Free Range/Intensive Milk

miss_corerupted

male calves don't produce milk and you only need 1 bull for a herd of females sooo the males aren't needed. This is a nice way of saying it.

Gigervamp

The male calves are culled. There is a campaign to get more people eating British veal in order to allow the calves to live for longer. British veal shouldn't be confused with veal fom Europe where they're kept crated in terrble conditions.

Ben84

Another aspect of modern farming that gets less attention than it should is the use of antibiotics. I was recently involved with a discussion about antibiotic resistance and discovered that their use in farming is likely to be part of the cause. While their use has been reduced somewhat in recent years, farm animals still consume a lot of antibiotics, and the very real danger here is that exposing large amounts of bacteria to antibiotics in this way is almost inevitably speeding up their development of resistant characteristics.

In some places farm animals routinely consume antibiotics throughout their entire lives as it's mixed in to their feed simply to avoid infections.

We're seeing more and more bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. MRSA for example - which has not been well represented in the media. A lot of people believe it's some kind of extremely bad bacteria, and it's not. The bacteria comes in two types, Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus and just plain Staphylococcus aureus that is easilly killed by antibiotics. Methicillin resistance is the only difference. Staphylococcus aureus has been around for a huge long time and is no more dangerous than MRSA. Both types cause minor infections, and occasionally serious ones. The difference is if you have MRSA the antibiotics don't work, and we don't have any other compounds that selectively target the bacteria like antibiotics do.

Resistance develops when a colony of bacteria are treated with antibiotics and all but a few die. These remaining few are the ones which happened through some chance to be more resistant to antibiotics, and they then go on and multiply and produce new colonies that inherit their genes and with these resistance. Multiple antibiotic treatments of successive generations of the few resistant bacteria that survived have an accumulative effect, and some bacteria strains are now completely resistant.

A common bacteria that has developed antibiotic resistance goes from an easily treated infection to a potentially very dangerous one. Medical staff are starting to realise the dangers and antibiotic use and prescriptions are being made more cautiously and there are new guidelines. The aim is to use them where needed for the effective results, but not over use them and cause excessive resistance development. However, they're still being used quite abundantly in farming, and this is no less hazardous. Bacteria that live in farm animals will just as easily develop resistance and spread to live in other animals such as humans.

I'm not against other animals taking antibiotics, but they should be restricted to the same guidelines as we are because the risk is just as significant. Very few humans for example consume antibiotics as long term preventative medicines. Mostly they're reserved for occasions where serious infections are found and are not preventative medicines. Antibiotics are one of very few things we have to protect patients against bacterial infections, which before antibiotics were available used to kill many people. This is their greatest use and they should not be used excessively in commercial farming as there's good evidence it can compromise this.

Mojisola

Buy organic and then you can be sure that antibiotics have only been used when absolutely necessary.

star2007

miss_corerupted wrote: »

male calves don't produce milk and you only need 1 bull for a herd of females sooo the males aren't needed. This is a nice way of saying it.

^^This.

If you disapprove of the veal industry and eating veal, you really shouldn't consume milk and other dairy produce.... they are two ends of the same stick.

Mother and calf are taken from each other at a day old. Although animals do not have the same cognisant abilities and language reasoning to understand what is happening to them, like we do, they still observably suffer deeply at this experience. The calf, if female will likely go the same way as her mother.... kept constantly in a cycle of pregnancy and lactation by artificial insemination. She is expected to produce many times more milk than cows a few decades ago... her udders will be over engorged and liable to acute discomfort, pain and mastitis, leading to a high pus count in the milk. (This is even though, as a society, we over produce milk far in excess of what the consumer demand level is).

Once the cow is about 7, she is deemed to be not productive enough, and sent to the knackers to be turned into cheap pies and burgers (her natural life expectancy is 20 +).

If the calf is male it is considered surplus to requirements, and either slaughtered hencewith, or sent to the veal industry with all the horrors that entails... the UK version is hardly much better. Whatever system is used, the calves will still have to be live transported over great distances in cramped cattle trucks.

If you don't hold any empathy towards animals as fellow sentient beings, and how they suffer in modern husbandry practices, that's your fair play. However, if you do.... then either buy your meat and dairy exclusively from a local smallholding farm shop where you can see the animals in situ, or avoid animal products completely. It's actually surprisingly quite easy, counter-intuitively I've found that my tastebud enjoyment, and intake of different types of vegetables and food has increased exponentially since I made the switch, even though it's perceived a restricted diet.

Don't get taken in by the marketing of 'happy meat & milk' by the big producers and retailers. E.g. most 'Free Range' and organic eggs are produced by birds who spend 90% of their time in huge sheds, and are debeaked without any anaesthetic (done to reduce pecking each other due to stress brought on by overcrowding).

Watch things like the Meatrix, Meet Your Meat, and Earthlings, should be available on You Tube/ Google vids, as well as reading up intelligently on the other side of the issue.

Balanced article here on the beeb:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/veal.shtml

Quote from above link:

"There is no such thing as humane slaughter and home-grown veal is not a solution. If people drink milk, baby calves will be killed for food," says Justin Kershwell, Viva! campaigns manager.

Mojisola

star2007 wrote: »

Don't get taken in by the marketing of 'happy meat & milk' by the big producers and retailers. E.g. most 'Free Range' and organic eggs are produced by birds who spend 90% of their time in huge sheds, and are debeaked without any anaesthetic (done to reduce pecking each other due to stress brought on by overcrowding).

Not true. Organic birds are not debeaked. If it was seen during an inspection that the birds were not using the outside range, that would be a problem for the farmer who would have to change the environment to encourage more birds to go out or risk the withdrawal of the organic certification.

star2007

As I understand it, Soil Association organic birds are not debeaked (and do have higher welfare standards), but other organic certification bodies allow it. Unfortunately, most organic eggs sold in supermarkets are not SA accredited, so you need to check specifically for those ones that are.

However, you still have the issue of 50 % of 1,000's of day old chicks (the males) being gassed/ ground up in a compacter cos they're completely redundant and profitless to the egg industry.

eta: just checked an egg fact sheet, for correction, defra standards do disallow routine debeaking in all organic egg production. However it still goes on in 'standard' Free Range production.
source: http://www.viva.org.uk/pdfs/egg_factsheet.pdf

kevok

i am investigating consumer attitudes to farming systems. could i ask a question?
when you think of milk what image do you see?

_Andy_

kevok wrote: »

i am investigating consumer attitudes to farming systems. could i ask a question?
when you think of milk what image do you see?

Hardly going to be unbiased survey given you're posting on a 'green and ethical' forum is it?

Raggs_2

I see a herd of around 350 adult cows kept in sheds, fed feed that they would choose over grass (I've seen free range choose it over grass), kept cool during summer heat with large fans and regularly showers (something free range have to just suffer). Treated well by workers, with any infection closely monitored and acted on swiftly. After a few times in the milking shed completely relaxed about the whole process.

The calves are separated at very young ages and given milk formula, so that it's known precisely the amount of milk and quality they are receiving. Once they are steady on their feet, they enter into sheds for their particular age. Again, infection is swiftly headed off, and as much as possible is done to avoid.

Male calves are sold off, likely for meat.

Why are the cows treated so well through their entire life? Because it makes a huge amount of difference to the quantity and quality of their milk, thus there's a lot of money to be made by just putting in a small amount of effort to have healthy, content, cows.

And luckily, it doesn't take much to have content cows.

Why do I see this, because I live next door to one dairy farm, and very close to a few others (and have worked in a couple).

But as Andy stated, more than likely to get very biased results here.

EDIT - And where I am, you don't need any bulls for your herd, artificial insemination, with proper scoring for many different attributes, in order to get the best possible calves (soon some genetic scoring too).