Myth-busting: Calf Cruelty

I don’t usually do a post that is mostly other people’s words, but this is just amazing and wonderful and gives me hope for the future of agriculture. Also, it’s very much true. I grew up on and around small to medium farms, I know what it takes to run one, and it’s not easy. It’s also not, contrary to what most young folks and city folks seem to think, the province of sociopaths. Animals, even meat animals, are taken care of. These are your livelihood, and the people who farm may seem callous, but they aren’t. Farm animals are not pets. I was once accused of cruelty and sadism for butchering a hog. After getting over the indignation that someone would assume that I’d put the animal down ‘just because you were mad!’ I shrugged and got back to wrapping meat for the freezer, meat that my family would be eating for the next few months. You take care of your food, from baby through maturity through the process of death and food. I wouldn’t feed my family animals that had been mistreated. If for no other reason than stressed meat tastes bad – you shoot a deer to drop it in it’s tracks because if it panics and runs before dying the meat will taste bad. But also because I’m not a monster, any more than 99.9% of farmers are. We respect the animals, and care for them almost like family.

There is a perverse movement to demonize agriculture at large. You’ll see photos like this of the calf which is supposedly being prevented from nursing. The PETA fake sheep supposedly killed for it’s wool. My reaction to that is a pure WTF?!!? because anyone who has half a clue knows that sheep are sheared, and if they aren’t given what is the human equivalent to a haircut, THAT could kill them after a while. Sheep, at least most modern breed, don’t shed. Anyway, those, the memes and articles portraying farmers as evil uncaring earth killers for using fertilizers and pesticides and so on… you’d think these people had absolutely no idea where their food came from. Or that they never wanted to eat again.






Source (at least for part of it)


Comments

26 responses to “Myth-busting: Calf Cruelty”

  1. Guineas aren’t evil, they EAT RATTLE SNAKES!

    ….wait, that may not be the best proof.

    1. Tiny raptor-type dinos with feathers. I never managed to raise guineas to adulthood, but a friend’s farm had a small flock. Interesting birds.

      1. My mom’s favorite bird.
        …which may be part of it, they really have to be socialized with any animal they’re around. She had success making them accept chickens by having both batches of chicks at the same time, which is also my plan.

        Just as soon as I get the chicken run built!

  2. This is priceless. Thank you for sharing, and I am so passing it on.

    1. Good! Let’s spread it far and wide, to combat some of the purely ignorant assumptions that are out there.

  3. […] via Myth-busting: Calf Cruelty — Cedar Writes […]

  4. Hmm. Maybe it’s peafowl that we need to get, in order to make sure we don’t have problems with poisonous snakes at the new place in Kentucky!!!

    1. Aha! Perfect. Merry Christmas, Mom. When you’re ready I’ll buy the guineas for the mini-Farm. You need to name it. Tassieknowe?

    2. If you go with guineas, look for the Pearls, their feathers are AWESOME– very useful for crafts, hats, etc.

      1. Yes, that was part of why I was trying to raise them. And then we had a windstorm that blew rain into their coop and they perished as a flock 🙁

    3. No, no, for the sake of your sanity, no. Peafowl never shut up. Their horrible, piercing shrieks are still annoying a quarter mile away. They do love them some snakes, though. Cats hate snakes, too, and generally aren’t as annoying. And they eat mice, rats, and squirrels. As a bonus, they also like sparrow and pigeon, the banes of every barn.

  5. Nobody of Import Avatar
    Nobody of Import

    God, some of the posts you copied…I knew people were that stupid, but wow… X-D

    If you don’t know anything about farming, either learn something or SHUT THE HELL UP. (I do, I’m a horse rancher in addition to the day gig…)

  6. Oh my gosh, that was hilarious. And informative. Thank you for sharing.

    1. I couldn’t resist sharing that, and putting it all in one place. I initially saw them on Facebook all disconnected into multiple images.

  7. Nimrod time: ‘the milk stolen for human consumption.”
    Okay, let’s all stop doing that. No more humans using milk in any form. Therefore, no more human need for dairy cows.
    Perhaps the opossums and muskrats will pass a collection plate to support the starving dairy cows that are no longer needed by humans.

    1. Oh, they don’t *care* what happens to the domestic animals that are adapted to co-existing with humans and couldn’t possibly survive in the wild (see yesterday’s post…). They just want to feel superior to other people and this is how they’ve chosen to do that.

      1. Vegans. * shudder * Over here, the grade school girls briefly formed a “cow club.” It was for girls who loved cows. Naturally, it was formed by a transplanted townie dad who was a vegan. The purpose of the club was to turn the kids into vegans, because hurting cows is bad, and stealing their milk hurts them, and other stuff and nonsense.

        In lighter news, check out “In Security”. The current story line has a child explaining to the mall Santa how Veganism is holy. http://www.gocomics.com/in-security/2017/12/06

  8. “hen pecked” is not just a colloquialism.

    1. And unlike most people’s mental image of ‘how cute, hens!’ it’s actually savage. I’ve seen chickens eating one of their own flock alive, so to speak. Hens pecking is gruesome when you know whereof you speak.

      1. Savage behavior from relatives of dinosaurs should not be surprising to any educated, intelligent person who actually thinks. Alas, those seem in increasingly short supply.

  9. Stupid like I see there is one of the reasons I dislike vegans as much as I do. It’s not that they have made a decision differently than me. I have no problem with that.

    It’s how they’ll lecture and pontificate about their superiority while completely ignoring just how little they know on the topic.

    1. I think the only non-preachy vegan I’ve encountered is a friend who went vegan after her body developed problems dealing with animal proteins.

      1. That would be because most all vegans – with the very rare exceptions like your friend – are religious. It’s not a health thing, it’s their religion. Like the Jain, only less sane.

      2. She has my sympathies for that one.

  10. Never mind that we’ve bred milk cows to the point where they produce far more milk than any calf needs (and in some cases more milk than a calf can drink) and so if we didn’t “steal the milk” those cows would end up with rotten milk in their bodies with lethal results.

    1. Which enables us to bottle feed a calf (or a kid, in my case growing up with goats) to satiation while still having milk for human use from the same cow. Heck, this is why wet nurses are/were a thing for humans. I know when my newborns arrived, I about drowned them in milk until my body adjusted to what they actually needed and calmed down on the production level.