Cows stuck on cargo ship - who can help

I'm Dun said:
We should eat a lot more venison. There are far too many wild deer, damaging habitats and being pushed into urban surroundings. The next bad winter we have there will be a lot dead from starvation sadly.
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Can't get venison for love nor money here used to eat it a fair bit north of the wall. Can get a bit of game but not much unless you know someone on a shoot.

I'm not sure any of this actually helps those poor cows on the boat.
 
I think what this thread proves is that a lot of people don’t want to stop eating meat. Like they don’t want to stop flying or driving. And that’s fine. But you can’t have a nice planet in that case.
 
Cloball said:
Can't get venison for love nor money here used to eat it a fair bit north of the wall. Can get a bit of game but not much unless you know someone on a shoot.

I'm not sure any of this actually helps those poor cows on the boat.
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The local butcher who does the award winning pork pies (and slaughters my sheep) sells venison, mainly as sausages and game pies that contain a lot of partridge and pheasant, with some chicken to tone down the flavour.
 
I'm Dun said:
We should eat a lot more venison. There are far too many wild deer, damaging habitats and being pushed into urban surroundings. The next bad winter we have there will be a lot dead from starvation sadly.
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I like Venison but it's out of my price range unless yellow stickered. It's in most of the supermarkets.
 
Burnerbee said:
I think what this thread proves is that a lot of people don’t want to stop eating meat. Like they don’t want to stop flying or driving. And that’s fine. But you can’t have a nice planet in that case.
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It’s not really that simple, though, is it?

Could all 7 billion people on this planet sustain themselves on veg alone? When I’ve been to sun-Saharan Africa, you see a hell of a lot of goats and cows. You can’t farm very much in the desert.

And in the western world, most people can’t “just stop driving.” Not with the current infrastructure and our capitalist system that requires people to go to work somewhere in order to sustain themselves.

If anyone wants to design a new political and economic system which doesn’t require labour for the sake of making other people richer and keeping yourself from starving, I am totally up for that.
 
Burnerbee said:
I think what this thread proves is that a lot of people don’t want to stop eating meat. Like they don’t want to stop flying or driving. And that’s fine. But you can’t have a nice planet in that case.
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It's not either/or though is it? It likely is possible to develop far more sustainable ways of eating meat, flying (I'm not convinced but haven't flown anywhere for over 20years!) and driving. It's possible and maybe even desirable to limit the use of all of them as well as improve them. Try explaining to the global majority who really want access to high quality meat protein that, sorry, it's not available to YOU, cos we over-consumed and lost any connection to natural, balanced systems.
In any environmental discussion about meat production you actually need nuance as we will undoubtedly require the muck of grazing animals to maintain soil fertility for all crops. Alternatively we could b*gger the soil fertility with chemical fertilisers I suppose. But that won't help the environment. There is no environmental scientist, I don't think, who has a serious argument for getting rid of grazing animals. How should we utilize them when they die? Ethically, in terms of animal welfare we don't have to eat meat at all but currently many, many people globally strive to have meat in their diets: for their calories and nutritional profile, for status (!) and other reasons. Humans have always eaten some meat so it's a stretch to imagine that humanity will suddenly cease that dietary habit. We should almost certainly drastically reduce our meat consumption in developed countries - for many reasons but most importantly, if we want a 'nicer' planet we should choose all foodstuffs with great care and invest more in their quality.
 
Caol Ila said:
It’s not really that simple, though, is it?

Could all 7 billion people on this planet sustain themselves on veg alone? When I’ve been to sun-Saharan Africa, you see a hell of a lot of goats and cows. You can’t farm very much in the desert.

And in the western world, most people can’t “just stop driving.” Not with the current infrastructure and our capitalist system that requires people to go to work somewhere in order to sustain themselves.

If anyone wants to design a new political and economic system which doesn’t require labour for the sake of making other people richer and keeping yourself from starving, I am totally up for that.
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This is why the planet is past the point of no return imo....Not because it actually is yet, but because life is set up in such a way that we're past the point that the necessary changes to the way we live are feasible. And there's too many of us. By a lot. (8.2 billion too many😅)
 
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I'm in a lot of foraging groups on Facebook and there's been a couple of posts of people butchering road kill venison.

Meat eaters need to be more open to the idea of other species than the usual as well. Battered zander with chips!!
There is actually a company in America using hypostomus plecostomus, but only for dog food (I have asked them about becoming a UK seller of it but it's too expensive to import.) but if people were a bit more adventurous there's many species/avenues of acquiring meat that aren't as environmentally damaging as mass animal agriculture with just a few, very domesticated (as in modified/selectively bred) species.
 
Burnerbee said:
I think what this thread proves is that a lot of people don’t want to stop eating meat. Like they don’t want to stop flying or driving. And that’s fine. But you can’t have a nice planet in that case.
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Growing plants on the scale needed to sustain the population of even just one western society would be impossible without large numbers of toxic monocultures which will no doubt be using copious amounts of pesticides which kill wider-scale biodiversity, and they are predominantly based off nerve agents developed for use as chemical weapons against humans, with little research done into the impacts on us, but it is certainly damaging to other wildlife. This would have serious negative repercussions on wildlife, us, and our planet. Not good.

Also, cutting meat out of our diets entirely would likely doom a lot of food-bred breeds to extinction.

Although, I think that sustainable farming practices using both arable crops and livestock would be a good approach. To do such a thing truly sustainably would probably require that food waste is eliminated almost entirely, a reduction in the total consumption of food per person, and a slight reduction in meat intake. However, I think it is extremely unlikely that this will happen on a global scale.

Really, the most effective way of ending the Holocene extinction is to kill the entirety of humanity, but nobody wants to do that. I wonder why(!)

(I have been alive for 17 years and never once set foot on a plane, and I don’t intend to unless it is actually completely necessary. Food waste is virtually non-existent in my home. I will concede that I have been driven to and from school, and will be learning to drive myself soon.)
 
I have to say, I just looked out of the window and two things crossed my mind.

Firstly those poor, poor cows on that ship, and how abhorrent and unnatural it is for them to be living like that.

And secondly that despite being called an "entitled, nostalgic, completely out of touch, irrational local farms" person who is "naiive and conpletely uninformed on this", at least I can safely say that I do see cows in fields, on our local farm, and I know exactly where they are.


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They were having an absolute hooley today and galloping around. I think they were fresher than the horses today!

I don't care that wanting animals to live like this is nostalgic or entitled. This is the kind of cattle farming I can get behind, and shipping anything on the hoof, producing them in intensive farming environments or letting them suffer horribly stranded at sea is simply not.
 
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Well said @LadyGascoyne. I think we have to be clear that those of us who do enjoy our meat and try to buy locally from our own local farm producers etc. do not in any way support either the long distance haulage of live animals for slaughter or anything else, nor do we support any of the horrific (if correct of course) practices in abattoirs that have been described here by some posters.

I am also fortunate enough to see the cattle and sheep that I might buy at a later date grazing within fields very close to me. Pigs however is another matter altogether and that I won't bring into the discussion here.
 
LadyGascoyne said:
I have to say, I just looked out of the window and two things crossed my mind.

Firstly those poor, poor cows on that ship, and how abhorrent and unnatural it is for them to be living like that.

And secondly that despite being called an "entitled, nostalgic, completely out of touch, irrational local farms" person who is "naiive and conpletely uninformed on this", at least I can safely say that I do see cows in fields, on our local farm, and I know exactly where they are.


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They were having an absolute hooley today and galloping around. I think they were fresher than the horses today!

I don't care that wanting animals to live like this is nostalgic or entitled. This is the kind of cattle farming I can get behind, and shipping anything on the hoof, producing them in intensive farming environments or letting them suffer horribly stranded at sea is simply not.
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This is my view as well, and as I said in a post earlier on, my late husband, a butcher said the only way for cattle to leave the United Kingdom is on a hook, unless they are pedigree breeding cattle….
Also if you ever drive down the A14 in England there is a stretch of farming land, acres of it and there in paddocks are free range pigs, hundreds of them….Individual shelters in each paddock….so pigs can be kept in humane conditions…
I am sure this is not the only free range pig farm….
 
Marshpiper said:
This is my view as well, and as I said in a post earlier on, my late husband, a butcher said the only way for cattle to leave the United Kingdom is on a hook, unless they are pedigree breeding cattle….
Also if you ever drive down the A14 in England there is a stretch of farming land, acres of it and there in paddocks are free range pigs, hundreds of them….Individual shelters in each paddock….so pigs can be kept in humane conditions…
I am sure this is not the only free range pig farm….
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There are in Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. One is next to the main Oxford to Swindon Road.
 
When I livid in the UK a neighbouring farm raised free range pigs. Also one of my siblings was a free range pig farmer. If you have been fortunate enough to eat delicious free range pork you would be highly unlikely to accept the taste and texture of intensively farmed pork.

Unfortunately I live very near to one of Ireland's largest intensive pig producers, I cannot call them farmers, they are as far removed from any traditional farming method as one could possibly imagine. I have never seen one pig in a field, but I have heard them screaming when I have ridden through their extensive set up.

DO NOT READ BELOW IF DISTRESSED BY ACCOUNT OF INTENSIVE FARMING CRUELTY.

One day I happened through as they were moving dozens of pigs from one huge metal container section to another. I witnessed two pigs so distressed by being roughly chased along in an unknown or experienced outdoor area with natural light that they collapsed screaming in the road. They were roughly kicked and thrown to one side to avoid blocking the pathway of the other pigs. They screamed and shook distressingly with their legs thrashing about as they attempted to stand up again, they could not do so.

I rode straight home sobbing, I never rode that way again, I do not know who was traumatized more, me or my poor horse. I think we could do far more to alleviate cruelty in farming here in Ireland and the UK than happens in reality.
 
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