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NEW REPORT EXPOSES THE SUBSIDY-SUCKING
FOOD-PRODUCTION THAT DESECRATES THE COUNTRYSIDE
"A sheep's aim in life is to find ways of dying"
is the way the farmer/shepherd (now styled as flockmaster)
callously dismisses the hardships endured by the surviving
animals delivered up to the slaughter and butcher. Sheep are
stoical sufferers - unlike pigs, people, and dogs - and signs
of distress escape the attention of uncaring keepers.
The miseries and harsh conditions of the season of intensified
lambing to catch the Easter and spring markets are yet again
to challenge the endurance of the long-suffering sheep. The
imperatives of production and the export trade and the relentless
cruelty and impoverishment of the environment comprise a shame
that calls for personal, individual action by consumers/customers
and a diversion of subsidies into unobjectionable earnests
in rural improvement and animal welfare.
"Consumers are reluctant to pay the real price for lamb
and mutton, anyway," says Dr Alan Long, an advisor of
VEGA research, which has just published an analysis into the
losses sustained during the lambing season and the destinations
and fate of the surviving animals. "We are now in a season
of a few months during which, as usual, about 4 million lambs
will perish in the womb or shortly after birth because this
ritual is inflicted on ewes and lambs failing to cope in unequal
conditions with exposure to blizzards, snow-drifts, sleet,
cold, starvation, abortion, stillbirth, infection, and misadventure.
It is an indictment of bad husbandry, neglect, and evil exploitation,
and is a far call from biblical impressions of sheep and shepherding;
and the farmers and the Countryside Alliance do not pull the
wool over the eyes we turn on this shame in our environment.
"Contrast the scenes on the evening's TV of Rolf Harris
and the RSPCA vets and their tender loving care with the weather
reports and forecasts telling of conditions in the highlands
and uplands - the appropriately named Less Favored Areas -
where enfeebled ewes and frail lambs are struggling to survive
unaided the challenges of birth. In those areas the Lord does
not temper the wind to the newborn lamb.
"The fox - especially the vixen - suffers too, and will
move in on ewes giving birth with one lamb already born. Farmers
and markets take chances in breeding sheep for meatiness rather
than hardiness, forcing prolificacy to the point at which
the ewe's guts are so compressed by unborn lambs that she
can't eat enough - especially in poor grazings - to sustain
herself and protect her progeny. However, predation by foxes
accounts for a small part of the losses due to 'misadventure'."
Sheep farming, extensified in the barren highlands and uplands
or intensified in the lowlands, is a ludicrous form of food-production.
Many farmers cultivate the subsidies more profitably than
earnings from the markets. Intensification and overstocking
have led to environmental degradation of threatened habitats.
WHAT'S TO DO, THEN?
"Desistance is the way VEGA urges the public to resist
and overcome the evils. Farmers and the Countryside Alliance
will get the message quick enough if customers intensify their
avoidance of sheep-meat in all its guises, for home-consumption
or eaten out, fresh, frozen, lamb, mutton, kosher, halal...
Less objectionable alternatives abound. Politicians will get
the message that electors want the quality of life in our
countryside and rural society with reconsideration of those
less favored areas.
"The love of mutton should no longer 'beat the love
o' sheep.' Tenderness is the word for the living animal, but
is a dishonest appreciation of the grilled or curried remains
on the plate. We urge people to abandon their complicity in
an avoidable rapine," states Alan Long.
FACTS AND FIGURES
- The annual losses in the UK of very young lambs exceeds
the number of scientific procedures carried out each year
in Britain on a variety of species. Running at about 16%
of the conceptions the losses amount to 4 million. Predation
by foxes accounts for about 1% of the losses. About 1 million
ewes die in gestation and birth.
- The breeding, rearing, and slaughter of sheep for meat
involves procedures infringing comparable Home Office requirements
for the keeping of laboratory animals.
- 18 Million sheep and lambs are killed each year in the
UK for meat; of these, 12.5m are directed into the domestic
trade which, topped up by the equivalent of 3.5m in imported
meat, comprises a total annual consumption of 16m. Live
exports of about 1m and exports of 5.5m as meat represent
a further kill of 6.5m sheep.
- Three out of 10 live sheep in the UK, being surplus to
home requirements, are exported on the hoof or on the hook,
for meat eaten abroad (nearly all within the EU). Transhipments
of live animals expose them to horrifying conditions in
transport and slaughter.
- Household consumption of lamb and mutton by the average
Briton is about 60g a week, down from 80g a decade earlier.
Present consumption, concentrated in the over 45s, amounts
to a human lifetime's kill of 21 sheep, for which a further
4 lambs have been conceived but succumbed before they could
survive to the age of slaughter.
- It would take the slaughter of a flock of 150 sheep to
satisfy the lifetime's requirements of a family of 2 parents
and 4 children (not including grandchildren and the corgis).
Something to chew on over the Sunday roast.
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