Sitting through hours of class is hardly stimulating, but when you start talking about animal welfare to a bunch of veterinary students you know you're in for a treat. There are always those in the lecture who stand up angrily or wave their hand incessantly to get their two cents in, and there are those that sit their grumbling in their seat (me). Although I'd never get involved in the conversation in front of a whole room, there's always a lot I wish I could say and would gladly tell you about if we ever met in person.
Today's issue addressed piglet euthanasia on swine farms. If you eat bacon, pork, sausage, etc, this applies to you. Basically, whenever piglets aren't growing well and the farmer is spending more money raising them then they're making for him, they become disposable. You have to earn your keep on a food production farm or you aren't worth keeping.
The most common means of disposing of these poor-doers is blunt force trauma to the head. As you can imagine, this involves slamming the piglet against a floor or a wall. This sounds terrible and unthinkable, and of course PETA has jumped up in all its self-righteous glory and started babbling about the issue. But as always, they only portray one side of the story, and since that one side of the story is shocking and brutal, everyone listens to them.
But let's think of the alternatives.
If you're a swine farmer with 1,000 head of swine on your farm, and hundreds of piglets to deal with...how many of those piglets do you think are going to be poor doers? Probably a few. And if you had to call a vet over every single time you wanted to get rid of a piglet throughout an entire year (pigs gestation is 114 days) and pay for the drugs, that's gonna cost you a pretty penny. Farmers simply can't afford to call the vet for every single animal they have to euthanize on a production farm. Not to mention the fact that piglets hate being handled more than anything, and this handling stress causes them more problems than a quick interaction. The euthanasia of these piglets isn't ideal, but as of yet there is no cost effective, viable option that can replace the blunt force trauma. Now that's not to say that veterinarians can't oversee the procedure and make sure that the people performing it (often migrant farm workers) are trained. But until the American consumer is willing to pay dollars more for their meats, eggs and milk, welfare can't improve. The farmer isn't going to magically sprout more money from his pockets to pay for all of these improvements.
And when you look at the entire food animal production industry, there are a lot of practices that seem horrible and unthinkable at first and have solid reasoning behind them. For instance, piglets are born with "needle teeth" which are often clipped off above the root so that they don't scratch up their mother when nursing or wound each other when fighting over teats. Lambs have their tails docked without anesthesia to prevent infection by maggots called "fly strike." Dairy calves are taken away from their mothers at birth so that we can utilize the mother's milk for our own benefit. These same calves are dehorned shortly after birth with hot cauterizing dehorners (did you know all dairy cattle of either sex are born with horns?) so that they can't injure other cattle or workers with their horns. Beef cattle and a number of species are often castrated with a minimal amount of anesthesia or analgesia, as the handling and administration of drugs often causes more stress than the procedure itself. Sows are kept in crates where they can't turn around during the period that they have new piglets so that they don't accidentally crush them by laying on them. In all aspects of the meat industry, these issues pop up. Improvements have been made over the years, and veterinarians (who got into their profession for their love of animals) are obviously looking out for the them. But there are some areas which simply can't be further improved upon without massive amounts of cash.
Cows at giant dairies out in California are not out on pasture. They live in free stalls within barns or tie stalls. This doesn't mean that they aren't happy cows, it just means that it would be impossible to deal with herds of hundreds of animals free ranging all over the valley. You can't put all dairy cows out on pasture unless you have a bunch of employees who are going to go out and wrangle them every day.
Bottom line: The American public really needs to do some research on where their animal products are coming from. This applies to meat, milk and eggs. Learn the actual facts behind production, and think about why it might be done that way. Economics play a MAJOR role in all farming practices, and a utilitarian decision is often the only decision that keeps the farm profitable. And please, trust veterinarians more than PETA. Veterinarians are highly trained to deal with animal health and behavior, and have been privileged with their licenses because of their ability to think rationally and intelligently. Of course there will always be those shmucks in slaughterhouses which prod cows with electric rods, but you can't prevent every injustice.
If you don't like the way meat is being raised/produced, then don't eat it! If you don't want to pay a few dollars more for those cage free eggs at the grocery, then please don't complain about laying cages!
Alright, that's my rant for the day. On to the next issue: accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies.
