goodbyes
Yesterday was (probably) the last lab I'll have this semester in the dairy barn. I probably won't get to see the chicks again, or the piglets, or some of the cows. We went to weigh our chicks the other day and I said goodbye to them and the pigs. Chances are these animals will either be slaughtered in a few weeks or sent to be breeders, or maybe continue to be research subjects. I'm sad for them, and weirded out by the other students' not caring. Some people picked the chicks up by one wing to weigh them and didn't seem to care if it hurt them or not. I bet if those people had pet birds they wouldn't be handling them that way.
I said goodbye to the piglets too. There's one that became my favourite over the past couple of weeks. All the pigs are friendly but this one was really sweet and one of the only pigs that wasn't scared when you put your hand above her to give her scratches. She loves having her neck scratched and climbs up on the side of the pen to see you. Her ear tag says 141 but I just called her little girl.
Here is a video of her pen (she comes up to sniff the camera) http://video.tinypic.com/player.php?v=2mmihwl
And our chickies.
some of the boys
some of the girls
It's strange. Being in a program that deals largely with "animal agriculture," especially one of my courses, Animal Production Systems, you get this weird feeling. I can't really describe what it is, btu I can say, you learn that what the 'animal rights people' say is true. There are some differences between the US and Canada, but ultimately, everything the activists try to tell you about is true. In the production systems class, we've covered poultry and some cattle so far.
We spent a whole lecture on poultry welfare and learned that yes, egg laying hens are kept in teeny tiny wire cages their whole short lives,with less space than a sheet of paper, their beaks do get cut off, and that chicks do hatch in drawers with hundreds of other chicks and no mother in sight. In Canada we don't even have free range farms that sell eggs or chicken meat to stores because our weather is too cold to allow the birds to go outside year round. Our free run barns allow the birds to move around, scratch, dustbathe, socialize, and nest, but are still extremely crowded and do not allow the birds to go outside. 'Meat birds' do keel over and die because they can't support their huge muscle mass, and leg problems are common. Hens who provide eggs for people to eat spend their year-long lives in battery cages with 4-7 other hens, if they're lucky and the farmer chooses to follow the voluntary guidelines for stocking density. Battery cage barns, cattle feedlots and broiler chicken barns don't have to be cleaned out until the flock/herd leaves the barn for slaughter, which allows the manure to reach piles of 3 feet high in egg barns, causes leg problems for cattle who constantly stand in their own waste and wet dirt or litter, and air quality to be terrible despite the ventilation. The reasons we use battery cages are economics and efficiency (it's less human labour when birds are caged & everything is automated). Hens that have hormonally-driven nesting instincts are frustrated when they lay their eggs and are unable to make a nest for them. Their bones are brittle because so much of their own skeletal calcium stores goes towards producing one egg a day, and because they can't perch on anything or move around without crawling over top of one of their cage mates. There is nothing for them to dustbathe in but they still go through the motions of it. Debeaking causes acute pain and after the beak heals, the nerve endings that have been severed in the beak form a mass of scarring that gives the hens' brains constant signals of pain for the rest of their lives. They don't want to eat because it hurts all the time. In the US, birds are forced to moult when food and water is with held, and then start a second year of laying. Our hens get slaughtered after a year of living in cages pumping out eggs because it's more cost effective. If something like avian flu breaks out and the birds need to be "emergency depopulated", we pump gas into the barns but can't do it fast enough to ensure that each bird dies quickly & painlessly, and many freeze to death. Turkeys are always artificially inseminated now, since we've bred them to have such large breasts that they can't mount each other. AI is used on chickens too since many roosters we've bred have actually lost the instinct to court females, and end up hurting them when they try to mate.
For part of the production systems class, we visited the campus poultry research station. When you see chickens up close, they are really beautiful birds. They're proud looking, and bigger than I expected, and have such nice feathers. The birds in the battery cages just stand there because there's nothing for them to do. Some pecked at the cage bars over and over. They only kept 4 hens in each cage at the research station, but even then the birds had trouble turning around and moving to different parts of the cage. Some birds were constantly rubbing their faces against the bars and in some rooms there were masses of flies around the cages. The floors of the cages are slanted so the eggs roll onto the collection belt and the hens can't stand comfortably on the wire floor because they slip. Feathers were missing on their heads, necks, wings, tails...the man who gave us the tour said the feather loss wasn't a concern because it was warm enough in the building for the hens, and that the free run birds also had feather loss. All the birds had lovely full feathering when we went into the free run part of the barn, though they were very crowded.. There were even individual battery cages, with one hen per cage (these are not used in the industry.) Some of them kept circling around and around. The tour guide showed us the debeaker and told us how it was a humane procedure to prevent the birds from pecking each other too much. All the rooms were quite dusty and smelled despite the fans.
We went to a 'beef cattle' reserach facility as well. There was an indoor feedlot where a few cattle were kept in each pen. The pen floor was covered with shavings according to the tour guide, but all you could see was wet dirt. The guide mentioned that some cattle have genetic leg problems, and I thought the constantly wet muddy floor of their pens probably made them worse. One beautiful steer with post legs tried to stand up when we went in front of the pen he was in. It took him 15 minutes to stand up fully, walk over & step down into the feeding area - a distance of maybe 8 feet altogether. The guide said the steer would be slaughtered the next week due to his bad legs. There was nowhere clean for the cattle to lay down. The floor in the feeding area of the pens was wet concrete. Many of the cattle were continuously mouthing the plastic waterers but not drinking out of them. Some of the cattle were coughing. The guide said typically in a feedlot like this one, each animal would have 62 square feet of space, about 16 animals per pen. That's less than 8x8 feet each. If you've ever seen a black angus or a charolais cow, they are about 8 feet long if not more, and probably 4 feet wide. There was a gutter running through each pen that was supposed to be where the manure went, but it was clear the system wasn't working very well because the floors of the pens were so dirty. The guide said that the pens were cleaned each time a new group of cattle was to be brought in (once or twice a year). He showed us one pen that hadn't been cleaned before the current animals moved in, and the muck was about a foot deeper than any of the other pens. There were also outdoor pens where the cows and calves were kept. The floors were concrete and cows were licking the metal gate constantly. The guide told us that cows are first bred at 15months of age even though they aren't mature until 3-4 years old. They're bred every year, meaning that the cows are pregnant while they're still nursing a calf and still growing themselves. The 15 month old cows were much smaller than the cows in the cow-calf pens. The guide said that one year, every single cow had to have a c-section to deliver their calves. Almost all of the 'beef' cattle in Canada are given hormone implants to make them grow faster. There were also some pastured cattle, mostly cows and calves. The farmer said the animals are less likely to have foot and udder problems when out on pasture, and there is less sickness. The manure pit was sunken but not covered and the smell on the farm, even outside, was strong enough that we could smell it from the bus before we even reached the driveway. The feed smelled terribly of fermentation. There were seagulls everywhere and they apparently fed on the cattle feed as it was stored outside and just covered by a plastic sheet. In class we recently learned that the top 3 problems in the dairy industry are leg problems, reproductive problems and chronic mastitis.
I didn't realize how long this was going to be. It's just crazy. We haven't even covered pig farming yet and have just started on dairy cows. Part of me always wanted to think that the situations described in the 'animal rights' flyers and whatnot were worst case scenarios in the industry, but in this class I found out otherwise. In our poultry welfare lecture, "welfare" was described as 'being morally acceptable to use animals as long as they're provided a happy life free of pain & suffering, including emotional pain, and a painless death.' There are so many violations of welfare in this industry I don't even know why welfare is a concern. Because you're damn right those piglets in my photos have had their tails cut off, pieces of their ears cut out, and their balls and tusks pulled out without any pain relief. Those chicks have metal tags put through their wings, the equivalent of using a stapler to put a 4inch wide piece of metal through a human arm. The birds at the research station had their beaks sliced off and the cattle castrated with no pain relief. One of the cows in our dairy barn even had her tail cut off for whatever reason. The cows in our dairy barn, the birds in batter cages and the pigs in breeding stalls live in spaces that could have been built right around them. The cows can't even lay down fully on their sides like they need to for lateral recumbent sleep, and are never put outside or released from their tie stalls. One of my classmates told me yesterday that she'd noticed a cow with an upper respiratory infection, so she told one of the caretakers. Apparently no one else had noticed the cow's illness, not even the people who feed the cows each day, and the cow was immediately put down. Not even a consideration of treating her for something that simple.
Honestly, the slaughter of farm animals itself is not a huge concern to me. Slaughter is just a small fraction of the lives of these animals, and having to live under the conditions they do is so much worse to me. I don't see how we can get away with treating creatures like this. All the research stations and the dairy barn are inspected a couple of times a year by the school's animal care committee, which doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with the way the animals are housed or mutilated.
On one hand, it's good to get some perspective from the industry's side, but it really blows my mind how monstrous people are to these animals.
I said goodbye to the piglets too. There's one that became my favourite over the past couple of weeks. All the pigs are friendly but this one was really sweet and one of the only pigs that wasn't scared when you put your hand above her to give her scratches. She loves having her neck scratched and climbs up on the side of the pen to see you. Her ear tag says 141 but I just called her little girl.
Here is a video of her pen (she comes up to sniff the camera) http://video.tinypic.com/player.php?v=2mmihwl
And our chickies.
some of the boys
some of the girls
It's strange. Being in a program that deals largely with "animal agriculture," especially one of my courses, Animal Production Systems, you get this weird feeling. I can't really describe what it is, btu I can say, you learn that what the 'animal rights people' say is true. There are some differences between the US and Canada, but ultimately, everything the activists try to tell you about is true. In the production systems class, we've covered poultry and some cattle so far.
We spent a whole lecture on poultry welfare and learned that yes, egg laying hens are kept in teeny tiny wire cages their whole short lives,with less space than a sheet of paper, their beaks do get cut off, and that chicks do hatch in drawers with hundreds of other chicks and no mother in sight. In Canada we don't even have free range farms that sell eggs or chicken meat to stores because our weather is too cold to allow the birds to go outside year round. Our free run barns allow the birds to move around, scratch, dustbathe, socialize, and nest, but are still extremely crowded and do not allow the birds to go outside. 'Meat birds' do keel over and die because they can't support their huge muscle mass, and leg problems are common. Hens who provide eggs for people to eat spend their year-long lives in battery cages with 4-7 other hens, if they're lucky and the farmer chooses to follow the voluntary guidelines for stocking density. Battery cage barns, cattle feedlots and broiler chicken barns don't have to be cleaned out until the flock/herd leaves the barn for slaughter, which allows the manure to reach piles of 3 feet high in egg barns, causes leg problems for cattle who constantly stand in their own waste and wet dirt or litter, and air quality to be terrible despite the ventilation. The reasons we use battery cages are economics and efficiency (it's less human labour when birds are caged & everything is automated). Hens that have hormonally-driven nesting instincts are frustrated when they lay their eggs and are unable to make a nest for them. Their bones are brittle because so much of their own skeletal calcium stores goes towards producing one egg a day, and because they can't perch on anything or move around without crawling over top of one of their cage mates. There is nothing for them to dustbathe in but they still go through the motions of it. Debeaking causes acute pain and after the beak heals, the nerve endings that have been severed in the beak form a mass of scarring that gives the hens' brains constant signals of pain for the rest of their lives. They don't want to eat because it hurts all the time. In the US, birds are forced to moult when food and water is with held, and then start a second year of laying. Our hens get slaughtered after a year of living in cages pumping out eggs because it's more cost effective. If something like avian flu breaks out and the birds need to be "emergency depopulated", we pump gas into the barns but can't do it fast enough to ensure that each bird dies quickly & painlessly, and many freeze to death. Turkeys are always artificially inseminated now, since we've bred them to have such large breasts that they can't mount each other. AI is used on chickens too since many roosters we've bred have actually lost the instinct to court females, and end up hurting them when they try to mate.
For part of the production systems class, we visited the campus poultry research station. When you see chickens up close, they are really beautiful birds. They're proud looking, and bigger than I expected, and have such nice feathers. The birds in the battery cages just stand there because there's nothing for them to do. Some pecked at the cage bars over and over. They only kept 4 hens in each cage at the research station, but even then the birds had trouble turning around and moving to different parts of the cage. Some birds were constantly rubbing their faces against the bars and in some rooms there were masses of flies around the cages. The floors of the cages are slanted so the eggs roll onto the collection belt and the hens can't stand comfortably on the wire floor because they slip. Feathers were missing on their heads, necks, wings, tails...the man who gave us the tour said the feather loss wasn't a concern because it was warm enough in the building for the hens, and that the free run birds also had feather loss. All the birds had lovely full feathering when we went into the free run part of the barn, though they were very crowded.. There were even individual battery cages, with one hen per cage (these are not used in the industry.) Some of them kept circling around and around. The tour guide showed us the debeaker and told us how it was a humane procedure to prevent the birds from pecking each other too much. All the rooms were quite dusty and smelled despite the fans.
We went to a 'beef cattle' reserach facility as well. There was an indoor feedlot where a few cattle were kept in each pen. The pen floor was covered with shavings according to the tour guide, but all you could see was wet dirt. The guide mentioned that some cattle have genetic leg problems, and I thought the constantly wet muddy floor of their pens probably made them worse. One beautiful steer with post legs tried to stand up when we went in front of the pen he was in. It took him 15 minutes to stand up fully, walk over & step down into the feeding area - a distance of maybe 8 feet altogether. The guide said the steer would be slaughtered the next week due to his bad legs. There was nowhere clean for the cattle to lay down. The floor in the feeding area of the pens was wet concrete. Many of the cattle were continuously mouthing the plastic waterers but not drinking out of them. Some of the cattle were coughing. The guide said typically in a feedlot like this one, each animal would have 62 square feet of space, about 16 animals per pen. That's less than 8x8 feet each. If you've ever seen a black angus or a charolais cow, they are about 8 feet long if not more, and probably 4 feet wide. There was a gutter running through each pen that was supposed to be where the manure went, but it was clear the system wasn't working very well because the floors of the pens were so dirty. The guide said that the pens were cleaned each time a new group of cattle was to be brought in (once or twice a year). He showed us one pen that hadn't been cleaned before the current animals moved in, and the muck was about a foot deeper than any of the other pens. There were also outdoor pens where the cows and calves were kept. The floors were concrete and cows were licking the metal gate constantly. The guide told us that cows are first bred at 15months of age even though they aren't mature until 3-4 years old. They're bred every year, meaning that the cows are pregnant while they're still nursing a calf and still growing themselves. The 15 month old cows were much smaller than the cows in the cow-calf pens. The guide said that one year, every single cow had to have a c-section to deliver their calves. Almost all of the 'beef' cattle in Canada are given hormone implants to make them grow faster. There were also some pastured cattle, mostly cows and calves. The farmer said the animals are less likely to have foot and udder problems when out on pasture, and there is less sickness. The manure pit was sunken but not covered and the smell on the farm, even outside, was strong enough that we could smell it from the bus before we even reached the driveway. The feed smelled terribly of fermentation. There were seagulls everywhere and they apparently fed on the cattle feed as it was stored outside and just covered by a plastic sheet. In class we recently learned that the top 3 problems in the dairy industry are leg problems, reproductive problems and chronic mastitis.
I didn't realize how long this was going to be. It's just crazy. We haven't even covered pig farming yet and have just started on dairy cows. Part of me always wanted to think that the situations described in the 'animal rights' flyers and whatnot were worst case scenarios in the industry, but in this class I found out otherwise. In our poultry welfare lecture, "welfare" was described as 'being morally acceptable to use animals as long as they're provided a happy life free of pain & suffering, including emotional pain, and a painless death.' There are so many violations of welfare in this industry I don't even know why welfare is a concern. Because you're damn right those piglets in my photos have had their tails cut off, pieces of their ears cut out, and their balls and tusks pulled out without any pain relief. Those chicks have metal tags put through their wings, the equivalent of using a stapler to put a 4inch wide piece of metal through a human arm. The birds at the research station had their beaks sliced off and the cattle castrated with no pain relief. One of the cows in our dairy barn even had her tail cut off for whatever reason. The cows in our dairy barn, the birds in batter cages and the pigs in breeding stalls live in spaces that could have been built right around them. The cows can't even lay down fully on their sides like they need to for lateral recumbent sleep, and are never put outside or released from their tie stalls. One of my classmates told me yesterday that she'd noticed a cow with an upper respiratory infection, so she told one of the caretakers. Apparently no one else had noticed the cow's illness, not even the people who feed the cows each day, and the cow was immediately put down. Not even a consideration of treating her for something that simple.
Honestly, the slaughter of farm animals itself is not a huge concern to me. Slaughter is just a small fraction of the lives of these animals, and having to live under the conditions they do is so much worse to me. I don't see how we can get away with treating creatures like this. All the research stations and the dairy barn are inspected a couple of times a year by the school's animal care committee, which doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with the way the animals are housed or mutilated.
On one hand, it's good to get some perspective from the industry's side, but it really blows my mind how monstrous people are to these animals.