Photo caption: I had this banner made a couple of Christmases ago after a local farmer finally fenced his stock out of “our” swimming hole in the Manawatu River.
I have been interviewing Emeritus Professor Charles Daugherty – saviour of our native tuatara – about growing up in Oklahoma, and the history of America from the Ice Age to the Vietnam War. Quite a big topic, and another story for another time. He gave me a copy of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (his dog) to give me the flavour of America in the 60s. Charles and his wife were just getting over a mild infection of campylobacter, which has somehow got into the Havelock North water supply and poisoned over 5,000 of its 14,000 inhabitants. (Overseas readers: Havelock North is a wealthy and beautiful town in Hawke’s Bay, set amidst wineries and orchards) The degree of affliction is host and dose dependent, Charles’s doctor told him. He and Maryanne got off lightly as they mainly drink tea and coffee rather than tap water.
Charles Daugherty, brother Bill, and mother Ann, c1949. Charles became an ecologist; Bill, a Marine and then an intelligence officer at the US Embassy in Iran. He was one of the hostages imprisoned at the Embassy for 14months.
Another biologist I know, Professor Nigel French from Massey University, a world expert in infectious diseases, uses evolutionary genetics to track the origin of food and waterborne bugs. He is well known for his forensic investigation a few years ago, which traced the source of about 50% of New Zealand human campylobacter infections to one poultry supplier. Subsequent interventions reduced the number of infections by the same percentage.
A government science agency (ESR) report has narrowed the range of possible sources of the Havelock North waterborne campylobacter to strains found in wild fowl and ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats and deer). The recent heavy rains may well be a factor in this rare event. It seems that campylobacter can survive longer, and be carried further, than people thought. Exactly how the water supply became contaminated is not yet established, but local authorities, farming interests, and clean water activists are taking their corners.
My sister and brother-in-law live in Havelock North. My brother-in-law cannot risk adding systemic poisoning to his other serious health challenges, so they immediately evacuated to the purer climes of Norsewood, where my family clings to a one-acre remnant of our grandparents’ farm. Our water comes from a natural spring above the Manawatu River (not known for its purity), and we collect rain water in a tank.
Meanwhile, on the many dairy farms around Norsewood, where the human population is at stone age densities, calves are dropping onto the chill wet fields in their thousands
Nationwide, a total of over 4.5 million calves will be born from 4.7 million cows/heifers (down from 5 million last year) by the end of September. Cows that fail to produce are culled (killed) or ‘carried over’, that is not milked until the next calving season. Dairy NZ estimates that sixty percent of the calves will be reared for beef (and slaughtered at about 20months) or kept as replacement dairy cows.
I rang a Norsewood farmer to see how the season is going so far. He was about half way through delivering his herd of 600. His wife, who runs a retail clothing business in the ghost town of Havelock North, had been at a loose end (not a euphemism) week before last. Schools and many businesses were closed. Those not clinging to the toilet bowl were nursing the sick, and delivering supplies of bottled water to the elderly and households where everyone has gone down with it, including the dog.
Farmers cannot afford to get sick at this time of year. They need to check the cows late into the night, and act as midwife to those having difficulty. All calves, regardless of their futures as dairy cows, steak, wiener schnitzel or leather jackets, are removed from their working mothers as soon as possible, housed in a shed, and hand fed until the truck comes to take them to the abattoir or sale-yards – they have to be at least 4 days old. A senior vet told me, off the record, that he thinks that calves should be put down on the farm, because many are too immature to withstand the journey to the meat works.
The care and transport of calves is now governed by law. A new regulatory framework has been introduced to give regulators greater powers against those in the breach – very few we would all like to believe. A vet inspects the condition of animals on arrival at the works, and ensures they are not hungry or thirsty, and that they were “fit for transport” and “suitable to be held” and “processed”.
The 30% of calves (about 1.3M) which are to be raised for beef are sold at local markets and are de-horned and castrated (with rubber rings) to make them less aggressive. A local anaesthetic must be used when castrating calves over 6 months. Farmers say that cows get over separation from their newborns after about a day or two, and that the calves quickly transfer their allegiance to the human on the end of the bottle. In fact, breaking bonds between humans and calves and lambs may be more of a problem.
Colleague Wendy had a past life as a farmer and made the mistake of getting too close to orphaned lamb, Ted (naming him was her first mistake). When he ultimately boarded the truck he tried desperately to get off and craned his neck to watch her weeping form disappear from view. My grandfather and uncle used to stand at the farm gate and cry when their calves were taken away.
The farmers I talk to are very good people and I have no reason to doubt their observations over many seasons, but nevertheless, I’m going to ask animal physiologists if, and to what extent, the cow suffers when her calf is taken away.
But let’s get real. This procedure is a primary root of human civilisation. Animal milk gave humans a reliable, nutritious and relatively safe food supply. The survival advantage of the genetic mutation allowing us to digest the lactose in milk into adulthood is obvious from its rapid spread. It is especially prevalent in northern European populations. But before then, we were able to consume the milk in the form of yoghurt and cheese, which have very low amounts of lactose. Anecdotally, a lot of people seem to be self-diagnosing lactose intolerance or have picked up the notion that adults should not drink milk. Suppliers have been quick to exploit that dietary fad. UK supermarkets have quite a range of lactose-free milks.
To refresh a cow’s milk supply, she must get pregnant each year. I learnt about work by a brilliant young New Zealand scientist who is a member of the MacDiarmid Institute, Cather Simpson. She and her team have developed a much better and more affordable way of sexing sperm so that farmers can get precisely the number of replacement females or males they need, using the best sperm. Seventy five percent of animals are conceived through artificial insemination, that rather eye-watering process involving rubber gloves and rolling up your sleeves to the elbow. Bulls are sent in to finish off the herd by the old fashioned method. They politely call it tupping in sheep circles. I wonder which method cows prefer. Most bulls seem to be too heavy to mount a small step let alone a cow.
In the end, cows must get pregnant with something to keep producing milk, and avoid the one-way journey. Sex determination will not change the fact that not all the offspring are wanted for burgers or replacement milking cows. Jersey boys are no good for beef production, being relatively delicate of frame and having yellow fat unattractive to consumers.
My farmer contact in Norsewood tells me that the birth of calves is timed so that the cows have a couple of months to recover their full appetite in time to make the most of the spring grass – their stomach capacity is reduced by the calf growing inside them. I never knew that. I never knew lots of things, including the entire history of America. To pass the time, I asked a couple of men in the “service industry” (don’t read anything into the quotation marks) some basic questions about the number of cows and dairy farms, and what happens to calves. They guestimated the national herd at a few thousand and 30 million respectively, and the number of dairy farms at 100 and 10,000. The older one said he had stopped drinking milk as humans are not supposed to drink it after age 7! They both looked embarrassed when I asked them what happened to the calves – like me, they really didn’t know.
It has been routine on some farms to induce the birth of calves for management convenience, rather than gynaecological necessity. The voluntary Code of Practice has progressively reduced the percentage of the herd that can be induced to zero, except under very specific circumstances. The many women who have experienced induction will appreciate that it’s not too different from the birthing process in the film Alien.
My favourite television programmes, now that I’ve weaned myself off Breaking Bad, are Long Lost Family (UK production) and Lost and Found (NZ production, TV3). If I needed any convincing that forced separation from a baby is just about the worst thing that can happen to a human female, then these programmes are ample reinforcement. Can other mammals be that different, I wonder? Can their feelings be measured? Sheep and cows cannot weep, but they cry out in the night for as long as a week sometimes, people say. At the very least they must be confused about what has happened to their offspring. But just supposing the animal’s distress is only of two days duration, should we then multiply that by the number of animals – 5M cows and 25M sheep – to quantify it? That would come to 1400 million hours of grief and confusion each year.
If there’s anything that makes scientists roll their eyes it’s that sort of anthropomorphising, long-bow-drawing silliness.
I am back in New Zealand in a cafe in Waikanae, resuming my interview with animal physiologist, Professor David Mellor, from Massey University. I did promise I would report my conclusions from my research into farm animal welfare. I find myself in a complete tangle of emotional, half-formed opinions and Google stats.
Photo of Professor David Mellor, Massey University, courtesy of NZ Farmers’ Weekly
“Sheep have it pretty good though, don’t they,” I venture, postulating my just-thought-up hierarchy of farm animal wellbeing – sheep, cattle, deer, cows, pigs, chooks. MP Nancy Astor once replied to criticism of her impulsive outbursts in Parliament: “How do I know what I think until I’ve said it!” I know what you mean, Nancy. I guess my reasoning is that sheep have larger and more interesting territories, and can keep their young with them for longer – though as a result they bond more strongly and suffer more from the separation. Only a few get milked. Being shorn by a competent shearer might even be a pleasurable experience for all we know. I don’t want to think about the inevitable trip to the works – the heat, the cold, the smell of urine, faeces and blood, the frightening sounds of the road, the lurching from side to side, the screech of brakes – but certainly no worse than for very young, still a bit wobbly calves. Tail docking is painful, but justified as causing less pain than fly-strike, which results in maggots eating your backside. Then there’s castration with rubber bands and dogs chasing you around all the time! Sheep are starting to slip from their no 1 position on my welfare scale.
Professor Mellor raises an eyebrow at my hasty conclusions. As far as this gentlemanly scientist ever goes in expressing disapproval, I think. Trouble is, I’m trying to draw quick, crisp bottom lines from a man who has spent five decades studying animal physiology, thinking deeply about farm animal welfare ethics, poring over the fine print in welfare codes of practice, and trying to reconcile them with economic realities and public opinion. But then most of the population will come to their conclusions in the space of a TV1 newsbyte, and from a far less reliable source.
Professor Mellor does not defend the practice of separating cow from calf. It is a necessary compromise if we want to farm milk and meat. It’s just not practical to keep the calves with their mothers for longer, he says, and in any case would make the inevitable separation worse. Farmers agree. What we have to do, he says, is strive to make everything else as pain-free and pleasant as possible, and strive constantly for improvement. He says research has shown that giving animals the basics – enough food and water, good veterinary care, and gentle handling – provides only a neutral existence, and does not confer wellbeing, though wellbeing is impossible without them. Pleasure for most animals comes from a variety of food (not the same old grass every day), water to cool down in on a hot day, shelter, freedom to explore, sunshine, the chance to express their natural instincts, real sex (not a plastic glove and syringe), and social interaction with others of their kind. Humans strive for just the same things, except for the grass. Syrians under siege tried eating it in their desperation.
Thanks to people like David Mellor, the late David Bayvel, and many dedicated public servants at MPI (Ministry for Primary Industries) and other professional bodies, we have improved our farm animal welfare to among the best, if not the best, in the world. Thanks to good science, it has been illegal since 2006 to cut the tails off cows – a practice proven to confer no health advantage to cow or human.
Read the excerpt from Akenfield (written in the mid-60s), below, in which a UK vet talks about his misgivings about farming intensification.
I can’t help thinking that in another 20, 50, 100 years we will look back on some of our agricultural practices with horror. But no one is blameless and no one is to blame. We just have to get on with the science, get educated, and somehow restore our environment while maintaining food production. Professor Daugherty is putting his ecological experience to good use up there in Hawke’s Bay as Chair of the Implementation Group for their Biodiversity Strategy. If he can bring tuatara back from near extinction, then watch this space.
This kaka (one of our endangered native parrots) knows who to go to for help. Emeritus Professor Charles Daugherty on Kapiti Island.
At the beginning of my Churchill research, Dr Steve Thompson gave me a book called “Akenfield”, which is a collection of interviews with almost every member of a Suffolk village in the mid-1960s. Here is what the vet, Dr Tim Swift (55) said back then about tail docking and the ethical questions around intensive farming practices:
“The imprisoned creatures (pigs) are eating each other. Everything is being controlled except their natural instincts. These are frustrated, so they have problems. Tail-biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly large problem. They just bit each other’s tails right off. You go in first thing of a morning and find three pigs running around with a mass of blood on their buttocks. Then you have to sit and watch for hours. At last you see a pig walk up to his neighbour and go chunk! And there is the most dreadful scream. Then more screams, for it takes about three good snaps to get the tail off. It is boredom which causes this and they are now considering taking the tails off baby pigs to avoid it. There is a lot of argument about whether a law should be brought in to prevent tails being cut off without an anaesthetic. De-tailing pigs is still in the basket – although in New Zealand they de-tail cows. They do it to stop the cow swishing muck into the milk bucket and to prevent dirt collecting round the cow’s bottom. It was the clean-milk production people in New Zealand who started this practice but the whole of the British veterinary profession are dead against it. We say, ‘We are not going to turn cattle out on a hot summer’s day to get covered with flies and not to be able to flick at its tormented ribs’. The New Zealanders say, ‘If the cow wasn’t mucky, there wouldn’t be any flies’. We don’t agree; it is often the sweetness of the udder which draws the flies. Many of the farmers like this de-tailing idea but we are fighting it. We are facing up to a great ethical question – to what extent can an animal be mutilated in the service of Man? Allowing for the fact that one believes that the animal exists for the benefit of man.
“There is castration. We’ve tried to get that more and more humane. We’ve brought in a minimum standard saying that every farm animal over a certain age must be given local anaesthetic before it is castrated. But it is economically impossible at present to do this. We haven’t got an anaesthetic which works quickly enough. Imagine a big pig factory with hundreds of pigs waiting to be castrated. Each animal would have to be injected twice, put down, given a quarter of an hour and then stood up again. You simply couldn’t do it. Think of the vet’s fees. The farmer simply wouldn’t put up with such a loss. If we had something we could spray, that would be easier. But we haven’t. So you have the big question – can you ethically castrate a pig without an anaesthetic? And the answer for most people is yes. Because people will never separate ethics from profits.”
(pg 262/3, Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village, by Ronald Blythe, published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969
