You know, Bill, I think that posting things to someone you know is a vegetarian about poor little bunnies being served up for dinner and such is a bit cruel or something. I have lots of friends who meat, and we all get along great together, but they don't taunt me with what poor animal they gobbled up with gusto the night before. So I think that from now on, when people do that, I will answer their posts with something that might make them slightly more knowledgeable about some aspect of vegetarianism, the animal rights movement, or factory farming.
So here is an interview that the venerable White House journalist, Helen Thomas, is conducting. I'm going to pull one paragraph out of it and put it right here because I think it is so compelling, but the whole article is definitely worth someone's time:
Helen Thomas: She has 150 cows and calves at her farm, and says many mothers and daughters form deep bonds, as the family drama involving two cows, both called Dolly, indicates.
Rosamund Young: To be honest, we hadn’t really thought it out, the significance of a mother’s love to the daughter, because we had been brought up to farm fairly conventionally, and you didn’t think about the cows, other than just doing their job; they’d have a calf and then when the calf was weaned, they’d have another calf, and they’d devote themselves to that. But one day when his heifer had a very traumatic experience, and she gave birth to a dead calf, and she prolapsed and she was in a lot of trouble. We had to have the vet to stitch the wound back in. She was unable to stand, she looked very exhausted, so we covered her with a blanket and nursed her and propped her up with bales of hay so she could be comfortable. And then when we went back an hour or so later, she’d disappeared, and she’d staggered slowly across the farm, field after field, and she found her old mother who had had two calves since, and she just sort of collapsed at her mother’s feet, and the mother was licking her all over the face and just loving her. If the heifer hadn’t been ill, she and her mother probably wouldn’t have had time to talk to each other, because the mother was busy with her latest calf, and it was quite moving to us that she did, and they stayed together for several days.
Okay, back to the beginning:
ABC Radio National - Background Briefing: 8 February 2004 - Factory Farming: Enough is Enough?
Program Transcript
Helen Thomas: Every day, a staggering number of animals are butchered for human consumption all over the world. But while we eat them in their tens of millions, we really know very little about how they cope with the lives we force them to live.
Lack of space in factory farms, little shelter for those outdoors, poor diet, and long road trips to their final destinations, inhumane treatment all along this production line. So what does it add up to in terms of our care and our responsibility?
Welcome to Background Briefing; I’m Helen Thomas.
Now the European Union is in the process of overhauling many practices involving farm animals like hens, calves and pigs.
Its new policies start with the recognition these animals are sentient beings.
So where does this leave a gluttonous, meat-eating Western world? Nowhere good, according to Matthew Scully, a special assistant and senior speech writer for President George W. Bush.
In his book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals the Call to Mercy, Scully writes:
Many people, when they examine their beliefs about animals, will find I think, that they hold radically contradictory views, allowing for benevolence one moment, and disregard the next. And the reality is, that we have a choice of one or the other. As a matter of conscience, however, we must ask ourselves which outlook is truer, which is closer to our heart, which attitudes leaves us feeling better and worthier when we act upon it, and then follow that conviction where it leads. And when we fail to act consistently with our own moral principles, when we profess one thing and do another, we must be willing to call that error by its name. It is hypocrisy.
Helen Thomas: Here in Australia, more than 8-million cattle, 1-million calves, 13-1/2-million sheep, nearly 17-million lambs, almost 6-million pigs and an unbelievable 42-milliion chickens were slaughtered last year.
That’s a great deal of killing indeed, yet a mere drop of blood on the international slaughterhouse floor.
In the US alone, it’s estimated one-million chickens are killed every hour; that’s 24-million chickens a day, almost 9-billion a year.
But how do these animals actually live before they die? Do they enjoy life, however short, or simply endure, through loneliness, pain and awful frustration?
Now it seems many of us can’t stand to even think about this. We say, almost instinctively, ‘No, don’t tell me any more.
Even people in the highest positions try to evade these facts, as Matthew Scully relates from his office at the White House.
Matthew Scully: I’m amazed Helen, at how many people, when I talk about farm animals, say to me about the factory farming, ‘I don’t want to know’. I spoke recently to a prominent conservative writer in America, and he said to me exactly that, ‘I don’t want to know’. And this is a man who makes his living passing fairly harsh moral judgements about other practices, but when it comes to cruelty to animals, that’s his answer, that’s the best he can do, ‘I don’t want to know’.
Helen Thomas: And what do you say to that?
Matthew Scully: I say it’s not a very good answer. I say that you have an obligation to know. You have an obligation to know the consequences of your own action. Cruelty to animals may not be the gravest of human sins, but it’s certainly among the most degrading. It’s an abusive power, and when people take advantage of animals and do cruel and wicked things to them, they debase themselves, and they act in a way that we often call less than human.
Helen Thomas:On the other side of the world, John Webster, renowned Professor of Animal Husbandry at the University of Bristol, is finishing his second book devoted to animal welfare. He’s worked hard over the past 25 years to know how animals react in certain situations. So he knows a great deal about sheep, for instance, to focus on just one creature we Australians have relied on for so long.
He has little doubt the 55,000 on the ill-fated Cormo Express suffered on that extraordinary voyage last year, after the vessel was turned away from Saudi Arabia and drifted for weeks before finally docking in Eritrea.
But John Webster’s sure of one thing: at least these sheep didn’t have an anticipation of their fate.
John Webster: I think it would be entirely wrong to assume that these sheep were aware that they were being transported long distance to be killed by Halal slaughter. I think we can take that element of suffering out of the equation. There’s plenty left, but the anticipation of horrors down the line are probably not in the sheep. But the other thing is of course that when they’re faced by pain, severe pain, it can be very distressing indeed because not understanding something like severe pain or severe fear is really as awful as understanding it. Now in the case of an animal that can’t actually rationalise the consequences of pain, it can be awful all the time. In some cases it can be better, in some cases it can be worse.
Helen Thomas: And do they feel emotional distress, if we want to use that term? I mean going on long journeys, whether it be overseas or just to the local abattoirs.
John Webster: You know, they don’t actually know that they’re going to an abattoir. They feel acute fear. For the most part they adapt on lorries and things, they adapt to the fear, and so long as there’s no immediate threat, there’s all evidence that the problem of anxiety disappears, provided they’re with others of their kind. But then other things like heat, cold, exhaustion, dehydration, you know, hunger, thirst, all those kick in.
Helen Thomas: Animal welfare has long been an issue of major study at the University of Bristol.
John Webster: We have studied pain, and interestingly enough, the perception of pain is much the same in humans and horses and cows and chickens, all have the capacity to feel pain, and be concerned by pain. We also ask them what matters in life, what they’re prepared to work for, and what doesn’t matter in life. And so for things like laying hens, we can define what they really need and what they don’t need. And this has led to things that the general public don’t particularly approve of. The free range system, which is now becoming very popular in the UK, we have about 5,000 birds, nominally on free range, appeal hugely to the consumer, but chickens don’t much like it. It’s a crowd, it’s too many, and they can’t cope. Whereas if you build them what we call the enriched cage, it’s not perfect, it’s like a sort of Eastern European Communist flat, it’s not a prison, it’s not great, but it’s not bad, and it’s better than living in a mob.
Helen Thomas: So chooks would prefer to be living by themselves, or with one or two others?
John Webster: Chooks would prefer to be living in a group of about three or four, which is what, of course, they grew up in the jungle, you know, probably with one cockerel with about half a dozen hens; they are great in the social group of about five or six and no more. But when they get to 5,000 birds, they can’t cope, they panic, which is hardly surprising.
Helen Thomas: John Webster, author of the upcoming book, Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden, maintains it doesn’t matter how we perceive animals, what’s important is how they perceive themselves.
Sheep, it seems, can withstand great hardship, the toughest of tough conditions, and often just won’t quit, even when it’s in their best to do so.
John Webster: One of the problems with poor old sheep is they are so incredibly tough. Pigs, largely can’t sweat, and therefore can’t cope with heat stress and things, but if you put them in really bad conditions in transport, they die. So on the whole, people tend to look after pigs rather better in transit, because dead pigs are not much use. Poor old sheep are incredibly tough and therefore they do actually survive for days and weeks on end.
Helen Thomas: And cattle?
John Webster: Cattle are rather similar to sheep actually, yes, because they have a very good capacity to avoid heat stress. They probably hit exhaustion quicker than sheep but yes, both of them suffer for the fact that they’re tough, because death is the end of suffering, and the animals that suffer the most are the ones that live the longest, if you see what I mean.
Helen Thomas: On the other hand, sheep can be quite brilliant. In fact in some instances, it seems our woolly friends have much sharper memories than, well, us.
John Webster: Sheep are very good at being sheep, and a lot of people think sheep are stupid, but that’s because we put them under stress. Sheep are actually brilliant at certain things, which are necessary to being sheep. This is not my work, but it’s work from people like Keith Kendrick, who shows that sheep have the capacity to recognise 200 or 300 faces from a photograph of different sheep. They not only actually recognise other sheep, but they will recognise photographs of other sheep. So they have an uncanny ability to know who is who in a big flock. They obviously as we all know, have an uncanny ability to recognise the sound of their lamb at a great distance, and they react emotionally in the same way as we do, and some fairly advanced sort of work, recording from neuron to the brain, and things of this nature, which shows that for example, you show a sheep a picture of a human or a dog, and it’s frightened. You show a sheep a photograph of a trough of food, and it’s positive, and it’ll go down that line, if it’s the old maze; so you see a picture of a dog down one side, a picture of food down the other side, it’ll always go down the side of food. You show a picture of a human carrying a sack of food, and then suddenly, you know, the human’s suddenly turned from being – it’s taken two individual images, food, human, one good, one bad, it’s looked down the line, it’s thought, human with food, on balance, good. And so it makes decisions like that. Which are emotional decisions. But sheep are very good at being sheep.
Helen Thomas: So in a sense, it’s surprising that sheep can actually focus and recognise things in a photograph.
John Webster: On yes. You can even deconstruct the photograph. This is classic work from Kendrick in Cambridge, you can even deconstruct the photograph, you can just show the eyes and the horns, and they will recognise a sheep from the eyes and the horns. They create images exactly the same way as we do. We’ve all evolved to succeed in different niches, and sheep have evolved remarkably well at being sheep. I can’t cope with 50 students, but a sheep can cope with 300 different sheep and recognise them all as individuals, which I can’t do.
Helen Thomas: Is the way we treat animals really a measure of our humanity? Matthew Scully, senior speech writer to George W. Bush, certainly believes so.
Matthew Scully: One common response is a certain kind of exasperation with the subject, and almost a certain despair over the subject, because people say, "Well you know, farming has always been harsh. When you’re raising these animals to be killed anyway, you know, it hardly matters that they suffer a little bit along the way". And what I try to point out to people is that this is really something entirely new. Factory farming is a radical departure from the practices and standards of traditional farming. It wasn’t always this way.
Helen Thomas: In what sense?
Matthew Scully: Well it wasn’t this way in intensity. Livestock farmers didn’t have to produce as much. You know it’s some mystery how it came about. It didn’t come about because people want to be deliberately cruel to farm animals, it came about because it was convenient, efficient and it saved people money. It’s an economic reality. And if you follow only economic reasoning, there’s no reason to oppose it. But you know, human beings aren’t just economic creatures. We’re moral creatures, and so moral values cannot constantly be subordinated to economic values, like lower cost. So what I tried to point out to people is that this is something qualitatively different. This is a world apart from the traditional farm. There’s not the consolation any more of feeling that the animals had something like a life before their end came. The reality is that they’re subjected to lives of constant privation, in the case of pigs, never even going outdoors, feeling the sunshine, mixing with one another, raising their own young for a certain period. It’s just endless privation and misery.
Helen Thomas: Scully’s appalled by so-called ‘hunters’, men and women armed with the most lethal weapon s money can buy, who pay for animals to be released in game parks for them to shoot. But the most confronting chapter in his book, ‘Dominion’, focuses on the factory ‘farming’ of pigs in America, North Carolina, to be exact.
This is what he saw at one piggery:
The sows each weigh 500 pounds. The crates are 7-feet long, and in width, less than twice the length of my 11-inch notepad. ‘Not much room, is there?’ I ask. ‘How can they even lie down on their sides?’ The answer can be seen in the swollen legs of the sows standing, or trying to stand. To lie on their sides, a powerful inclination during months of confinement in 22-inches of space, they try to put their legs through the bars into a neighbouring crate. Fragile from the pig’s abnormally large weight, and from rarely standing or walking, and then only on concrete, their legs get crushed and broken. About half of those pigs, whose legs can be seen, appear to have sprained or fractured limbs, never examined by a vet, never splinted, never even noticed any more.
We keep walking. Sores, tumours, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting and other vices as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical vacuum chewing on nothing at all. Stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And social defeat, lots of it in every third or fourth stall, some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you.
Helen Thomas: But what disturbed Matthew Scully most when he visited these piggeries? The physical or emotional abuses of these animals?
Matthew Scully: Just seeing this moral void in which no care at all is extended to these animals, as animals. You know, no veterinary standards obtain any more because the veterinarians basically serve the interests of the company, and it seems to me have forgotten the obligations of the veterinary oath they’ve taken. You know, the most disturbing thing which I tried to capture in that particular chapter, which as you say is the chapter that seems to speak to people the most, is the sheer loneliness of the factory farm. You wander around there, and these creatures are basically warehoused and you have to search for a person, for somebody whose job it is, and responsibility it is, to care for those animals, and to make sure they’re not suffering too much. And it’s so mechanised now and it’s only going to become more so in the future, unless something is done. And it does occur to you to ask when you’re there, ‘Where’s the good shepherd? What would the good shepherd think of this if he could see the way human beings are treating these helpless creatures?’
Helen Thomas: Let’s remember, this was what Matthew Scully saw in North Carolina.
As we know, the European Union’s been wrestling with these issues for the past few years, and it’s now illegal to keep sows in separate stalls or tethers. Don Broom, Vice Chair of the EU’s Animal Health and Welfare Panel, says it’s quite clear some systems cause some animals distress.
Don Broom: For example, if you keep sows in individual stalls, or if you keep them tethered all the time, then that causes significant welfare problems and the evidence for that is principally abnormal behaviour, abnormal physiology, changes in their ability to deal with diseases and so on. So if you keep social animals in individual pens all the time, then that causes significant problems for them.
Helen Thomas: In fact I was talking to a farmer the other day who’s indeed got out of intensive pig farming, but says that if it was really making them unhappy, they wouldn’t do well, and they do do well. That’s an old argument but how do you respond to that?
Don Broom: Well the first thing is, if you keep a person in solitary confinement and you feed them on a minimal diet, then they do survive, they don’t die, but that doesn’t mean that their welfare is good. So the fact that they do survive and grow and reproduce doesn’t mean that everything is OK. We’ve actually done comparative studies of different systems for keeping sows, including the keeping of sows in stalls. And what you find is that when the sows are kept in stalls, you see high levels of abnormal behaviour, particularly sterotypies such as bar biting, sham chewing, weaving movements of the head, and those sorts of movements are not shown by animals which are kept in good conditions, and they’re not shown by animals which are living in social groups. And they don’t have to be out of doors necessarily, but they do need something to root in, they need the social contact, and they need to have basically a reasonable amount of control over their interactions with their environment. Animals have problems if they can’t control a fair amount of what is happening to them.
Helen Thomas: Now here in Australia, the pig farming industry’s currently reviewing its code of practices.
Australian Pork Ltd., the national body for pig producers, declined to talk to Background Briefing, and was reluctant to take us through a local piggery.
But Paul Hemsworth is a regular visitor to many of our intensive farms. He’s the Director of the Animal Welfare Centre, a joint venture of Melbourne and Monash Universities and Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries.
Paul Hemsworth: The two common approaches that scientists use to assess animal welfare are firstly just looking at how well the animal adapts to its environment, so looking at whether or not there’s evidence of biological dysfunction, so for example, stress responses, extreme behavioural responses, and fitness effects like effects on health and injury, reproductive abnormalities etc. That’s one approach, and that’s an approach that I tend to favour. It’s a fairly conservative approach because it probably identifies those most serious conditions in terms of animal welfare. The other approach is actually looking at animal preferences, really asking the animal what it wants. We really don’t know if those two approaches provide the same answer.
Helen Thomas: And yet it’s hard, as an outsider I guess, to see how can the science be so different, how can looking at what animals prefer give us a different idea to what they don’t like, than say, trying to monitor their stress levels, if you like.
Paul Hemsworth: I have great faith actually, in terms of asking animals what they want. But I think at this point of time, their methodology’s limited. For example, a lot of the approaches that have looked at animal preferences, often look at short-term requirements. And so animals may make decisions in the short-term, they may also make decisions in terms of what they’re familiar with. An example is if you perhaps have animals on a flooring that may be a little bit injurious to their feet, and they create lameness problems. When exposed with the choice of either returning to that flooring or returning to an alternative flooring, they often choose the one they’re familiar with. At least in the short term. So there are still I think, some methodological issues that confront us when we try to ask animals what they want, particularly what they want in the long term.
Helen Thomas: The day we spoke, Hemsworth was on the move between Albury and Melbourne, busy with his current project looking at different types of housing for sows.But he admits that, at this point, most pigs are still kept indoors in Australia.
Paul Hemsworth: I think the industry is looking at alternative housing systems, but alternative housing systems that work. So for example, I’m currently funded- it’s a mixture of Federal government funding and industry funding- to look at housing breeding sows in large groups on litter indoors. Those systems look as though they may have tremendous potential but there are also some issues associated with those pigs. And one of the big issues is how you assemble those groups without getting too much aggression. Our work, I think when you look at the welfare research that’s been done to date, it’s fairly crude. We probably know very little about some of these animals we’re working with.
Helen Thomas: When you visit these places, are these animals happy? Would you say they were happy?
Paul Hemsworth: I find it very difficult to assess happiness. When I tend to look at the behaviour of these animals and when we tend to look at some of the stress hormones in these animals, I would say that when you compare the main housing systems, they often don’t differ that greatly. But what I think is important is that we need to fine tune these systems. I mean, what is the optimal space allowance, what is the optimum group size, what is the optimum physical environment that we need to provide?
Helen Thomas: Certainly at an international level, there’s faith we’re not too far behind European trends, where sow stalls and tethers are now banned by the EU.
Don Broom, Professor of Animal Welfare at Cambridge University’s vet school.
Don Broom: All pigs have to be provided with some opportunity for manipulating materials or for digging with their noses, so that’s part of the directive which applies to the whole of the European Union. That’s a recent directive, which has just come in, and there’s a period of phase-out for the older system. So we’re already seeing changes like that. And we also have a directive which says you can’t keep young calves in individual boxes where they can’t turn round and feed them on a diet which lacks fibre and lacks enough iron so that they become anaemic. So nobody in Europe is now allowed to do that, and we also have legislation which is going to result in the phasing out of battery cages for laying hens. So hens will have to be kept in a circumstance where they have a perch, where they have a nest box, where they have an opportunity to scratch and investigate their environment, and that’s going to result in very much better welfare for those birds. So there are really quite big changes occurring in the farming industry within Europe. Now some of those things are changing in Australia, and some of them have not occurred yet I suspect, but they might do in the future because the scientific information is just as valid in Australia as it is in Europe.
Helen Thomas: Changes afoot too, in Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. It’s drawing up a new National Animal Welfare Strategy, designed to encompass all animals, and ensure transparency in terms of the management and care of the creatures we farm.
But why should we care about any of this, given the fact that so many people live such hard lives and die so terribly?
How does Matthew Scully, the President’s man, answer that?
Matthew Scully: Well what I say is that it has the ring of an excuse. The fact is that it usually takes more time and effort to do the cruel thing than it does to do the kind thing. Take for example, what we were discussing, factory farming. You know, does it distract you in any way to feel compassion for cruelly treated animals and to take your business to humane farms, or not to eat meat at all? Does that effort distract you in any way from works of charity towards human beings from the good works you would do otherwise? No, not at all. It’s not an either/or. The reality is that human beings have many responsibilities in life and kindness to animals is among them. It may not be, as I say, the most urgent, but you know, when you neglect it, you have to answer for the wrong you do, just as you do elsewhere.
Helen Thomas: Then again, John Webster from Bristol University, says we don’t mean to be mean.
John Webster: Ninety-nine percent of abuses of animal welfare have nothing to do with cruelty. They have to do with keeping tens of thousands of broilers in a shed where they grow too fast, and they’re in pain for the last third of their lives. It has to do with shipping sheep vast distances on slow boats, and things of this nature, which is not deliberate cruelty, but it’s systematic abuse of animals because we’ve forgotten to consider them as individual, sentient beings. They’re just a commodity.
Helen Thomas: But a lot of people listening to this show would think, Well, they are. They are product, they are just a commodity.
John Webster: In our view they are, yes. But they don’t see it that way. Much of the research is designed actually to ask the animals the question, not to presume that we know whether they feel, or how much they feel, or what they feel, but actually to ask the questions, to see what matters to animals. The concept of sentience, which is now embraced in law in Europe, that food animals are for the most part sentient creatures, I don’t know about prawns, but the concept of that is that sentient animals are animals which have feelings, and these are feelings which matter to the animal.
Helen Thomas: One of the great characters in this international discussion about animal welfare, behaviour and humane practice is Temple Grandin.
An Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, she’s a rare breed indeed, a highly respected ‘reformer’, having redesigned livestock facilities all over the world.
She maintains that animal cruelty is often a matter of ‘bad becoming normal’, and was particularly angry about what happened with some old chickens in America’s huge ‘egg layer’ industry.
Temple Grandin: Some of the people in the US were taking the old hens and throwing them in garbage cans and suffocating them. And I think what happens is people gradually slip in to something like this. It’s what I call bad becoming normal. Now I’ve taken a lot of people through a slaughter plant that are not industry people. And when a slaughter plant’s working right, well most of them will go, ‘Oh, it’s not anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be’, they’ll find it’s acceptable. But something like throwing hens into a garbage can, alive, that’s totally, absolutely terrible.
Helen Thomas: And is it something that happens because they’re working with so many animals?
Temple Grandin: That tends to make it worse, but that’s not the total answer. I think it’s more of a thing where they don’t see out the box.
Temple Grandin: From her home in Fort Collins, Temple Grandin says the industry built on live transport of sheep has also been guilty of bad practice becoming normal.
Even so, she reckons Australia’s looking at this particular conundrum the wrong way.
Temple Grandin: Let me tell you one of the most important things you could do to stop a fiasco like that ship being turned back in Saudi Arabia. You have to change the way the contracts are written. I’ve found that in 30 years of working in livestock, that you’ve got to hit people in the pocketbook nerve, you’ve got to hit them where their money is. Now if those contracts are set up where the shipper gets paid based on how many live sheep are loaded onto that ship in Australia, he’s got no incentive to take care of those sheep. Now you change that contract, where that shipper’s paid based on how many live sheep get off the other end. Then he’s going to have a good incentive to take care of those sheep. And I have found the economic incentives are the best way to improve many different animal handling things. Take catching chickens, for example, there’s a lot of problems with broken wings. Well if you pay the people that catch the chickens based on having a very little amount of broken wings, then they do a better job of catching chickens. The worst way that you can pay people for any animal handling thing, I don’t care what it is, is based on how fast you can handle them. That just reinforces rough, bad behaviour.
Helen Thomas: Temple Grandin works to ensure the humane slaughter of animals like sheep and cattle, and she insists it is possible.
Temple Grandin: If you look at how the animals behave in a well-run slaughterhouse, the cattle are not frantically trying to jump out. You know, most of the plants usually have only about a 5-1/2 or 6 foot fence, and cattle are capable of jumping that and most don’t. And I’ve watched really carefully to look at the behaviour of the cattle at the plant, and the behaviour of the cattle at the farm when they’re being handled for vaccination. They behave exactly the same way. If they knew they were going to die, they should be going frantic, you know, and smacking against fences. And they’re not doing that.
Helen Thomas: And what does that say to you, does that say something about the safety they feel at the farm, or the lack of intelligence they have in an overall sense?
Temple Grandin: Well I don’t think it’s anything to do with intelligence, they just don’t know what the slaughterhouse is. And the thing is, the things they’re scared of are not the same things that we’re scared of. If I take a white plastic bottle and I throw it down on the floor in front of the race to the slaughterhouse, you can just about shut a plant down. The cattle will not walk over that white plastic bottle. Or if they see a little chain hanging down wiggling, or they see a reflection on a shiny piece of metal wiggling. These sort of things scare the cattle, and then you have to like do a lot of rough handling to get them to go by there, like a wad of electric goads. But if you get rid of these things they’re afraid of, like air blowing in their face, seeing people up ahead, seeing things that jiggle and move, seeing reflections, then they walk right into the slaughterhouse.
Helen Thomas: So the smell doesn’t put them off?
Temple Grandin: Any smell can put them off. Like if you take the smell of fresh paint, put it in the race, that will stop them. It’s anything that’s novel.
Helen Thomas: One of her current concerns is a new problem with America’s dairy herds. She says nearly a quarter of all heifers are now lame, to some extent, that is, they walk with difficulty, a problem that also exists in the UK.
Temple Grandin: I was just reading a report the other day that 24% of all dairy cows are lame. Well 20 years ago you didn’t have that many lame dairy cows. And it’s gotten to where that that amount of lameness has just become normal.
Helen Thomas: And why are the dairy cows becoming lame?
Temple Grandin: There’s a whole lot of different reasons, and some of it is bad management, some of it’s genetic, some of it’s a combination of housing systems that are bad and genetics and how they’re fed with a whole lot of different things. But the bottom line is that 24% of the dairy cows lame, is not acceptable. The dairy industry gradually slid into this.
Helen Thomas: According to Dairy Australia, our 2.3-million dairy cows don’t have this problem, at least not at such dramatic levels.
President of the Queensland Dairy Farmers Organisation, Wes Judd, says conditions are vastly different in this country.
Wes Judd: Australia is fortunate in that our industry is different from industry in North America, in the way in which we farm. And that is, we’re based around a pasture grazing situation, and therefore our animals in Australia, are disposed to extended periods of time in housing. So this means immediately that there’s much less lameness in dairy cows in Australia.
Helen Thomas: How much lameness is there though?
Wes Judd: Well recent surveys would give us an indication that the incidence of lameness is around 7% or less, which is a lot less than what’s reported overseas.
Helen Thomas: Nonetheless, it’s a significant figure. Judd has 180 cows on his property near Warwick, in southern Queensland. And while their natural lifespan is probably 20, maybe even 25 years of age, he culls most of his herd at around half that point. But he disagrees they die too young and worn out.
Wes Judd: I don’t think they are being worn out in too short a period of time. And I think that we take many steps to make sure that they’re not. It’s not in a dairy farmer’s interests to have a short life span of an animal. There’s a big investment in an animal, so that the investment that you’ve got in an animal necessitates that you get longevity out of them, and to quote what they might or might not do in a natural situation, well we’d all like to have things the way they were, but we know that’s not practical. I’ve got cows that are 10 to 12 years old in my herd, and I suppose if I averaged out the age of my cows, they’d be in that 8, 9, 10 year old range before I would cull them. So I’d be getting that five or six lactations out of an animal, and unless we look after those cows in a very prudent way, then certainly they’ll break down.
Helen Thomas: In Britain, Rosamund Young takes a much bigger step in terms of her duty of care to the animals she raises. Last year, this beef cattle farmer turned author, writing ‘The Secret Life of Cows’. Yet as poignant as that title sounds, she and her brother continue to drive some of their herd to the local abattoir.
Rosamund Young: When I can first remember, we had a fairly conventional system and the animals went to market. When I got to be old enough to drive, I used to go with them, before that my father went. And I would stay all day the market trying to keep them happy, giving them hay, carrying them buckets of water, talking to them. And then the time would come when they were sold, and someone else would take them away. And I think to start with, I didn’t think about it too much, but as I got a bit older, I thought I wonder if they’re going to be OK, I wonder if they’ll be well treated, I wonder if they’ll go on a long journey. And then one day we had a particularly friendly bullock called Lancelot, and we all missed him, he was so different and so clever, and we thought we shouldn’t be doing this, we’ve got to find a system where we can go with them and actually watch them killed. It’s much easier to watch them killed cleanly than it is to wonder if they go off in a lorry and they’re going to be hungry and tired and without any friends, and they’re going to have to fight and be miserable.
So now we’ve got a system where we go with them and we actually almost hold their hands, so we know they’re dead, and it’s so much better to make sure they’ve lived a happy life and died without suffering.
Helen Thomas: Of course most farmers can’t afford such extraordinary attention, financially or emotionally. Then again, is Rosamund Young really just guilty of anthropomorphising?
Rosamund Young: Well I’m not at all ashamed of being anthropomorphic. I think I’m a human being and so the only way I can describe what I see to other human beings is in my own language, which is a human language. So I do attribute human attributes to the cows in order to make people understand. I don’t know what level the cows understand and enjoy things. But they do enjoy them as a cow, not as a person, I’m not comparing them, but they can be happy or sad or depressed or bored or whatever, as a cow, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, you’ve got to allow them to live their lives as a cow. Unfortunately, it’s within a commercial system. If we could afford to keep 100 cows just for the pleasure of it, I daresay we’d see even more interesting relationships develop over the years.
Helen Thomas: She has 150 cows and calves at her farm, and says many mothers and daughters form deep bonds, as the family drama involving two cows, both called Dolly, indicates.
Rosamund Young: To be honest, we hadn’t really thought it out, the significance of a mother’s love to the daughter, because we had been brought up to farm fairly conventionally, and you didn’t think about the cows, other than just doing their job; they’d have a calf and then when the calf was weaned, they’d have another calf, and they’d devote themselves to that. But one day when his heifer had a very traumatic experience, and she gave birth to a dead calf, and she prolapsed and she was in a lot of trouble. We had to have the vet to stitch the wound back in. She was unable to stand, she looked very exhausted, so we covered her with a blanket and nursed her and propped her up with bales of hay so she could be comfortable. And then when we went back an hour or so later, she’d disappeared, and she’d staggered slowly across the farm, field after field, and she found her old mother who had had two calves since, and she just sort of collapsed at her mother’s feet, and the mother was licking her all over the face and just loving her. If the heifer hadn’t been ill, she and her mother probably wouldn’t have had time to talk to each other, because the mother was busy with her latest calf, and it was quite moving to us that she did, and they stayed together for several days.
Helen Thomas: Now some of this might sound overly sentimental. But the fact is, we really don’t know, because we haven’t taken the time to observe these animals properly.
Former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson is also fascinated by cows, though probably no more so than by chickens and ducks. Pigs are also a large part of his new book, ‘The Pig Who Sang to the Moon’, in particular, Piglet, the sow who loved singing on a beach in Auckland.
Jeffrey Masson: She was a companion to one of the people who lived here, and he took me out to visit her, and he told me many stories about Piglet. First of all, she used to love to go for swims in the ocean here, and often when children would see her, they’d become very excited and swim over her, and she would let them climb on her back and she’d take them for a little ride in the water, she loved swimming. It turns out pigs are all pretty good swimmers. But then he told me that whenever the full moon came out she would often go down to the beach and she’d look up at the moon and would make these sounds and it sounded to him like she was singing, and I then start inquiring if anybody else had heard this, and it turned out that a number of people who lived with pigs, say that they will often do that, on that full moon night will go out almost like a wolf, and kind of howl to the moon. It’s not clear what they’re doing exactly, but some form of communication.
Sound of pig singing from the movie "Babe"
Helen Thomas: Is it in your mind, I mean I know that you make the point right throughout the book that it’s ridiculous to argue that one animal is smarter than another, therefore we shouldn’t be kinder to that animal, we should be more careful with that animal. But I wonder as I read the book whether there was a particular affinity you had with the pigs because that chapter is very compelling about the way we treat them when they are intensively farmed.
Jeffrey Masson: Yes I think the reason for that, I think a lot of people have this reaction to pigs, first of all because they’ve had such a bad reputation in western literature for so long, some of the swear words when we want to complain about someone, we say, ‘Oh, you know, he’s a filthy swine’, or ‘This place is a pigsty’. Many people who have been around pigs are astonished at how intelligent they are and how much like a dog they are. Pigs like us, pigs seem to want to hang around us, and they’re intensely curious. So they behave more like a dog and a cat, and therefore we think of them as somehow being different, but I think this is just the kind of anthropocentrism, where we only like animals who like us back, and that’s why I think people have more difficulty for example with sheep than with goats, because goats do seem to be interested in us.
Helen Thomas: Jeffrey Masson’s aware some scientists and academics might baulk at the evidence in his book, the bulk of which is anecdotal.
Jeffrey Masson: It’s also true though that more and more scientists are recognising that the plural of anecdotes is data, and after all, if you observe long enough you’re not just telling stories, you’re watching, and I think what matters is the quality of watchfulness we bring to it. The intelligence we bring to it, the information, the willingness to look beyond the box as it were, to see something that we haven’t been prepared to see. And that’s how there’s been progress in science forever, and it’s not necessarily the consensus that matters, but one scientist like Jane Goodall, willing to go out and say, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve been underestimating chimpanzees for hundreds of years’. I think more and more people are recognising that that’s the case with almost every animal, there’s hardly an animal in existence about whom anyone can say ‘Well we know everything there is to know about this animal now.’ People tell me, ‘I’m a vegetarian, I only eat chicken.’ And I say, ‘But a chicken is a bird, it’s a living animal, and in fact a very sensitive animal’. In fact there’s a huge amount of research going on right now in the United States, and not by animal rights activists, obviously scientists who are interested in avian calls among chickens, that roosters have, it turns out, many many different kinds of calls that they use for the hens. They have a special call to alert the hen to an aerial predator for example, and another one to say there’s a ground predator, and the animals respond appropriately. So they recognise the distinction, and so far we recognised something like 17 different calls, to tell the hen that there’s a special kind of food waiting for her. And these are things we’ve never even noticed. It’s not that they haven’t always been there, of course they’ve been there, we just haven’t bothered to look.
Helen Thomas: He even raises the possibility that pigs might feel more deeply than humans, and cites the case of one who seemed to die of nostalgia.
Jeffrey Masson: Pigs are such sociable creatures. So here was an animal who had friends, had a life, and was moved, and just couldn’t take it, and eventually died I think of grief, you know of a kind of nostalgia, ‘Give me back my old life’. Now we don’t like to think of those kinds of things happening because it reminds us too much that these animals may not only be similar to us, but in certain senses, may be our superior when it comes to deep feelings. It’s quite possible that pigs can feel depression more deeply than can human beings. I mean nobody knows of course, but that’s not an impossible thought.
Helen Thomas: Is one of the problems here that we really don’t know? I mean, do we need to do more experimentation on animals at a farm level?
Jeffrey Masson: Well we certainly don’t need more experimentation. What we need is more observation. We need more Darwins among us. I mean Darwin saw the continuity. He said, "How can there be a discontinuity in terms of feelings between animals and humans?" There just can’t be, it makes no scientific sense, and I think any animal scientist has to recognise that yes of course they’re very similar to us when it comes to their emotions. And you know, there’s a whole new field how in neuroscience where neuroscientists are fascinated by the so-called reptilian brain, you know, the ancient parts of the brain stem which control emotions and seem to be almost identical in all mammals. There’s very very few differences which would definitely be an indication, if not a proof that these animals feel very similarly to what we feel. Now it’s so much easier for us because we can tell each other about how we feel, and with animals we have to observe them. But I think anybody who observes animals closely is not going to have problems recognising when an animal’s happy or sad or frustrated, or even joyful.
Pigs communicating.
Helen Thomas: Scientifically, Jeffrey Masson might not be as far off the mark as some might want to think.
Don Broom, Cambridge Uni’s Professor of Animal Welfare, says their work indicates livestock and companion animals are social creatures with complex needs and responses.
So, scientifically speaking, how smart are they?
Don Broom: I think every farmer would be able to quote examples of pigs, and indeed sheep and cattle, which have behaved in a very clever way on some occasions. So farmers are aware that the animals that they are keeping have a significant intellectual ability. If you actually do comparative studies of the ability of farm animals and pet animals to learn, then you get some interesting results. There was a study done by Ron Kilgar in New Zealand a few years back, in which he decided that to compare animals, that a sensible way to do it, was to put them in a maze learning situation, and make the maze of different sizes according to the animal, but just so they had exactly the same kinds of decisions and things to remember, in order to be able to get through the maze. They then tested about 10 or 12 different species, including five-year-old children, they actually found that five-year-old children did the best, and then after them came a group which was basically pigs, cattle and sheep, and they were all very good at learning the maze, and they were fractionally better than dogs, and quite a bit better than cats and horses, and then lower down came rats and chickens, and possums. So they found that that kind of comparative study, the main large farm animals, were doing very well.
Helen Thomas: Food for thought, in more ways than one.
Don Broom is upbeat about the changes that have already occurred in Europe in relation to animal welfare, largely driven, he says, by public opinion and consumer pressure.
But this major debate continues with no easy solutions in sight. Matthew Scully, the US President’s senior speechwriter, and author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy expects no major changes in his lifetime.
Nevertheless, he’s far from hopeless.
Matthew Scully: Forty years ago a few tried to prohibit some of the practices now common in factory farming. It probably wouldn’t have been that difficult if you declared in law for example, that you can’t confine an animal for all of its life, and prevent almost any movement at all, you can’t just treat that animal like a machine, you have to have some minimal time outdoors and socialisation, that would have been non-controversial; farmers 40, 50 years ago would have said, ‘Well of course, we do that anyway’. And so had those standards existed then and been put into law, many of these terrible practices now common would never have come to pass. So now it’s like we’re trapped in this situation where we rely so much on these things and the cost of stepping back and undoing it just seems too much. But in fact the cost of going on is too much.
Helen Thomas: But I guess people listening this morning, Matthew, are probably wondering, ‘But how do I do that? I mean, I haven’t got time, nor the inclination really to go and see these farms first-hand for myself.’ How do we remember the moral costs, when we’re just going about our daily lives.
Matthew Scully: I have one quick piece of advice that comes to mind, in the case of factory farming. I would advise them to go to a website: www.farmsanctuary.org. Click on the factory farm photo gallery, just brace yourself a little bit, look at those pictures and you will instantly recognise practices you would never approve of in your own life.
Helen Thomas: Then, he says, take action.
Matthew Scully: In America we have some stores which are known to deal in more organic products and meats from farms that have some modicum of compassion, and so I advise people to take their business there, and I assume that there are similar stores in Australia, and the response that usually comes back is, ‘Well that’s going to cost extra money’. Well, yes, it is going to cost extra money, and it’s always hard to change one habit and start another, but when you do, you feel a lot better about it. You’ll have last burden in the back of your mind, one less thing left undone in your own life.
Helen Thomas: Background Briefing’s technical producer is Angus Kingston, the web co-ordinator, Richard Gracia. Our Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett. I’m Helen Thomas, and you’re listening to ABC Radio National.
Further information
Farm Sanctuary
Farm Sanctuary is a U.S based organisation that operates farm animal sanctuaries and wages campaigns to stop the exploitation of animals raised for food.
farmsanctuary.org
ABC Radio's AM: Smart sheep surprise scientists
Includes interview with Dr. Keith Kendrick.
abc.net.au
BBC News: Amazing Powers of Sheep
Sheep may be brighter than we think.
news.bbc.co.uk
The European Union: English language portal
europa.eu.int
Compassion in World Farming
UK based NGO which campaigns for better treatment of farmed animals.
ciwf.co.uk
Publications
Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (2003)
Author: Matthew Scully
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
The Secret Life of Cows (2004)
Author: Rosamund Young
Publisher: Farming Books and Videos Ltd; ISBN: 0954255550
Published in the UK.
© 2005 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright information: abc.net.au
Privacy information: abc.net.au
abc.net.au |
