With more and more people across the country becoming more conscious about the origin of their food, especially meats and other farm products, farms and abattoirs have come under more intense scrutiny as of late. Whether they’re not following proper protocol when it comes to animal recycling, fallen stock collection and animal disposal, accused of being violent towards livestock or aren’t following health and safety procedures, there are plenty of reasons why a farm may be shut down or penalised by government officials or regulatory boards.
Alongside the rise of people wanting to know more about their food’s journey to their plate, there has also been an increase in veganism and animal activism. This has led to the uncovering, and media coverage, of negligence and lazy practice across farms, such as poor animal disposal and animal recycling or infrequent fallen stock collection. However, worse than this, it has also lifted the veil on abuse and mistreatment of animals across the country at select farms. Whilst most farmers do tend to nurture their livestock well, some do not.
A recent investigation by the EU involved an illegal lorry journey of calves travelling from Ireland, destined for Holland and Belgium. Around 5,000 calves were transported across 17 lorries on a 19-hour ferry journey from Ireland, which is 10 hours more than the legal time limit that un-weaned calves are allowed to be transported for. The journey overall took 56 hours, a staggering amount of time for the calves to be confined in a small space without their mothers’ milk, or even water. They were being transported to veal farms in Belgium and Holland, where they will spend several weeks in small pens, despite being still dependent on their mothers for nutrition. There were also only three attendants on the ferry, when there should have been seventeen – one for each lorry. This cruel act is being thoroughly investigated by French authorities, the Irish Agriculture Department and the EU, to try and ensure that this abhorrent practice doesn’t occur again.
Video footage taken at a farm in Bedfordshire has emerged and is full of shockingly cruel behaviour. Workers tormented the pigs on the farm and carried out horrendous acts on the innocent animals, including clipping piglets’ teeth off without pain relief, smashing a piglet’s head against a wall, illegally and repeatedly shocking pigs with an electric prod, and not carrying out proper fallen stock collection, leaving dead piglets all over the floor and trapping live piglets in crates with their dead siblings. Animal welfare investigators found the regulation breaches at Rosebury Farm in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. The farm had passed five Red Tractor inspections this year, including one only in July. However, the farm was given notice of these inspections before they happened, so when inspectors arrived unannounced, they were shown the full horrors of the farm, causing it to be suspended. This farm delivered the animals to abattoirs that supplied large supermarkets too, meaning that it could have reached a lot of people.
It’s one thing for farms to get slightly lazy and become negligent with some aspects of the farm, such as animal disposal, animal recycling and some cleanliness issues (which are still obviously of the utmost importance), but to demonstrate these levels of cruelty towards the livestock is completely disgusting and should not occur in this day and age.