Lie of the Land and Hugh's Chicken Run

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u04elw2

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Those programmes were so sad. As a vegetarian I wouldn't eat meat anyway but I just think it's a shame how farmers are having to bow down to the pressure and do things like breeding calves that are crossbreeds they know they'll have to shoot, despite being perfectly healthy, just to increase dairy yield, intensive farming etc just because if they don't they would be forced to close due to lack of business and pressure from imported food and supermarkets.

Like one guy on it said, he's a farmer and he doesn't agree with broiler hens / pheasants, intensive farming etc. And he thinks its unfair that cattle and sheep and pigs are transported hundreds of miles and not killed on or near the farm. But he knows he'll be in trouble eventually because that's the way things are heading thanks to everyone wanting their supermarket food so cheap.

So sad.

Although I don't agree with the presenter's statement that "why care about foxhunting when nobody cares about the state of farming". That is unfair as I care about both. I don't agree with foxhunting just as I don't agree with killing any animal but that is my personal opinion.

I also had a problem with the farmer's statement that "if we all became vegetarians then it would mean no animals in the countryside for us to look at". That may be true if we're assuming that all animals are killed for meat. But surely we could still have cows for milk? And breed them as purebreeds, keeping the males to breed and the females for more milk? Sheep for wool? Chickens for eggs? Hell, I'd have herds of everything as pets given the land and the money!

I feel that if farming was allowed to go back to the way it has been for hundreds of years and farmers were allowed to slaughter animals in familiar surroundings on their own farm and raise them the way they know is best then I would have far less of an issue with the meat industry. I wouldn't have so much of a problem with worrying about how animals were raised and killed and I wouldn't voice my opinion against it as much as I presently do.

I feel very sorry for the farmers in all this - it's not their fault and they are, in my experience, a bunch of people who care greatly about their animals. It's just a shame that society has forced them to this.
 
Erm sorry to burst your bubble but ALL dairy cow herds will have some of the calves killed ... 90% of the time its just not viable to sell them or run them on for meat.

For a dairy cow to produce milk all year, she has to calve.....
 
I've watched Lie of the Land twice now. It is really disturbing, but it makes me angry that there is this state of apathy and inertia. Farmers blame the supermarkets and the consumers that buy from the supermarkets, but most people have no idea about the issues. I strongly believe the present movement in the media to get the truth known will shape consumer buying patterns and create pressure for change. I hope so anyway.

I sympathise with the farmers, I know and have experienced how hard they have to work at all hours of the day and every day of the year, but in Lie of the Land, they have a very defeatist attitude. I would be responding to the growing demand for locally raised and slaughtered organic meat if I was in that line, not government handouts and bowing to the supermarkets who want to import intensively reared meat stuffed with water and god only knows what else and shipped across continents to be sold for less than the cost of a packet of fags.

Cross breeding the dairy herd to increase their milk yield means the male calves are unsuitable for meat and have no value. This was painfully evident in the film by the ruthless way they were culled, slung on the back of trucks, skinned and fed to the hounds. I don't know how representative these scenes are of the dairy industry in general, but as a vegetarian that still consumes dairy, it made me feel a hypocrite for even that.

Now I'll stick my neck out and say the same people who claim they can only afford to feed their families on £2 intensively reared supermarket chickens are those who stand in front of me at the newsagent buying £10 of scratchcards, 5 lines for Saturday's lottery and a packet of Marlboros.

There really does need to be change in this country and I hope the current publicity will kickstart things and we can all support farming with a clear conscience.
 
tamster, I couldn't agree more!

Did you see that woman who was so cold, even after going into that broiler hen shed? Everyone else was in tears and she was just like "so? that's the way it is"

It's people like her that need to wake up to the suffering and waste that goes on. Everyone else on Hugh's programme seemed to have taken some of it on
 
I wasn't going to post on this thread, rather wait until I got to SB, but I think tamster you are mixing up the prgrammes.
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