Animal Welfare in the North Pasture
What do I think about animal welfare?
…This is an updated version of my first post here…
My feelings and thoughts about animal welfare are kind of complex but at the same time very simple. As our family’s main method of making a living, we turn animals into food. I don’t necessarily love doing that because animals are living things and have a certain right to life and happiness as far as they can experience it. On the other hand, those animals have evolved provide food for other life forms and to fulfill that purpose my overall job is to do all parts of that purpose, even turning them into food.
Pigs and cattle would either go extinct very quickly or evolve very rapidly into very quick and wily versions of themselves if they were allowed to live in the wild in our climate. Chickens would vanish within about a week. A LOT of things like chicken even more than we humans do.
I feel it is my job and duty to provide as natural a space for the animals that work for me as possible. I also feel it is my job to protect them from predators as much as possible. My job also includes making their passing into food as painless and quick as possible. Their job and duty is to provide food for me and my kind. Every living thing I know of, from microbes to blue whales provides food and services for other living things.
It is our job as farmers and people to be the caretakers of our animals and treat them with the respect they deserve as living things. That does not mean we should try and make them live forever. They have a job to do for us also.
What is being done to promote our methods? The promotion of our methods of producing food is best done by our selling our products to more and more people. The more demand there is for food raised our way, the more food we will be able to produce our way.
On the other hand, as long as farmers can make a living with confined animal feeding operations, with cramped unnatural settings for animals, those feeding operations will continue to exist. The main thing that can be done to increase ethical raising of animals is to make the food we produce more available and for the public at large to buy it. My writing this is also a step in that direction.
As far as specific protocols we use to ensure our animal welfare is the best possible:
We provide plenty of fresh grass for our cattle every day. Our cattle always have fresh water and a place to lie down in the shade where they don’t have to worry about predators and where they can be comfortable. If an animal gets sick, it is cared for until it gets better. If a cow gets hoof rot or pneumonia it gets an antibiotic shot and gets cured. We do NOT feed antibiotics to animals to make them more able to live on foods that weren’t meant for them. I can go into that practice at length but that is a different story.
Our chickens are raised on pasture with ‘chicken tractors’. A chicken tractor is a large cage about three times as big as a minivan. It is a framework on wheels or skids that is covered with chicken wire and something to provide shade and shelter from rain. It is moved daily to fresh grass. The chickens are thus kept safe from predators while being able to get fresh grass, some bugs and their man supplied food. A chicken in the wild would last less than a week. A LOT of predators like chicken even more than people do. The places where the chicken tractors have been and chicken manure has been deposited grow some of the most lush green grass I have ever seen. Chicken poop is good that way.
We have one farmer who raises a few pigs on pasture. Most of our pigs are raised in large outside pens about three times as big as a house. They can get inside out of the weather or hot sun if they want. They can also get outside in their yard to play and get fresh air and sunshine. They have feeders where they get as much food as they want. They are kept in deep bedding and have big bales of hay or straw or cornstalks that they can make nests out of. Pigs can be pretty destructive to the landscape so this is the way this farmer raises them. Domestic pigs in the wild would have trouble surviving, mostly because farmers would shoot them on sight because of the damage they would do to the farmer’s crops. There are many places in the US where the farmers wage war on wild pigs. The constant hunting makes domestic pigs evolve pretty quickly into wild pigs and they quickly learn to be scared of everything and run and hide. Pigs are fairly smart and quickly become more difficult to hunt. In fact, one of my neighbors has gone to Texas for a pig hunt. He didn’t bring back any meat though I believe the Texans do eat them, the same we we eat deer.
Farm animals have all evolved to their current forms because they survive much better as farm animals than they would in the wild. The definition of survival in this case is how well the life form is able to live out its life and continue its species. No farm animal would retain their current characteristics for very long in the wild. Those that were not wily and quick would very quickly suffer a very painful death by predators.
It is part of our overall purpose to do all we can to make sure our animals have a good life. We owe it to our animals to help them fulfill their purpose to provide food for us and our kind.
No worries.
SV