intensive dairy farm in UK

[AnnieLobeseder]

Plans to open first massive intensive dairy farm in UK.

Personally, I can see this as being the thing that finally tips me into veganism.

Other views?

"There is a national campaign against this proposal: "

That such a campaign exists means that the campaigners have admitted that they wouldn't get genuine public support for stopping the dairy if they tried to get us to boycott its products.

That such a campaign exists also continues to encourage people to pretend that they're not really responsible for this and that they have the potential to stop it in a heartbeat.

I don't expect we will be given a consumer choice.I imagine it will be 'hidden' in products containing milk and sold as pure milk under retail branding. Does any one know if factory farmed milk has to be identified on product labels? Even so I could end up drinking it in my local cafe...

"I don't expect we will be given a consumer choice"

I doubt very much that they fulfil the criteria for an Organic label on the milk.

So people could spend an extra 20p, buy organic milk so that this mega dairy will never be profitable and will therefore close and never be repeated.

Or people could continue to buy the cheap milk and complain that the Government should do something.

I wonder which will happen....

I don't like the way cows are kept to produce the milk my family drinks, but when I get through 4 pints a day for my family of 5, and am on a very limited budget, of course I'm going to buy the cheapest milk that the supermarket offers. An extra 20p on each pint would be an extra £22.40 a WEEK on my milk bill. That sort of money is not available in my budget to allow me to have any sort of a concience(sp? I know it's wrong!) about how my milk is produced. And 4 pints a day works out as a pint a day for each of the dc, and one pint between DP and I for cereal and his coffees etc.

To be fair though, flushing a toilet isn't really the same moral choice as slaughtering an innocent animal.
Nor is it cruel to keep toilets locked in small dark rooms, in an unclean state, chopping off parts of their anatomy (i.e beak chopping for hens), farm them intensely, pump them full of hormones and drugs, feed them an unnatural diet, seperate them from their young or use questionable methods to 'humanely' kill them.

I'm afraid you are talking about life (which is closely related to our own) and souls and that is a wholly different plane of moral standing (depending on how you view our animal counterparts). But I don't think I am wrong in saying that, mostly, human beings like to think of themselves as compassionate creatures.

Which is thus why it is strange and seems wrong for us to sell joints of pink meat in supermarkets far away from origin and not even question how the meat came to be.

Meat is a different thing entirely from shovelling poo, or switching on electricity. Because you are, as a human being, with the greater power and with the most responsibility, dictating what happens to the lesser lives. Of which you have no idea and never will of how they feel or see the world and the cruel practices inflicted on them by us.

It seems wrong then to be the removed person from the factory farming. And yes, I too believe that everyone should witness the slaughter of an animal by the common methods and then make a decision in regards to their meat consumption. I think it's a sound logic. Maybe not to do it yourself - but to be ok with what actually goes on. I wonder how many of us would be?

A lot of meat eaters have no idea what they are eating - they eat meat, they are proud of this fact and they have an 'I don't care attitude' to how it gets to their plate. As long as it does, in vast, cheap quantities. Some of it is little better than the rendered dog meat they put in pet food.

The ones that do care get some mixed messsages about it, and try their best and believe that buying certain labels removes some of the guilt, as they are assured it is 'friendlier meat'. But again, a lot of people just see the label and not what the label REALLY means.

I think everyone needs to be much more aware of what they are actually eating and how it came to be. We put too much faith in big suppliers and cheap prices.

"Mass factory dairy production isn't the fault of the Government or greedy produces but the fault of people who happily buy it."

There is nothing else available to the vast majority of us. Even the organic label, like the "free range" one probably does not mean what you imagine it does. They say the cows are allowed outdoors when conditions are righr - what does that typically mean?

Unless things have changed in the last few years, the majority of organic milk (as milk and other dairy products) does not come from this country. (but I am more than willing to be corrected on this!)
Many dairy farmers were promised premium prices for their milk if they went through the lengthy and costly process of becoming organic. The promise was never fulfilled, as the milk could be bought cheaper from France. I personally know 4 farmers who had to sell up because of this.

Keeping a milking herd indoors isn't new. Several larger herds in this country and others already keep their cows indoors 100% of the time.
I think the fact that this huge herd has been so publicized has brought it home to many more people, and sadly it is a combination of supermarkets and consumers who have driven the price down of milk and meat to the point where it is barely sustainable, and the only way many farmers can stay in business (and bear in mind in most cases, this is the only business they know, with not many transferable skills to take to a new job) is to keep up with the industrialization of farming. Battery hens are the prime example for this. Unfortunately, buying free range eggs does not opt out of this, as in too many cases, the life of a "free range" chicken is far worse than that of its battery contemporary. (I think someone else posted about this before)
If anyone really wants to make a difference, then stop buying your milk from supermarkets, and get it through a milkman or farm shop, where there is more chance of the farmer being paid a more realistic price, so can avoid the otherwise inevitable industrialization.

Oh Tsk Tsk BadgerPaws, you're supposed to compost your own excrement and incinerate your own rubbish to generate electricity, how dare you take the easy way out and expect other people to sort these pollution- and ethical-dilemna-fraught problems out for you?

"To be fair though, flushing a toilet isn't really the same moral choice as slaughtering an innocent animal."

That wasn't my point.

My point was that saying "you can't eat meat unless you are prepared to slaughter it" is the same as saying "you can't use the toilet unless you're prepared to shovel poop", both say if you won't do the process you can't use the result.

If you want to change that argument a bit and say "you can't eat meat unless you are prepared to know what is involved in slaughtering it because there are extra moral implications" then that's a fair point to start a debate.

I might well disagree with you, but it's a fair debate to have.

I disagree. The difference is that in one case you might decide "I wouldn't do that but I'm OK with someone else doing it" and on the other you are deciding " I wouldn't do it AND I object to anyone else doing it". I think that is a fundamental difference.

It is not the same, it's entirely different, I'm simply making the point if you can't take a life (or indeed rear an animal and then take it's life), why are you happy to live in blissful ignorance of the way that animal lived and died for you, so you can have it on a plate and pretend it's just another factory product.

The fact you think of farming animals as no different to a sewage farm is proof of how detached you are from the living breathing creatures you buy in plastic wrapped polystyrene trays.

Which is the problem, you want animals to be a mass produced product, you want a massive choice, all year round and at a cheap price like other products then the animals must be treated as such to meet the demand.

It is just down the road from me.There is much opposition I really hope it dosen't go ahead