Baby Calf Care on the Dairy

I found your website via Animal Blawg. Yes I am one of those dreaded vegans! Congratulations on creating such an impressive website, even if I do have criticisms regarding its content… First of all, please get your kitties fixed up – as a ‘cat carer’ I despair at the constant stream of abandoned and lost cats that find their way to our colony. The only way we can control a stray cat colony is by catching (not easy) the unfixed felines and the vet does the rest, at our expense! Puss is then returned to the colony if she/he is too old and wily to re-home. If only we could stem the tide of new arrivals, our colonies would eventually diminish until we reached that desired state of no strays. If only people would get their cats spayed or neutered, this problem would be straightaway halved!

All your animals in the pics look good and your farm is a caring one by all accounts, but what happens when those animals no longer produce enough milk? They go off to slaughter just as their calves did and who is to say what treatment they will receive once they have left you? There are too many reports of abuse of animals about to be slaughtered, but how can this problem be taken seriously unless every slaughterhouse has a webcam – that is never going to happen.

Regarding the video of abuse at Bushway Packing Inc., you blame the person filming the abuse, but often this person is an infiltrator for the very reason he would never get into the place otherwise. The abuse is usually systemic, which is how the infiltrator learned of it in the first place. If he had intervened, both camera and film would have been destroyed and his own safety compromised. He films despite his disgust, so that he can inform us. Those poor creatures being abused could not be helped, but filming it means this will not happen to other animals at that facility – at least not in the near future.

I am not a young nor am I radical, but I do support those brave enough to investigate cases of cruelty to animals and those who put their own comfort and safety to one side in order to help an animal in distress. I spent many summers during my childhood on a farm such as your’s where the farmer (my uncle) genuinely cared about his animals. However, it has taken me 50 years since then of learning about and witnessing bad behaviour at abattoirs, some of those who work in such places can be unimaginably cruel.

The story of the downed cow (http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/Cows/DownedCow.htm) is just one of many validated reports of appalling cruelty at abattoirs, not just in the U.S., but here in New Zealand, in Australia, the U.K. and other countries that have so-called stringent animal welfare laws. It has to be said that we would never know about these cases if it was not for some brave soul going along and, to all appearances, becoming ‘one of the guys’. Incidentally, most photographs and videos of abuse are obtained covertly for obvious reasons. You feel anger at the guy for not intervening, how do you think he must feel?

You are a dairy farmer and I am an animal rights advocate – we could not be more opposed, but if we both have concerns when an animal is abused we have some common ground. Although my diet is now vegan, I do realise that good farmers are better than bad ones and that the farming of animals is not going to end any time soon, so from the cow’s point of view you are the preferred farmer.