Managing Livestock so They don’t Become Dead Stock

(Or why you are not exempt from animal welfare laws just because you live on a farm)

Firstly, I must do the disclaimer! I am not a livestock expert. I am not a veterinarian or an agriculturalist. Seven years ago I was a complete novice in the farming world. Now I like to think I have learned quite a bit about caring for these beautiful farm creatures. This information is what I have learned from seven years of watching, looking, listening, and reading all about sheep, cattle and pigs. It is the accumulated knowledge of seven years of owning, caring for and loving my own livestock. As with anything else in the world, do further research to find out for yourself if what I know and believe works for you and your situation!

Anecdote: When we first looked at Morilla with the real estate agent we drove around the whole farm and did notice there were several dead sheep in various stages of decomposition lying about in the paddocks. I commented: “There are a few dead sheep about”, to which the real estate agent replied, without missing a beat: “If you’ve got livestock, you’ve got dead stock”. This seems to be the general attitude of farmers who own vast amounts of land and have large numbers of livestock. If you have 20 sheep it is a tragedy to lose one. If you have 2,000 sheep, who’s counting anyway? To me, every sheep who dies is a terrible loss that probably could have been prevented if I had been more knowledgeable, more mindful or more determined. I do not like to lose an animal because I just failed to care enough.

Having livestock in your life is a great joy and a blessing. It is also a responsibility, both morally and legally. Your farm animals must have the following conditions, the same conditions any other animal in your care requires:

Access to clean fresh water at all times

Access to adequate feed to meet their nutritional requirements at any time

Access to shelter from the sun, wind and rain

Freedom from pain and discomfort

Treatment of any injuries, illness or disease in an adequate and timely fashion

Gentle handling undertaken with all due care and consideration

Freedom from fear and stress

Adequate preventative health measures to ensure good health, such as worming, lice treatment, hoof management, vaccinations etc

Freedom to live a life of quiet contentment while being able to exhibit their natural behaviours as much as is possible.

Cruelty and neglect- just because no-one will see what you do, doesn’t mean it is any less wrong

Just because you may now be living on a property where you are not under the scrutiny of the public eye, this does not excuse you from the animal welfare laws every person in this country must abide by. Just because others may not see what you do, does not make what you do any less important. Whilst living on Morilla I witnessed some terrible acts of neglect and cruelty from farmers- people we, as a community, expect and trust to care well for the animals we will eventually eat. It seems like a hypocritical thing to say- that we expect the animals we raise to be killed for our own consumption to be well cared for and free from pain, fear and stress while they are alive. However, I believe that the vast majority of people in this country would like to know that the animals our farmers are raising are being well tended to and well cared for and not subjected to cruelty or neglect.

Remove a man from the judgement of others and he sometimes falls very short of the societal expectations that are otherwise placed upon him. You see this on the internet with people who, if open to judgement by other people, would otherwise not look at websites featuring child pornography or beastiality. But in the privacy of their own home, with no-one watching and no-one likely to discover their activities, some people will and do seek out these sites.

Place a man amongst others who think and act the same way as him and he suddenly believes that his actions are normal and acceptable, regardless of what the wider community thinks or what the laws of the society may be. Again, you see this with paedophiles who interact with each other over the internet and form groups who support and encourage each other and so begin to act as if the illegal activity is in fact normal and even desirable.

These two forces- removal from general public scrutiny and associating mostly with like minded people-  come together in small country towns and on big farming properties, where some farmers act in ways that an outsider to the community would find offensive, shocking and just plain wrong.

I believe that neglect of farm animals is more common that most people believe it to be. Many animals which are injured or become ill are simply not taken to a veterinarian. They are treated on the farm by people who are possibly not well qualified or experienced to do the job correctly. Often access to a vet is difficult because they are located many kilometres away and transporting the animal to the vet is not easy. Sometimes it is a matter of expense- if the cost of the veterinarian services will be more than the actual monetary value of the animal, it may be seen as uneconomical to take the animal to the vet. Sometimes it is a matter of indifference- there is an expectation that some animals will die and therefore the sick or injured animal becomes a statistic. As many farmers share the same ideas and beliefs about what constitutes acceptable animal care practices when it comes to sheep, many farmers do not even think that the way they manage their animals could possibly be conceived of as incorrect. They support each other in the beliefs they hold and reconfirm to each other that their way of viewing the world is right. Whenever you have doubt about whether something you are doing is correct or not, imagine doing it in the middle of a crowded street in the city. How would the people in the street react to what you are doing?  How would you be judged by ”the general public” and not your peers. Imagine hitting an orphaned lamb’s head against a tree to kill it- how would other people you do not know react to you if you did this? I saw a farmer do this, as if it was a common practice and nothing at all to be concerned about. He was so removed from the realities of the world outside of small town farming community that he had no idea that what he did was wrong. It was, to him, an acceptable solution to a problem. So please do think about the wider public before you act. If it is not something you could do unashamedly in a public place full of strangers, then what you are doing needs to be reassessed. Do not let invisibility make you feel confident to commit acts that would be generally reviled.

Ewes who experience difficulty giving birth can be neglected and left to die rather than monitored and assisted during the labour. This is how we acquired Enoch- his mother died during labour. The farmer who owned Enoch’s mother did not want Enoch, the day old lamb, and told us to “put him over the fence and let him die” This is neglect and abandonment of your responsibility to animals in your care.

Sheep can be left unmonitored for many weeks and develop injuries, fly strike or illness which is left untreated for too long. Some of these sheep will die. You can see some of these dead sheep in the paddocks as you drive along a country road. These sheep died from something and it probably wasn’t old age.  While some farmers keep ewes into old age and keep breeding from them every year until they either die from old age or from the physical demands placed upon them with breeding, many farmers sell their sheep when they get too old to breed. Farmers do not keep unproductive stock, and a ewe which cannot produce a lamb every year is unproductive- costing the farmer money but not making the farmer money. So it is unlikely that a sheep in a paddock makes it long enough to die of old age. It is far more likely to die in an abattoir and be turned into food or to die inadvertently of illness or injury. If a sheep dies of illness or injury and no-one noticed or cared enough to intervene then this is neglect.

Sheep which are denied access to adequate nutrition during times of the year when there is little feed on the ground or when there is drought are being subject to neglect. Every now and then you will read about a farmer who has neglected his sheep’s nutritional needs to the point that many die, the RSPCA become involved and the farmer is fined. This is rare because most farmers do not want their sheep to die en masse and therefore lose them large amounts of money. More often farmers feed their sheep the minimal amount of supplementary feed to keep them alive until the grasses start to grow again. This saves the farmer money. The sheep lose condition but will not die, and they will be expected to put that condition back on when the pastures green up again. Sometimes farmers hang on to stock they cannot afford to supplementary feed rather than selling them because they do not want to lose their sheep or the genetic lines they have been breeding. Unfortunately each sheep has a dollar value. Many farmers will not expend more money on a sheep than it will potentially earn for them in income. If farmers did do this they would lose money and farming is a business not a charity and so farmers do not work to lose money. This is a very sad reality of farming- animals are income, a commodity and they have a specific dollar value. The fact that the sheep is a living creature and is subject to all the legal and moral consequences of such, can be overlooked because farm animals are part of the business. Sadly, because they are part of a business and have a monetary value rather than an emotional value, farm animals do not always get the same protection from neglect and cruelty that animals we enjoy as pets get.

Sheep which are mulesed are subjected to cruelty. Farmers will get very emotional about this issue and claim that the flystrike is far worse than the mulesing. This may, or may not be true. I have never had flystrike or been mulesed so I am unable to judge which is worse. However I am certain beyond any doubt that having a section of skin cut off with scissors, without any anaesthesia or analgesia would be extremely painful. That is just a fact which cannot be denied. If the sheep has an intact nervous system then the sheep is experiencing the same pain you or I would feel if we had the skin around our tailbones cut off with scissors. The fact that it is for “the sheep’s welfare” is totally irrelevant. We do not operate on people without analgesia or anaesthesia, regardless of what benefit the surgery will have for the patient. If any doctor attempted to perform surgery, other than an absolutely life saving emergency procedure that could not wait, without any pain control he or she would be struck off the medical registry and most probably find himself in jail. For some reason beyond me, we allow this terrible operation to be performed on our sheep and accept that it is painful, yet tend to say:”But what can you do?”. I’ll tell you what you can do. You can make this procedure illegal and stop it from being performed. It is unacceptable in today’s society to allow this procedure to continue. If farmers carry on about how they will “get out of sheep” if mulesing is banned, let them get out of sheep. They will get back into sheep once the price of sheep increases and they see the potential for profit. The banning of mulesing will no doubt cause an outroar from unimaginative and inflexible farmers who lack the vision to imagine a world different from the one they now inhabit. But the roar will turn into a whimper over time and then farmers will just adapt and get on with things. Much of the world objects to mulesing. We need to pay equal attention to the consumer of the product we are trying to sell and not just to the producer. If no one wants to buy our product because they object to how it is produced, the producer will suffer in the end. We need to move with the changing times instead of trying to hang on to an outdated practice.

Many practices are carried out on farms that most people outside of farming would consider cruel. Some of these practices are necessary. Some are unnecessary . Many could be performed under local anaesthetic, or in other ways that would make the procedure less painful. However, if the cost of reducing the pain is too high (unprofitable) then many farmers would not consider altering the practice to save the animal pain.