I believe that as a society, we have become completely disconnected
from our food. There is this cute little pic, taken from what appears
to be a newspaper clipping. We all point and laugh, we hope that it's a
wind-up - no one can really be that daft can they? - but deep down,
there's a part of me that is concerned it's all too real. Someone
really believes this to be true. I also have a song running through my
head at the moment, especially the line "Peaches come from a can, they
were put there by a man".
There
are a lot of ways that I see this disconnect - especially regarding
meat. I saw someone ranting on about how ridiculous it was that a leg
of lamb now cost $35 and that put it totally out of her price range. I
don't think she realised that it was the wrong season for fresh lamb and
we'd had a very hard winter the year before.
Now let's
just stop and focus on that little bit for a moment. A hard winter
means lamb at Christmas four to six months later is expensive. Lambs
are usually born late Winter to early Spring. Down here in the South
Island of New Zealand, we can get sudden unexpected blizzards any time
from June to late September. We did a couple of years ago, I was stuck
inside for four days and completely grateful that I didn't have any
livestock at that point.
In my little area,
sheep-farming is predominant. I was talking to the manager of our local
large sheep estate and during that blizzard a couple of years ago, they
lost more than a thousand lambs. They were born during the blizzard
(sheep tend to do this, I think it's a survival trait). Lambs going
from over 30 degrees Celsius in the womb to minus zero air temperature
go into shock and die. Their little bodies don't have the resources yet
to keep themselves warm, and they're wet with amniotic fluids which
cools their bodies more quickly and sometimes freezes before they've
dried. Their mothers are generally covered in a layer of snow on the
ends of their wool and they can't completely envelop the lamb anyway.
The lamb's body temperature drops too fast and it kills them. A day or
two after birth, the lambs are better able to cope with a sudden drop in temperatures.
This
station generally runs about 10,000 head of sheep. I'm not sure what
percentage of that is ewes in lamb. I do know that most ewes have twins
and sometimes triplets. Because it's sheep, there is an expected rate
of mortality. It was explained to me as "Sheep just die sometimes, for
no real reason at all. It sometimes seems as though they go looking for
new dumb ways to die. The trick is to try to keep them alive for long
enough to make a few quid off them."
Even if that
thousand was 5% of their lambs for that year, that's still a
considerable amount. I suspect though it's more like 20 - 30%. Now
they have an amount of income they expect from the works in return for
all the lambs they sell them. There is nothing greedy about this (as
some have suggested), they get paid once a year and they have certain
costs that need to be covered to continue running. Things like wages,
vets, shearers, all the trappings to keep the animals well and healthy,
and more expensively, contained in their correct paddocks and poachers
kept out.
How would you cope with a 5% pay cut? What
about 20- 30%? Most people I know live week to week. 5% for an entire
year would cripple them. So the works pay more for the lambs. The
scarcity pushes the prices up. This isn't a new thing either. I know
for that year, the works was paying 30% more per lamb to keep their
farmers going so that there would be lamb next year and possibly hogget
in a few months. When the works pays 30% more, they charge more for the
meat that goes to the supermarket. They have operating costs like
staff wages etc to cover too.
And that's how a hard
winter increases the price of your leg of lamb at Christmas. I also
know that several farmers were disheartened by the way it dropped back
down to a more normal rate the following year.
Now
let's just take that a wee step further. I've seen a lot of stuff this
year regarding factory farming animals. I've seen pictures of sows in
farrowing crates with captions about how she spends her entire life
stuck like this. Tragically, this creates two problems for those
supporting the factory farming issues.
Firstly, a
farrowing crate is used purely for farrowing. The sow has her litter of
piglets (this is what farrowing means) and is in this crate for 1-3
weeks (it varies) until the piglets are big enough and strong enough to
get out from under their mother and she has less ability to eat them.
I
saw a number of things when my sow had her first litter of piglets. An adult pig getting up
from lying down is not a pretty or graceful event. They roll around
until they can get their feet under them to get up. 80 - 150kg of
clumsy animal rolling around. I saw two newborn piglets crushed when
Mum rolled on them trying to get up to show me how clever she'd been.
A
local pig farmer told me that eating piglets is more common with gilts
having their first litter. She's a little confused about what has just
happened, as many new mothers are, then something that smells like food
crawls over her face.
Before this farmer began using farrowing
crates, he had a very hard time staying in business and keeping staff.
There is nothing that drives staff morale down more than getting up
after a small storm in the night to find out that many of the sows had
panicked and there's at least a 50% mortality rate in the piglets just
from the storm. I mentioned a 5% loss in sheep farmers - here 25% is
normal and expected but it can be over 50%. When you have to go and pick up several thousand dead piglets in a morning, it's a truly awful way to start your day.
Now, a
gestation crate or sow stall is different. This isn't used for
farrowing. This is used to keep a sow caged until she farrows. This is
the crate or stall that she may spend most of her life in. This is
awful and cruel and I support the
fact that they have been banned in NZ. What was that? Oh yes, they've already been banned (2010 I believe) to be completely phased out by the end of next year.
But somehow,
a 50% piglet mortality is kinder and less cruel than a sow in farrowing
crate for a couple of weeks? I challenge that assertion in anyone who wants to make it. What
kind of twisted, sick individual can honestly accept this as truth?
How is half your piglets dead better than 1-3 weeks in a farrowing
crate? Most sows walk happily into them and lie down. They don't have
to work for their feed, they get to rest after the birth of anything up
to 25 piglets and they are warm and sheltered.
I've spoken to
people who believe that if a sow has plenty of room to move, in a lovely
spacious shed then she won't roll on her piglets or harm them in any
way. These are again people who have no ideas of the reality. Unlike
many mammals, a sow must lie down to feed her piglets. When the piglets
have fed, they pile on top of Mum (you see this in cats too) and as
close to Mum as they can get for the warmth and comfort. It really
doesn't matter how much space the sow and piglets have - they'll all be
together in one small part of that space.
The second
part of the issue with referring to farrowing crates as sow stalls or
even as similar to sow stalls is that when you use the wrong words in
your protests you are ranting about things that
don't actually happen. What this does is show your
ignorance which makes you someone to ignore. It doesn't matter how
well-intentioned you are or even if you're protesting something that
genuinely needs to be stopped, if you're waxing lyrical over an issue
like this and the words you're using aren't what you really mean, you
seem to be clearly poorly educated in your issue and not worth giving
air time to.
There was a video doing the rounds of some activists breaking into a
pig farm at night. They made much of how startled and nervous the
piglets were. They showed all the rats running around. They spoke of
how awful it was to see 20 piglets cramped into such a small space.
Please
tell me how someone breaking into your home and shining lights attached
to video cameras in your face in the middle of the night would leave
you calm and unruffled? Please explain to me how that should be even
less if it happened to your children? Remembering that these were
piglets of only a few months old.
I have heard from a
fairly reliable source that the rats were released by the activists.
Truth? I don't know. The presence of rats however, only shows that
there is adequate feed and ventilation available. It is harder to
control rats in a free-range environment and if you want to consider
something a little scary, I used to buy a brand of pig pellets that the
rats and mice left alone. I didn't have to put it in tightly lidded
bins or anything. You have to wonder what could possibly be in this
feed that the vermin wouldn't touch it? If you leave poison around
(even in bait stations) you run the risk of potentially poisoning your
pigs. If not from direct contact with the poison, from when they eat
dead rats - and they will. Traps are difficult with rats and can only
catch one at a time. Lots of cats and dogs is a better option, but will
never keep the vermin population down to zero.
20
piglets is one litter. This is one family of siblings, all together
nice and cozy. A sleeping room in a preschool could potentially look
similar too. Miss Eight's preschool had little cot spaces like cubby
holes up the wall in the nursery. Three layers of what were effectively
baby sleeping cages. It was a clever way to make the most of the space
they had, but when I say it like that, it sounds rather terrible
doesn't it?
Don't forget, as many people seem to,
that the perfect end result for organisations like SAFE and PETA is that
we all become vegan. Because killing our own kind is so much better
and far more ethical. I cannot be vegetarian. My body is built in such
a way that I don't absorb iron from non-meat sources. I quickly become
very sick and anaemic, even when I'm making sure to have a healthy and
balanced vegetarian diet - yes I know there is more to it than just not
eating meat.
Our bodies are designed to be omnivores.
This is in our very physiology. From the type of teeth we have and the
way they are structured to our digestive system. Having political views
to make that "not for you" is one thing and that is fine. Having a
body type that remains healthy on this type of diet is another thing,
and that is also fine. Telling the rest of the world that they should
live unnaturally and make themselves ill for your politics or beliefs is
arrogant. Anyone who is truly sucked in to that is a prime example of
Darwinism in action.
Now when there are people who are still objecting to the prices of food, who seem to treat increases in the prices of food as something completely unfair and rude that has been done to them and seem to believe they have a right to cheap food what is to be done?
"I'll eat free-range pork and eggs when they come down in price" they say. Or "These free-range farmers are just cashing in on a fad, they're just being greedy." But at the same time they're often the people complaining about factory farming practices.
You can't have it both ways. Free-ranging costs more for a number of reasons.
I do believe that free ranging is better. I like the taste of the meat more than the factory farmed stuff. If I can't afford to buy it (or couldn't before I moved to our block) then I would go without.
However, as long as there are people with the attitude that food should be cheap (and how dare these farmers actually be able to afford to live and pay their staff more than minimum wage?) then there will always be factory farming in one form or another. I am not saying it's right. I'm saying that the protests are aimed at the wrong part of the process. This is a supply and demand thing and a disconnect from what goes into growing an animal from paddock to plate and keeping it healthy enough to become food.
If you truly want to stop factory farming, become more involved in where your food comes from. Get your education from more balanced sources. Visit the farms, as I have, talk to the farmers or more importantly,
listen to them. See that money is just as tight for them as it is for you. If you want to stop it, create demand for the free-range. Stop buying the other stuff. Actually live by your proclaimed ideals. Be aware that a lot of the propoganda you hear is inflated, dramatised and made to cause an emotional reaction and that there may not be as much truth in what you see than it seems on the surface.
