AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: Since I wrote about the dilemma of what to do with an increasingly frail elderly ewe a few months ago, a number of people have asked me "What happened to Marina?" We debated her fate at length. Peter convinced me that she and her twin sister, Mira, and the two other elderly ewes, Brigid and Kybele*, who arrived here together 10 years ago, would have a terrible winter ahead. He worried that because they were increasingly unable to keep up with the herd, they would be prime candidates to be torn up by coyotes. I reluctantly agreed it was time for them to go, and we arranged to send them off to slaughter -- there's a market for older animals as dog food. I'm thrilled to report, however, that at the last minute Peter called around and instead found a home for all four of them at a wonderful institution, the Catskill Animal Sanctuary in Saugerties. We took them last Monday, and it seems it will be a fine home for them, run by delightful, caring folks who did not have the doctrinaire,"farmer as enemy" attitude I feared. Instead of becoming dog food, these two sets of devoted sisters are now happily retired to assisted living in the farm animal version of DelRay Beach. [*Kybele’s first lambing resulted in twins, one of which she rejected because of insufficient milk. The author, above with the rejected twin Orhan, whom he and his partner bottle-fed and castrated to be the herd wether. Orhan now leads the herd.]
The reason I had concerns about our reception was a certain anti-farm zealotry that sometimes comes across from those associated with farm animal sanctuaries. I got a sense of this antipathy just a couple of weeks ago, when Peter (right) told me about Joe Donahue's interview on WAMC radio with Jenny Brown, of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. In the interview, she recounted the saga of Kayli the cow. Kayli recently escaped while awaiting slaughter at a Halal slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania. Her cause was adopted by local animal rights activists; she was pardoned by Pennsylvania's governor, and finally brought to the Sanctuary in Woodstock to live out her days as a celebrity cow. It all sounded quite heartwarming—who would not root for a cow escaping death?—but Peter suggested to me that there was a certain anti-agricultural subtext. I listened to the interview, in which Ms. Brown sounded quite reasonable. I then turned to the Sanctuary's website. There "the subtext" was in bold relief, essays ostensibly about factory farming, but which paint with such a broad brush, they could be used to condemn all livestock raising. True believers concern me. I admire their passion and commitment, but always worry that their allegiance to a particular vision of an ideal world might make things in the real real world in which we live worse. This has certainly seemed true of late with the rigid ideological zealots of the Tea Party in Congress. The Woodstock Sanctuary has an admirable mission of saving abused and neglected farm animals, but, from what I can discern from its website, it is also guided by a rigid ideology that rests on some unexamined assumptions and damaging misinformation about farm life. The effect of the misinformation is to set up opposition between two groups—small, humanely-run farms and farm animal sanctuaries—that ought to be allies in a shared effort to see that farm animals are well cared for. Let's start with the unexamined assumptions. The story of Kayli, like many of the essays on the website, rests on the assumption that saving farm animals from slaughter promotes happier lives for them. The story does not confront an uncomfortable underlying truth: the only reason people support farm animals—provide food, shelter, and attention—is because they serve human needs. If Kayli had not been raised for food, she probably never would have lived at all. Indeed, over thousands of years of selective breeding, livestock have been essentially created by man to serve as human food or fiber sources. The creatures we've created rely on us, not only for their sustenance, but also for protection. If allowed to roam free and reproduce naturally, it is likely that, in short order, they would face extinction. Domesticated livestock do not have the resources or genetic imprint to live on their own. They would be easy prey for predators.
The evil the Sanctuary says it is trying to address is inhumane, unhealthy and environmentally unsound factory farming. The Sanctuary tells us that agriculture has changed: our picture of the small family farm, with contented animals grazing out in pasture, is at least fifty years out of date, and the factory farming that has largely replaced it is full of unspeakable horror. I couldn't agree more. But the Sanctuary's remedy is to stop eating meat, poultry and eggs altogether, and even to stop using wool. There is no mention of the obvious alternative of encouraging the movement so evident in our region of raising livestock in a humane and sustainable way. If the Woodstock Sanctuary approach prevailed, the only place you would find farm animals would be at the Sanctuary and like institutions, or on the estates of the rich folks who keep them as pets. Ironically, achieving that goal would jeopardize the continued existence of the very animals that are the objects of the Sanctuary's work. Believing that all farm animals will enjoy natural, happy lives if only we stop raising them for food or fiber is kind of like believing that cutting taxes for wealthy people creates jobs—it's essentially a religious conviction lacking empirical support. When, to support its arguments, the Woodstock website offers facts beyond those about the horrors of factory farming, many of those facts seem to have been created to justify their ideology rather than their ideology growing out of the facts. Consider these passages from their section on what's wrong with using wool:
WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: "Supposedly, shearing a sheep is a humane practice because the sheep would otherwise be burdened with kilograms of excess wool. This, of course, is a myth. Sheep grow enough wool to cover, insulate and protect themselves. It is only through human involvement that the wool grows faster because it is constantly being sheared off. Sheep are sheared each spring, after lambing, just before they would naturally shed their winter coats." Actually, the human effect on the growth of wool on sheep is the result of eight thousand years of selective breeding. Beginning with Ovis Orientalis, a hairy goat-like wild animal, man bred domesticated animals to produce far more fibers than the animals themselves needed, in order to serve human needs. Shearing removes this excess fiber. Anyone involved in raising sheep knows that without shearing their wool grows longer and thicker and becomes matted—a big source of discomfort once hot weather arrives. The matted wool around the anus can become caked with manure, creating a breeding ground for maggots and flies. Further, sheep do not naturally shed their winter coats. This we know from the few times we have been late getting our shearing done or when we’ve decided not to shear the new lambs born in the spring. WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: "Timing is considered critical. Shearing too late means loss of wool. In the rush, many sheep die from exposure after premature shearing." Give me a break. I've never seen or even heard of this happening on farms like ours. Our twice a year shearing is timed to give the sheep relief from summer heat (the spring shearing) and to give them time to grow back a nice coat for winter (the fall shearing). Judging from the challenges of scheduling our expert shearer, Bruce McCord, everyone else is on pretty much the same schedule. Our shearing is about as threatening to the sheep as a haircut would be to a human. WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: "Every single year, hundreds of lambs die before the age of 8 weeks from exposure or starvation. Many mature sheep die every year from disease, lack of shelter, and neglect." Out of the millions of lambs born each year world wide, "hundreds" or "many" die? The vague numbers themselves (asserted without any citation to scientific literature) should give you an idea of just how serious an issue this is. Most breeders we know of create warm, sheltered environments similar to our birthing pens in the barn for sheep to have their lambs, and buy milk substitute to bottle feed the lambs if their mothers are unable to nurse them. Some breeders even make tiny garments for their newborn lambs to keep them warm. If you want a sense of the environment that sheep on small scale farms enjoy, go to the sheep barns at the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival in October. No birth (sheep or human) is risk free, but you can be sure that livestock keepers, for whom the sheep have value, take measures to avoid risk. Sheep are quite hardy and can give birth successfully even outside in January blizzards, but if you want to see a big increase in deaths from exposure among the more vulnerable lambs, stop raising sheep agriculturally and let them roam wild.
WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: "Many people do not know that the sheep farming industry involves abuse, pain and suffering. The animals are often treated inhumanely and are made to undergo severe amounts of pain and brutality. Lambs’ ears are punched, their tails cut off and the males castrated all without anesthesia within the first few weeks of their lives." Is punching lambs' ears (that is, piercing ears for identity tags) painful abuse? Tell that to the millions of men and women who elect to pierce their ears, noses, lips and nipples, solely for cosmetic reasons. As to the admittedly less comfortable issue of castration, there's a balancing of cost (including the minimal pain to the animal if done right) and benefit, as I discussed a couple of weeks ago in this space. You can make up your own mind, but in doing so, keep in mind that humane societies and animal shelters, which are not raising animals for either food or fiber, generally require neutering of both males and females before they release animals for adoption. Is the SPCA then guilty of abuse? There are many good reasons for limiting reproduction. WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: "While animals such as egg-laying hens, dairy cows and wool-bearing sheep are not immediately killed to procure their salable products, they suffer tremendously for years prior to their ultimate and unavoidable slaughter." As to whether keeping of sheep generally leads to lives of pain and abuse, I am sure the operators of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, and the readers of this blog, could readily find dozens of farms to visit within less than an hour's drive of home where suffering is simply not part of the picture. I believe that, in our region, farms that make humane treatment of their livestock a priority far outnumber factory farms. If the evil is factory farming, then an attack on all livestock farms and all use of meat and fiber is far too broad a remedy. Folks are certainly entitled to believe that the ultimate slaughter of animals for food is distasteful or immoral; being vegetarian or vegan on that ground is, to my mind, a readily defensible philosophy. But what is not defensible is justifying that philosophy by speading misinformation that implies that raising animals for meat or fiber necessarily involves pain or abuse. Failing to adequately draw the distinction between factory farming and humane farming implicitly vilifies the many people of good faith who live with farm animals and care deeply about their welfare even as they choose to continue the very human practice of eating meat. As the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy has argued for years, without a market for meat, most farm animal breeds would become extinct, resulting in the loss of our agricultural heritage. If raising farm animals is restricted to the few farm animal sanctuaries that have room for a breeding pair or two, these breeds will not be preserved. If the Woodstock Sanctuary were to succeed in its goal of "saving" all farm animals from their fate, it would ultimately be dooming cows like Kayli to extinction. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
