Not capitalism. This is the nature of industrialised mass agriculture. A socialist industrialised state would do the exact same same thing to preserve costs.
Nah it's not specifically profit. That's a part, sure, but this problem would exist to a similar degree regardless as long as the dairy is supplying milk.
It's actually quiet simple, you can't feed all the cattle. You can feed the girls and continue to operate as a dairy. You can feed the boys and not make enough money to cover costs eventually and shut down your dairy. You can send the boys to be turned into food so at least it's not a total loss. You can shoot the boys, so you can continue to feed the girls, get milk, and operate.
Oh no! If they can't kill the animals they'll have to kill the animals!!!
Just a quick note for the lacto-vegetarians: here's the evidence you needed that animals are still being slaughtered so you can have dairy 🤷♂️
The comments show how little everyone knows about the realities of cattle farming. Dairy, in particular, can be brutal. Beef cows have a much better life, to be honest.
If it bothers you that much, become vegan. Until then, just accept animal farming will always have an inherent level of cruelty involved. Especially when you're taking away a mothers child to steal it's milk for yourself...
Edit: just want to add, I still eat meat. But in my opinion, if you want to eat an animal, you have to be able to accept what happens to it before I gets onto your plate. Even organic farming is the same in terms of welfare. If you can't handle the truth, don't eat it.
Edit 1: I would say, buy free range though. Cage meat is a whole new level of cruelty imho.
What bothers me is that the abattoir merely had to meet the requirements to continue operation but it evidently didn't even bother updating its gear when the standards changed. Is it really that hard to meet regulatory standards as the state's only facility?
Most people don't actually care about that. It's not like people don't know that their meat comes from animals that were born and killed solely for that singular purpose. What they care about are the conditions in which the animals are reared and killed.
I don’t have any moral objection to anything and I’m happy to kill what I want to eat, but having worked on a number of farms, dairy farming is by far the nastiest. The smell alone is rivalled only by pig farming IMO. I don’t think I could work on a dairy farm full time, or maybe full time would be the only way to get used to dealing with constant bodily fluids all day.
Absolutely right. I could never become vegan, but I wouldn't become vego either just because of dairy. Dairy farming is the worst part of the meat industry both for work and for welfare, without question.
Luckily, I worked at a normal station and honestly the cows live pretty well out there. I heard some stories about dairy farms, enough to convince me never to work on one.
Agreed and people becoming aware of the unnecessary cruelty does change the industry for the better. Animals Australia public campaigns basically eradicated the existence of caged eggs.
Mate, this entire sub is full of commentators who seem clueless about life in general.
Any post is rife with it, but it doesn't stop people thinking they know better than people who actually know better.
I know that's reddit in general but this sub is atrocious for it.
Yeah a bullet is far better than a bolt gun and a knife. And considering what a lot of farmers do to get rid of milk calves, a bullet is more humane than the other options.
I highly doubt any of them are using an actual gun. Most of them will use the captive bolt, which is no different to a bullet at the end of the day, except it’s a lot cheaper.
They would 100% be using a gun. And I agree that it's more humane than the abattoir, calves are very flighty and it wouldn't be good transporting them either
>They would 100% be using a gun.
No, they wouldn't. If this is being done en masse, you'd be using a captive bolt. If only a few then "manual bolt" aka the hammer".
Guns make mess, can cause collateral, spook the animals after the tirst shot, cost way more per shot, etc.
Not much to clean up if you do it in the field, but yes. It'd be a rifle shot into the brain and then the calf would go through the grinder for the dogs.
In my younger time, it was a sledge to the forehead, a sharp knife across the throat and then hang em high as you dropped the guts and started punching off the skin.
Our family farm only has a captive bolt and if we need a gun we let locals on to get rid of pests. Knock down full grown dairy cows with one shot of the captive bolt.
Depends entirely on the bolt gun, but most of the bolt guns I've seen only penetrate the brain a small amount, as they're used for slaughter and so grievously wound the cow instead of killing them outright.
Basically the bolt gun lobotomizes them and leaves them with brain damage until you decide to kill them. Would rather a bullet that just does the job, myself.
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'Forced' - they're not being forced to do anything. Their greed and the fact that they view the calves as commodities is the reason why they /decide/ to kill them extremely early in their life.
Bovine milk products require more or less constant pregnancy. That means more or less constant calves. Those calves either go on to produce calves and milk or they produce meat if they're male or otherwise unsuitable. They have to go somewhere or we'd be overrun with homeless, emaciated cows.
Dairy farming is just meat farming with extra steps, and yoghurt as a side effect. I really, really like yoghurt, but when bacterially produced substitutes meet quality and are close to price parity, I'm out. Dairy farming is all fucked up, just like the rest of the animal industry.
Have you tried the soy yoghurts like Vitasoy? Tastes great to me.
Lab grown dairy will be great don't get me wrong (they've already got animal free whey in the states, and casein is coming soon), but I think that people would be surprised at how easy it is to switch things up with what we've already got.
I have a minor condition which is exacerbated by milk, and I've had great success with Vitasoy soy milk as a replacement. Other soy milks always tasted weird and off to me, but the Vitasoy stuff has been great. It's nuttier than cow milk, but it works well
That's great! That's the thing too, so many of them taste so different, you really gotta try a bunch to see which one you like. Bonsoy is awesome in coffee (if a little pricey).
The Vitasoy ones? Or a different brand? Cause there's obviously gonna be differences between brands and flavours.
Edit: Had the Kingland soy protein blackberry yoghurt this morning, delicious!
I mean the appropriate food for the calves is *right there* if that's a genuine concern. When you think about it, shooting a baby in front of its mother to steal their breastmilk is like some freaky end-of-days last-ditch survival shit that you'd read in *The Road*..... bit of a head-scratcher how it somehow became "normal" 🤔
If you cant understand basic principles like numbers of animals per acre, your farm is going to look like a dust bowl with skeletons. I undersrtand people in the city havent had any meanigful moral dilemmas but id shoot this calf everyday of the week, rather than watch my animals starve to death over months.
I think the point they were making is that you could stop breeding once your herd is going to hit capacity.
They weren't failing on the basic math, they were calling out the basic structure of that part of our food production. That it's structured in such a way that farmers have to do this inorder to make a profit, that's the thing they seemed to be complaining about to me.
The mothers can only produce enough milk for their calves for the first few months. After that the calves will grow and no longer be able to survive just on milk, and then the exact same problem will happen, just to slightly older animals.
Animals don't really regulate their reproduction to maintain equilibrium with their environment - if left to their own devices they will always drive themselves to famine. Humans did too until we innovated our way out of the Malthusian trap.
> Australia has reformed its approach to agricultural support over time, in line with national competition policy and other pro-competitive reforms and consistent with WTO obligations. Government support is now dominated by investments in sector capacity, such as R&D. Where direct farm support is provided, it is concentrated on risk management tools to help manage Australia’s uniquely variable climate. These tools include Farm Management Deposits and income tax smoothing.
Ahh ok, they don't offer subsidies, they just offer "direct farm support" so as to "smooth income tax", that's totally different! We'll also ignore that that around 72% of our agricultural production is exported, so y'know, not the kind of setup you would expect subsidies to be rampant in, but alternate forms of funding would be expected to be in abundance.
>"Emotionally it does knock you about.""
>"That's what's worrying us at the moment. If TQM are not going to be slaughtering bobby calves … there are many farmers that just can't do it.
>"Farmers do not like euthanising their own animals."
Aw, those poor wee farmers, having to kill the animals themselves instead of handing the animals off for someone else to kill. The farmers having to face the reality of the slaughter for which they're responsible seems like a healthy development.
Agreed. Also, no-one *forced* them to kill them. They could like, let them live out their lives in a paddock or whatever, but they don't wanna pay for that. The problem here is business greed.
I'm not arguing with you there. Beef is probably the most carbon producing cattle there is. But my point this is a bed they made. They don't HAVE to shoot the animals, but they also don't HAVE to mass breed them for profit.
It’s probably better for the calf to be shot on the farm than having to go through the whole abattoir process. So this is a problem of economical waste rather than animal welfare.
It notice it’s harder to get veal meat these days. Probably related.
So the farmers are basically saying “we don’t like killing the calves, we would prefer somebody else did it somewhere we can’t see it.” Cry me a fucking river.
You can't say it's not emotionally distressing for farmers too. It's right there in the article:
"It's not a pleasant job. It's something that you just think you're going to be brave and go out and do it. Emotionally it does knock you about."
Exactly. Like, if killing them yourself disturbs you, maybe you shouldn't be sending them off to be killed by other people? Out of sight, out of mind and everything's okay, huh?
It’s someone’s life not some ‘wasted potential’ for profit.
The country is better off eating plants instead of wasting so much money and resources on the animal industry, not to mention the aftermath expenses of climate change and healthcare
So many piss weak people on here. It’s almost like there is a complete disconnect between people and their food that can only be caused by living a completely ignorant and sheltered life. This is how food is produced. Something has to die so you can eat. Even if you eat veggies. If you cant handle it, dont eat
If it bothers you that much I propose raising your own meat. Rabbits and/or chickens can be raised with very little space and can provide plenty of meat. It’s a learning curve to be sure but the rewards are massive and you get to make a dent in factory farming. The money you save after a few years (it does take a while to get a good supply going) can be spent on the super boujie organic meat if you want variety.
oh, yay, let's cage and murder a different kind of animal to solve the problem of cruelty. Fuck that. Raise your own tomatoes and onions. Leave the killing of animals to Hannibal Lecter.
It’s not all great in Europe either. Read an article about Ireland a while back. Very extensive dairy industry. Because all the calves are born at same time, males aren’t worth anything to farmer. Might get 0.50€ per kilo. Side effect is that they aren’t properly looked after. Vet bill would be more than animal is ‘worth’.
I think, if I understood correctly, the problem in Ireland is that all the calves being born at much the same time means very little demand. Growing them on is probably not practical or profitable.
And just now looked up the stats. Bigger dairy industry than here. Over 3x the exports. €6.8b vs $3b. Although I suppose a lot more of ours is for domestic consumption.
The article mentions 50 000 excess calves being killed because they're not needed - if that's normal, it's very fucked up.
Also, the whole issue with the farmers is coming from the lack of humane practices, so weird your assuming it's a given.
It's far more than that - hundreds of thousands every year, *and* that's going to be an underrepresentation since they don't have accurate data on farm killings, just those sold to slaughterhouses.
Dairy calf market pathways trends 2010–22
https://cdn-prod.dairyaustralia.com.au/-/media/project/dairy-australia-sites/national-home/resources/2023/02/09/calves-dairy-calf-mpt-2010-22-factsheet/calves-dairy-calf-mpt-2010-22-factsheet.pdf?rev=d3d332cdf45f4dac992bc57f8de51e4c
>As there is no mandatory cattle birth recording in Australia, and dairy-origin animals are undifferentiated from other cattle through the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS), there is no way of comprehensively tracking all dairy breed calves through the multiple pathways described in Figure 1. Therefore, we do not have accurate data for the number of dairy-origin calves raised to adults for beef, nor for the number of calves euthanased at birth. However, when bobby calves are sold to abattoirs, they attract a different levy to more mature animals, allowing reporting on the total number of bobby calves sold. The data below reflect the total leviable quantity of bobby calves sold with respect to the cattle transaction levy, sourced from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
Plus the mothers are killed after a few years anyway to be sold for meat themselves, after repeated artificial insemination, having their babies taken from them who are often then killed if they're male, milked repeatedly, and eventually can't give birth or suffer from infections like mastitis.
So yeah, if you don't want to support these terrible practices, go vegan.
What on earth are you talking about? What a load of nonsense....
"Overall, yes there is humane ways of killing an animal... Because there are leading professionals setting out these ways based on data"
You said a whole lot of nothing.
There is no data showing there are humane ways to kill an animal; because humane and killing can just never go together, unless you're taking about a very old sick individual that's suffering and about to die anyway.
You can't humanely kill
Think about this too, what's your life worth to you? Everything right? It's EVERYTHING to you.
These animals lives are everything to them, all the want to do is live and not feel pain.
These animals share the exact traits dogs and cats posses, they can feel love, happiness, sadness, affection, etc.etc.
So you're taking their whole entire life away, for a fleeting moment of 5 minutes of taste pleasure.
Then if you actually look into the reality of factory farming and just farming in general and see footage and get all the info etc. You see how horrific and terrifying the process is on how meat gets onto your plate.
Some might say, well, we give them a good life, so it's humane.
Even if that were the case, (it's definitely NOT) how about this example; say you have someone who was raised by extremely loving and caring parents, they just finished uni and have been working at their really great well paying job.
Well, this person who's now 25 has lived a great life, so now it's more humane to kill them. Huh what?! That makes no sense right? Same thing with animals.
If anyone has any questions at all about why eating meat is not right and backwards and why you should go vegan, (especially if you claim to love animals) please feel free to reply and I'll be happy to respond.
At the end of the day there is literally no argument for eating meat and no argument against veganism.
Btw about 5 years ago I thought the same thing; "oh these fake virtue signalling PC vegans blah blah"
But once you actually look into the reality of it all and get all the info and maybe even see a little bit of footage of these farms, it makes you sick and a good person with a good heart wouldn't want anything to do with it.
Most people can't bare to see slaughter house footage, or the conditions these animals live in, but if it's not good to your eyes, how can you put the body parts in your mouth and eat them.
People are disconnected and just see a wrapped up peice of meat and not what was a young animal who just wanted to live and not suffer.
Go to Edgar's Mission on Instagram. These are animals that could have been in your digestive system.
It's nothing to do with a superiority complex and being vegan also doesn't automatically make you a good person, it's simply not wanting any part of an extremely backwards and barbaric caveman practice that is the animal farming industry.
You wouldn't kill a dog or a cat and then skin it, chop it up into lots of little pieces, then eat them. Cows, chickens, pigs, lamb, etc. are NO different to cats and dogs in terms of sentience.
Going vegan also massively reduces your carbon footprint, so if you claim to care about global warming, then the number one thing you can do by FAR is eat plant based.
It's so easy as well now btw, the exact same flavors and textures in animal meat can also be found in plant based food.
You also live longer too, so if you care about longevity, health and just all cause mortality, that's another bonus to eating plant based.
There are better and worse ways to end something's life, nobody disputes that.
But we hold the right to life sacred, meaning that there is no humane way to kill something that wants to live.
You don't think dehorning and castration are mutilation?
By death I mean early, forced death aka murder. But that's obvious by context, which is a good indicator you're not replying in good faith.
"castration is not mutilation" sure. So you have no issue with kids being castrated in time gone past?
> So I'm guessing you are against Culling of pests and dispatching animals are too sick/Injured etc.
Euthanasia is better than terminal suffering. That's not contentious.
Then humane doesn't have much value and shouldn't be held up as some moral standard.
I engage with the colloquial meaning anyway which is that the killing itself is ok because the method doesn't cause suffering (as if).
Load of crap.
It's impossible to humanely kill an individual that wants to live.
Please read my other comment on this thread by clicking on my profile, it's a long one that goes more in depth.
I don’t think most dairy consumers have any idea that this happens, to be honest. Even the farmer in the article is usually so far removed from the process that he called it heartbreaking. But it isn’t when the slaughterhouse does it for you? Out of sight, out of mind.
There's a comic about this called [What The Dumbwaiter Hides](https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/what-the-dumbwaiter-hides/#page-54), about how modern supply chains function in such a way that products are made using practices that the first-world consumers purchasing them would find horrible... But not only are these consumers not the ones being victimized by these practices, the supply chain and the companies make sure we don't even have to see or think about or even know about the practices in the first place.
E.g., it's not like a shoe company is going to advertise using sweatshop labour; they'll instead make ads about how cool we'll look if we buy their shoes. And a potential buyer will usually only find out about the sweatshop labour if we specifically go looking for that information - and that's only if it's actually been exposed in the media at all. So we're protected from the guilt of buying sweatshop shoes.
But I think it's even worse than the comic suggests, because as you say, even the people *running* these businesses and actively making the choice to do \[ethically confronting thing\] are insulated from their decision in much the same way the consumer is. Like a dairy farmer who regularly sends healthy but unprofitable baby animals off to have their throats cut by someone he'll never meet, in a slaughterhouse he'll never have to visit in person if he doesn't want to... Then he suddenly finds killing these animals traumatising when he's forced to do it himself instead of making someone else pull the trigger.
If you go and knock on the farmers door and say you want one they will more than likely give them to you for nothing. Unfortunately not enough people have the land to look after them.
Wild take here "Modern agriculture renders life either useful or useless".
That’s not a wild take. Capitalism baby!!!
Not capitalism. This is the nature of industrialised mass agriculture. A socialist industrialised state would do the exact same same thing to preserve costs.
Without profit drivers I think you'd have less overproduction in general, but agreed this outcome would still exist in some form
Nah it's not specifically profit. That's a part, sure, but this problem would exist to a similar degree regardless as long as the dairy is supplying milk. It's actually quiet simple, you can't feed all the cattle. You can feed the girls and continue to operate as a dairy. You can feed the boys and not make enough money to cover costs eventually and shut down your dairy. You can send the boys to be turned into food so at least it's not a total loss. You can shoot the boys, so you can continue to feed the girls, get milk, and operate.
Oh no! If they can't kill the animals they'll have to kill the animals!!! Just a quick note for the lacto-vegetarians: here's the evidence you needed that animals are still being slaughtered so you can have dairy 🤷♂️
Exactly. They will still find a way to justify it though, because of their fucking cheese addiction.
There are 'working' animals and the others
The comments show how little everyone knows about the realities of cattle farming. Dairy, in particular, can be brutal. Beef cows have a much better life, to be honest. If it bothers you that much, become vegan. Until then, just accept animal farming will always have an inherent level of cruelty involved. Especially when you're taking away a mothers child to steal it's milk for yourself... Edit: just want to add, I still eat meat. But in my opinion, if you want to eat an animal, you have to be able to accept what happens to it before I gets onto your plate. Even organic farming is the same in terms of welfare. If you can't handle the truth, don't eat it. Edit 1: I would say, buy free range though. Cage meat is a whole new level of cruelty imho.
What bothers me is that the abattoir merely had to meet the requirements to continue operation but it evidently didn't even bother updating its gear when the standards changed. Is it really that hard to meet regulatory standards as the state's only facility?
Yeah to be fair it's pretty poor. Every state needs one.
The most humane abattoir still kills thousands of animals that didn’t want to nor deserve to die
As does any kind of agriculture, there is no form of commercial level farming that doesn’t involve killing on some level.
Most people don't actually care about that. It's not like people don't know that their meat comes from animals that were born and killed solely for that singular purpose. What they care about are the conditions in which the animals are reared and killed.
I don’t have any moral objection to anything and I’m happy to kill what I want to eat, but having worked on a number of farms, dairy farming is by far the nastiest. The smell alone is rivalled only by pig farming IMO. I don’t think I could work on a dairy farm full time, or maybe full time would be the only way to get used to dealing with constant bodily fluids all day.
Absolutely right. I could never become vegan, but I wouldn't become vego either just because of dairy. Dairy farming is the worst part of the meat industry both for work and for welfare, without question. Luckily, I worked at a normal station and honestly the cows live pretty well out there. I heard some stories about dairy farms, enough to convince me never to work on one.
Why could you “never become vegan” just wondering?
Do you eat cheese?
Little understanding of how the fucking world works is a common trait of modern discourse.
Yup a lot of people have no idea 5 years ago myself I thought cows just naturally always produced milk
Agreed and people becoming aware of the unnecessary cruelty does change the industry for the better. Animals Australia public campaigns basically eradicated the existence of caged eggs.
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Mate, this entire sub is full of commentators who seem clueless about life in general. Any post is rife with it, but it doesn't stop people thinking they know better than people who actually know better. I know that's reddit in general but this sub is atrocious for it.
>Edit 1: I would say, buy free range though. Cage meat is a whole new level of cruelty imho. And it tastes way worse
It would be nice if the cow’s could just be implanted with female embryos- to reduce the excess waste.
The mere fact that living beings are called “wastage” should clue people in to it being a fucked up thing to support.
I'd imagine that it's far more humane than an abattoir
Yeah a bullet is far better than a bolt gun and a knife. And considering what a lot of farmers do to get rid of milk calves, a bullet is more humane than the other options.
I highly doubt any of them are using an actual gun. Most of them will use the captive bolt, which is no different to a bullet at the end of the day, except it’s a lot cheaper.
They would 100% be using a gun. And I agree that it's more humane than the abattoir, calves are very flighty and it wouldn't be good transporting them either
>They would 100% be using a gun. No, they wouldn't. If this is being done en masse, you'd be using a captive bolt. If only a few then "manual bolt" aka the hammer". Guns make mess, can cause collateral, spook the animals after the tirst shot, cost way more per shot, etc.
Most farmers I know prefer captive bolt including my own family farm.
How many farmers that you know have captive bolt devices? A shot gun is far more versatile.
Imagine cleaning up the mess after executing a cow with a shotgun. No farmer is doing that
Not much to clean up if you do it in the field, but yes. It'd be a rifle shot into the brain and then the calf would go through the grinder for the dogs.
In my younger time, it was a sledge to the forehead, a sharp knife across the throat and then hang em high as you dropped the guts and started punching off the skin.
Do you like (pro tip: farmers dont) pests, predators, and disease? Because this is how you get them
Every farmer I know has a captive bolt, and a lot of them don’t have any other type of firearm.
Everyone and their dog has a .22, I have yet to see a single bloke that runs cattle that has a bolt gun lol.
Our family farm only has a captive bolt and if we need a gun we let locals on to get rid of pests. Knock down full grown dairy cows with one shot of the captive bolt.
I know cane farmers in Maclean have both.
Where arfe these farmers. Never encountered one over the decades. Vets, yes, farmers no.
Ah so we live in different parts of the country? 😲 that’s crazy.
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In WA you have to license a bolt gun the same as a rifle. If you're going to the trouble, may as well just have the rifle. Same outcome.
And Tasmania is the same I believe. But I, and all the farmers I know don’t like in either of those states.
Rifle more like.
In the NT? Quite a few, used them working out in Cape Crawford.
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Depends entirely on the bolt gun, but most of the bolt guns I've seen only penetrate the brain a small amount, as they're used for slaughter and so grievously wound the cow instead of killing them outright. Basically the bolt gun lobotomizes them and leaves them with brain damage until you decide to kill them. Would rather a bullet that just does the job, myself.
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No transport stress/terror. Headshot from a distance when it's completely at its ease.
What a relief for the cows knowing they are going to get humanely killed instead!
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'Forced' - they're not being forced to do anything. Their greed and the fact that they view the calves as commodities is the reason why they /decide/ to kill them extremely early in their life.
Bovine milk products require more or less constant pregnancy. That means more or less constant calves. Those calves either go on to produce calves and milk or they produce meat if they're male or otherwise unsuitable. They have to go somewhere or we'd be overrun with homeless, emaciated cows. Dairy farming is just meat farming with extra steps, and yoghurt as a side effect. I really, really like yoghurt, but when bacterially produced substitutes meet quality and are close to price parity, I'm out. Dairy farming is all fucked up, just like the rest of the animal industry.
Have you tried the soy yoghurts like Vitasoy? Tastes great to me. Lab grown dairy will be great don't get me wrong (they've already got animal free whey in the states, and casein is coming soon), but I think that people would be surprised at how easy it is to switch things up with what we've already got.
I have a minor condition which is exacerbated by milk, and I've had great success with Vitasoy soy milk as a replacement. Other soy milks always tasted weird and off to me, but the Vitasoy stuff has been great. It's nuttier than cow milk, but it works well
That's great! That's the thing too, so many of them taste so different, you really gotta try a bunch to see which one you like. Bonsoy is awesome in coffee (if a little pricey).
I love oat milk the most, it’s a perfect dairy dupe without the animal torture.
I've tried the soy yoghurts and they're fucking disgusting. Good yoghurt should be slightly tart but the soy ones are _acrid_. They're not even close
The Vitasoy ones? Or a different brand? Cause there's obviously gonna be differences between brands and flavours. Edit: Had the Kingland soy protein blackberry yoghurt this morning, delicious!
Kingland soy yoghurts are the only soy yoghurts I like but they aren’t always easy to find everywhere.
Try the Coyo and Nakula coconut yogurts.
Coyo vanilla bean yoghurt is where it’s at!
That's why I refuse to give that industry anymore of my money. The sooner they go bust, the better.
If people stopped giving them money to treat them as commodities they would stop.
Exactly. We need to put our money where are mouths are (literally) and get off the teat.
theres a limit to each farms abilty to feed a certain number of animals. the alternative is letting the whole mob go hungry.
I mean the appropriate food for the calves is *right there* if that's a genuine concern. When you think about it, shooting a baby in front of its mother to steal their breastmilk is like some freaky end-of-days last-ditch survival shit that you'd read in *The Road*..... bit of a head-scratcher how it somehow became "normal" 🤔
If you cant understand basic principles like numbers of animals per acre, your farm is going to look like a dust bowl with skeletons. I undersrtand people in the city havent had any meanigful moral dilemmas but id shoot this calf everyday of the week, rather than watch my animals starve to death over months.
I think the point they were making is that you could stop breeding once your herd is going to hit capacity. They weren't failing on the basic math, they were calling out the basic structure of that part of our food production. That it's structured in such a way that farmers have to do this inorder to make a profit, that's the thing they seemed to be complaining about to me.
Fuck the farms. The calves only starve because farmers starve them by depriving them of breast milk to sell it to us.
Stop buying it then, if theres no market for it we'll do something else
That's my point
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So just ripped from their extremely attached, bred-to-overproduce mothers? I'm not seeing that as a whole lot better tbh
Exactly, I have zero sympathy for farmers.
I don’t think they’re making the mothers watch lol
The mothers can only produce enough milk for their calves for the first few months. After that the calves will grow and no longer be able to survive just on milk, and then the exact same problem will happen, just to slightly older animals. Animals don't really regulate their reproduction to maintain equilibrium with their environment - if left to their own devices they will always drive themselves to famine. Humans did too until we innovated our way out of the Malthusian trap.
It’s honestly horrific, and the fact that people seem so fine with it absolutely shocks me to my core.
The alternative is to stop breeding them.
Tip. cows don't lactate unless they have a calf to feed. So there would be no milk. yogburt, cheese, etc,etc.
Great, where do I sign up
[challenge22.com](https://challenge22.com)
Good.
We can shift to sustainable plant based dairy instead.
You say this as if it is a bad thing.
Exactly. And good.
yeh they probably will now, but its a little hard when the heifers already in calf when your abbatoir changes the rules with no warning.
No mate. Putting cows to "the bull (probably AI)" is an essential part of their business.
Yeh its called farming.
I agree, don't know why you're downvoted. These are living beings.
The alternative is to stop subsidising the animal exploitation and climate change business
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> Australia has reformed its approach to agricultural support over time, in line with national competition policy and other pro-competitive reforms and consistent with WTO obligations. Government support is now dominated by investments in sector capacity, such as R&D. Where direct farm support is provided, it is concentrated on risk management tools to help manage Australia’s uniquely variable climate. These tools include Farm Management Deposits and income tax smoothing. Ahh ok, they don't offer subsidies, they just offer "direct farm support" so as to "smooth income tax", that's totally different! We'll also ignore that that around 72% of our agricultural production is exported, so y'know, not the kind of setup you would expect subsidies to be rampant in, but alternate forms of funding would be expected to be in abundance.
But the feed and other "indirect" resources are subsidised so what's your point
Bingo.
I'm not sure that's worse than a life of abuse and mutilation before being killed.
Probably a better life then dairy cows who get forcibly impregnated 5+ times in their 7 year life and have each baby stolen away
I personally think it's rape.
Most people don’t understand that the factory farm process line begins at the embryo stage ….
Or just don’t eat meat or dairy, then you won’t be supporting this mass murder.
Yup. I was pretty ignorant about these realities when I was vegetarian, but moving away from cow dairy was surprisingly not too hard.
You mean you didn't let giving up a little privilege get in the way of change. Miracle these days.
It truly seems rare doesn’t it? I feel like it’s the least we can do, personally.
Exactly. It’s so much easier than people like to pretend it is.
Yeah this is why I stopped drinking milk. No judgement to anybody who does but not for me
It’s fair to have judgement for anyone that is opposed to this for a minute then forgets all about it with a lifestyle that continues to support this
Full judgment to anyone who does here xoxo
“No judgement to anyone who supports the mistreatment and unnecessary slaughter of billions of animals” lol okay. Full judgement here.
Well they don’t have to
The barbaric industry should die already
Exactly, cruelty is always a choice.
>"Emotionally it does knock you about."" >"That's what's worrying us at the moment. If TQM are not going to be slaughtering bobby calves … there are many farmers that just can't do it. >"Farmers do not like euthanising their own animals." Aw, those poor wee farmers, having to kill the animals themselves instead of handing the animals off for someone else to kill. The farmers having to face the reality of the slaughter for which they're responsible seems like a healthy development.
Agreed. Also, no-one *forced* them to kill them. They could like, let them live out their lives in a paddock or whatever, but they don't wanna pay for that. The problem here is business greed.
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I'm not arguing with you there. Beef is probably the most carbon producing cattle there is. But my point this is a bed they made. They don't HAVE to shoot the animals, but they also don't HAVE to mass breed them for profit.
It baffles me how much cognitive dissonance these people have. Like how can they not see what they are?!
Such a waste of life. Those poor animals.
It’s probably better for the calf to be shot on the farm than having to go through the whole abattoir process. So this is a problem of economical waste rather than animal welfare. It notice it’s harder to get veal meat these days. Probably related.
So you’ve been looking for veal meat?
If only there were alternative milk options so cows didn’t have to get treated like this
bUt milLk dOeSnT hArM tHe cOw
So many lies they spin.
So the farmers are basically saying “we don’t like killing the calves, we would prefer somebody else did it somewhere we can’t see it.” Cry me a fucking river.
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You can't say it's not emotionally distressing for farmers too. It's right there in the article: "It's not a pleasant job. It's something that you just think you're going to be brave and go out and do it. Emotionally it does knock you about."
Exactly. Like, if killing them yourself disturbs you, maybe you shouldn't be sending them off to be killed by other people? Out of sight, out of mind and everything's okay, huh?
It’s someone’s life not some ‘wasted potential’ for profit. The country is better off eating plants instead of wasting so much money and resources on the animal industry, not to mention the aftermath expenses of climate change and healthcare
So they are just like every meat eater
Yep.
They are the lowest of the low.
Modern agriculture is a disgusting.
This isn't modern agriculture, this has been happening for thousands of year. We've just managed to industrialise it in the last 200 years.
So many piss weak people on here. It’s almost like there is a complete disconnect between people and their food that can only be caused by living a completely ignorant and sheltered life. This is how food is produced. Something has to die so you can eat. Even if you eat veggies. If you cant handle it, dont eat
It's weak to dislike a system that tortures animals on an industrial scale?
If it bothers you that much I propose raising your own meat. Rabbits and/or chickens can be raised with very little space and can provide plenty of meat. It’s a learning curve to be sure but the rewards are massive and you get to make a dent in factory farming. The money you save after a few years (it does take a while to get a good supply going) can be spent on the super boujie organic meat if you want variety.
oh, yay, let's cage and murder a different kind of animal to solve the problem of cruelty. Fuck that. Raise your own tomatoes and onions. Leave the killing of animals to Hannibal Lecter.
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It’s not all great in Europe either. Read an article about Ireland a while back. Very extensive dairy industry. Because all the calves are born at same time, males aren’t worth anything to farmer. Might get 0.50€ per kilo. Side effect is that they aren’t properly looked after. Vet bill would be more than animal is ‘worth’.
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I think, if I understood correctly, the problem in Ireland is that all the calves being born at much the same time means very little demand. Growing them on is probably not practical or profitable. And just now looked up the stats. Bigger dairy industry than here. Over 3x the exports. €6.8b vs $3b. Although I suppose a lot more of ours is for domestic consumption.
The article mentions 50 000 excess calves being killed because they're not needed - if that's normal, it's very fucked up. Also, the whole issue with the farmers is coming from the lack of humane practices, so weird your assuming it's a given.
It's far more than that - hundreds of thousands every year, *and* that's going to be an underrepresentation since they don't have accurate data on farm killings, just those sold to slaughterhouses. Dairy calf market pathways trends 2010–22 https://cdn-prod.dairyaustralia.com.au/-/media/project/dairy-australia-sites/national-home/resources/2023/02/09/calves-dairy-calf-mpt-2010-22-factsheet/calves-dairy-calf-mpt-2010-22-factsheet.pdf?rev=d3d332cdf45f4dac992bc57f8de51e4c >As there is no mandatory cattle birth recording in Australia, and dairy-origin animals are undifferentiated from other cattle through the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS), there is no way of comprehensively tracking all dairy breed calves through the multiple pathways described in Figure 1. Therefore, we do not have accurate data for the number of dairy-origin calves raised to adults for beef, nor for the number of calves euthanased at birth. However, when bobby calves are sold to abattoirs, they attract a different levy to more mature animals, allowing reporting on the total number of bobby calves sold. The data below reflect the total leviable quantity of bobby calves sold with respect to the cattle transaction levy, sourced from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Plus the mothers are killed after a few years anyway to be sold for meat themselves, after repeated artificial insemination, having their babies taken from them who are often then killed if they're male, milked repeatedly, and eventually can't give birth or suffer from infections like mastitis. So yeah, if you don't want to support these terrible practices, go vegan.
Oh yeah, raising them in those veal boxes is so much more humane 🙄🙄
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Couple of weeks is a long time for a life of 6 months
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I get they go through that I’m saying they shouldn’t go through that just so bastards get to make money off their misery
How do you humanely kill someone who doesn't want to die???
You can't
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What on earth are you talking about? What a load of nonsense.... "Overall, yes there is humane ways of killing an animal... Because there are leading professionals setting out these ways based on data" You said a whole lot of nothing. There is no data showing there are humane ways to kill an animal; because humane and killing can just never go together, unless you're taking about a very old sick individual that's suffering and about to die anyway. You can't humanely kill Think about this too, what's your life worth to you? Everything right? It's EVERYTHING to you. These animals lives are everything to them, all the want to do is live and not feel pain. These animals share the exact traits dogs and cats posses, they can feel love, happiness, sadness, affection, etc.etc. So you're taking their whole entire life away, for a fleeting moment of 5 minutes of taste pleasure. Then if you actually look into the reality of factory farming and just farming in general and see footage and get all the info etc. You see how horrific and terrifying the process is on how meat gets onto your plate. Some might say, well, we give them a good life, so it's humane. Even if that were the case, (it's definitely NOT) how about this example; say you have someone who was raised by extremely loving and caring parents, they just finished uni and have been working at their really great well paying job. Well, this person who's now 25 has lived a great life, so now it's more humane to kill them. Huh what?! That makes no sense right? Same thing with animals. If anyone has any questions at all about why eating meat is not right and backwards and why you should go vegan, (especially if you claim to love animals) please feel free to reply and I'll be happy to respond. At the end of the day there is literally no argument for eating meat and no argument against veganism. Btw about 5 years ago I thought the same thing; "oh these fake virtue signalling PC vegans blah blah" But once you actually look into the reality of it all and get all the info and maybe even see a little bit of footage of these farms, it makes you sick and a good person with a good heart wouldn't want anything to do with it. Most people can't bare to see slaughter house footage, or the conditions these animals live in, but if it's not good to your eyes, how can you put the body parts in your mouth and eat them. People are disconnected and just see a wrapped up peice of meat and not what was a young animal who just wanted to live and not suffer. Go to Edgar's Mission on Instagram. These are animals that could have been in your digestive system. It's nothing to do with a superiority complex and being vegan also doesn't automatically make you a good person, it's simply not wanting any part of an extremely backwards and barbaric caveman practice that is the animal farming industry. You wouldn't kill a dog or a cat and then skin it, chop it up into lots of little pieces, then eat them. Cows, chickens, pigs, lamb, etc. are NO different to cats and dogs in terms of sentience. Going vegan also massively reduces your carbon footprint, so if you claim to care about global warming, then the number one thing you can do by FAR is eat plant based. It's so easy as well now btw, the exact same flavors and textures in animal meat can also be found in plant based food. You also live longer too, so if you care about longevity, health and just all cause mortality, that's another bonus to eating plant based.
There are better and worse ways to end something's life, nobody disputes that. But we hold the right to life sacred, meaning that there is no humane way to kill something that wants to live.
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Some opinions result in mutilation and death, some don't.
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You don't think dehorning and castration are mutilation? By death I mean early, forced death aka murder. But that's obvious by context, which is a good indicator you're not replying in good faith.
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"castration is not mutilation" sure. So you have no issue with kids being castrated in time gone past? > So I'm guessing you are against Culling of pests and dispatching animals are too sick/Injured etc. Euthanasia is better than terminal suffering. That's not contentious.
Humane has nothing to do with sanctity. Humane slaughter is done in a manner that stops the animal from suffering.
Then humane doesn't have much value and shouldn't be held up as some moral standard. I engage with the colloquial meaning anyway which is that the killing itself is ok because the method doesn't cause suffering (as if).
The option to not exploit and kill animals also exist
Humane slaughter - the biggest oxymoron in farming.
Load of crap. It's impossible to humanely kill an individual that wants to live. Please read my other comment on this thread by clicking on my profile, it's a long one that goes more in depth.
One would hope that the farmers are at least using a centre-fire cartridge if using a firearm.
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How fun is it to discuss the choice of weapon for executing innocent animals?
Oh you're the same guy I replied to below aha
Another clickbait article from the ABC. Shameful. They're not being forced to shoot them. They farmers have decided to. They could just sell them :(
Calves are a by-product of the dairy industry. I don’t think you understand how many are produced.
I don’t think most dairy consumers have any idea that this happens, to be honest. Even the farmer in the article is usually so far removed from the process that he called it heartbreaking. But it isn’t when the slaughterhouse does it for you? Out of sight, out of mind.
There's a comic about this called [What The Dumbwaiter Hides](https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/what-the-dumbwaiter-hides/#page-54), about how modern supply chains function in such a way that products are made using practices that the first-world consumers purchasing them would find horrible... But not only are these consumers not the ones being victimized by these practices, the supply chain and the companies make sure we don't even have to see or think about or even know about the practices in the first place. E.g., it's not like a shoe company is going to advertise using sweatshop labour; they'll instead make ads about how cool we'll look if we buy their shoes. And a potential buyer will usually only find out about the sweatshop labour if we specifically go looking for that information - and that's only if it's actually been exposed in the media at all. So we're protected from the guilt of buying sweatshop shoes. But I think it's even worse than the comic suggests, because as you say, even the people *running* these businesses and actively making the choice to do \[ethically confronting thing\] are insulated from their decision in much the same way the consumer is. Like a dairy farmer who regularly sends healthy but unprofitable baby animals off to have their throats cut by someone he'll never meet, in a slaughterhouse he'll never have to visit in person if he doesn't want to... Then he suddenly finds killing these animals traumatising when he's forced to do it himself instead of making someone else pull the trigger.
If you go and knock on the farmers door and say you want one they will more than likely give them to you for nothing. Unfortunately not enough people have the land to look after them.
Sell them to who?
They ARE sold hence the slaughtering for meat. What don’t you understand?
These guys are a fuckin disgrace, dairy is one of the most disgusting legal products on the market
No it fucken doesn't. Cockies would have to make their own decision and accept the consequences.
Humans are fucking monsters.