Lock, Stock and Chitchat a Seacht

patsy_mccabe wrote: »

My fella managed to get himself out under a gate, go down the end of shed, out door, up the yard and there he was standing inside the gate bawling at me this morning. This little fella count stand yesterday.

MickeyShtyles wrote:

Just to clarify..... The human variety or bovine?

whelan2 wrote: »

Eldest lad was 16 the other day, what's the story with getting the tractor licence?

patsy_mccabe wrote:

Have the cows enough milk? Had a red limousine heifer with twins a while back. I fed her meal in a bucket every day and she did a good job on them.

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

Hope this will work.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/moove-over-refugees-militant-vegans-have-claustrophobic-cows-to-save-3jh9wrd0x

Not long ago, after being accused of abusing its powers, the RSPCA decided it would stop bringing trumped-up prosecutions against children who fail to clean out their rabbit hutches properly and concentrate instead on the real villains.

There are plenty of targets, it seems. Last year one woman was successfully prosecuted for cutting the heads off her two pet snakes with a pair of scissors. And that’s only right and proper, because while they may only be snakes, you have to be fairly weird to think: “Right. I need to kill them, so I shall go through my sewing kit to find the right weapon.” Certainly, it would only be a matter of time before a person like this were pushing babies into a waste disposal unit.

Then there was a man who kept a golden eagle in his kitchen, and two brothers convicted of head-butting their bulldog. Why would you do that? Bulldogs have already had their snouts head-butted into a concertina by the cruelty of deranged selective breeding. So all of them already look as if they’ve run into a wall while travelling at a thousand miles an hour.

I applaud the RSPCA for its new stance. It’s sensible to leave averagely lazy pet owners alone and go after the people who are plainly mad, and possibly quite dangerous.

However, there are other animal welfare enthusiasts who it appears are not quite so sensible. That brings us to a pro-vegan organisation called Animal Equality, which believes that fish can be sad, that an egg is an abortion and that milk is murder. I don’t doubt that some of its supporters spend their evenings sending dog poo to scientists who make beagles smoke pipes.

Last week it released photographs and video of some cows living in sheltered accommodation on a farm in Dorset. It pointed out that the hutches in which the animals took cover when it was raining were too small and that many had open sores on their backs from trying to get inside. And it said that Marks & Spencer, which prides itself on the ethical nature of the food it sells, is still selling milk from the farm in question. M&S? S&M, more like.

The law — there’s a law for everything these days, it seems — says that cows can be kept in individual hutches only until they are eight weeks old, after which they must be allowed to stand in the rain in a field doing absolutely nothing until they die of boredom. And there seems little doubt that the cows in the pictures are more than eight weeks old.

However, M&S says it dispatched a team of experts immediately and that after an investigation and assurances from the farmer, it will continue to buy his milk. The farmer says spot audits have been done and all were passed. Dorset council’s trading standards people have also paid a visit and did not detect any breaches. So the farmer, the council and M&S say everything’s fine, but the animal rights people still argue it isn’t. And the photographic evidence appears to back them up.

Hmmm. Who knows? Dairy farming is a tricky business these days. You need a gigantic herd to make more than £2.75 a year, and one tiny blip in the weather or one punctured tyre on a milk tanker can wipe out any profit in an instant. So maybe for a short while cows that were more than eight weeks old were kept in hutches that were a bit on the tight side.

Maybe, then, the book should be thrown at Farmer Giles. Maybe he should be imprisoned and fined so heavily, he is forced to sell his farm to property developers. Or maybe, instead, we should seek out the lawmakers who decided how much space a veal calf needs to be happy and ask them: “What were you thinking of, you imbeciles?”

Near where I live in the countryside there are fields that, at this time of year, fill up with tin boxes that are, in some cases, no more than 14ft long. They are called “caravans”, and whole families sleep and eat in them for weeks at a time.

Others are even less fortunate and have to live in a plastic triangle with nothing to protect them from the elements other than a jammed zip and a small stove that they use to keep warm and heat what they call “food”. Often this amounts to nothing more than a thin gruel with some beans in it. And do we have legislation to prevent this kind of cruelty? No. We do not.

You could argue that people are not forced to live in these “caravans” and plastic triangles, but that’s not so. If they’d had a decent education and had earned more money, you can be sure they’d rent a villa in St Tropez instead.

And anyway, what about the people who live in the refugee camps of Jordan or South Sudan? They are trudging through a mind-numbing existence of acute hunger, disease and devastating loss and they don’t even have the privilege of being milked twice a day. No one comes with clean bedding every morning. No one mucks them out. No one supplies food or clean water or shelter when it’s cold.

Occasionally a big-hearted volunteer will arrive with a few sacks of grain and a bagful of aspirin, but these visits are few and far between. Because, I’m sorry to say, most people are too busy hiding in the bushes in Dorset, filming cows that may or may not be too large for the sturdy and clean accommodation with which they’ve been provided.

I’d like to close with a message to the friends and supporters of Animal Equality. Why don’t you go to a small coastal village in Africa one day and tell the people there that the fish they’ve just hauled from the sea are sad as a result? And let’s see how far you get.