by Clare Druce
The gamebirds considered in this Opinion are pheasants and partridges, representing, FAWC tells us, an industry with an estimated value to the UK economy of £1.6 billion. According to FAWC’s 2008 Opinion, approximately thirty five million pheasants and five to ten million partridges were at that time released annually in the UK for shoots.
It seems mortality figures were not ‘readily available’ but apparently stakeholders suggested a likely 5% to 20% up to the time of release, with another ‘significant’ number of lost birds, those shot and injured, or not shot at all.
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In the course of its enquiries FAWC visited all kinds of rearing systems, including the infamous cages for breeders. Much of the information in the 2008 Opinion is useful and revealing.
For example, we learn that it’s not only specs with pins that pierce the nasal septum: apparently those perfectly legal ones that clip into the nostrils can cause ‘eventual perforation of the nasal septum’ (28). How distressing is the word ‘eventual’ in this context. Bits too are now suspected of damaging the nasal septum.
We’re told that partial beak amputation combined with bitting is still carried out, though ‘not commonly’ (29). Who are these enthusiasts, we wondered, inflicting two tortures when just one would do the dirty work?
Cages for breeders ‘in their present form’ are frowned upon, as not offering breeding pheasants ‘an environment in which their basic needs to express normal behaviour can be or are being met’ (30). Surely a powerful understatement.
The ‘small raised metal cage for breeding partridges in pairs’ also met with disapproval, for the same reasons. The newer models were found to measure approximately 90cm x 30cm and 40cm high (36ins x 12ins x 16ins), and here we learn that some partridges are kept in these miserable little prisons for ‘up to three seasons’ (31).
Brails (described throughout the Opinion as ‘brailles’), restraints we’d hitherto believed to be tied to a wing to stop birds escaping from open-topped pens, are, we now discover, sometimes used throughout the breeding season in enclosed pens too, merely to prevent ‘loss by mismanagement’ – in other words, a brailed bird can more easily be caught if it makes a bid for freedom through a gate carelessly left open (32).
The Opinion mentioned a study (unspecified) that suggested a figure of between 25 and 30% of birds ‘that die or are lost from the shoot following release and before the start of the shooting season’ (33), confirming our observations that mortality is notably high when birds are transferred to the relative freedom of release pens.
Perhaps the pheasants we’d met wandering the lanes of Bettws Cedewain were ‘lost’. We certainly hoped so.
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February 2010: I noticed a copy of The Countryman’s Weekly on sale in our local newsagent’s. An almost life size colour photo of a pheasant on the cover had caught my eye, along with the wording Game Rearing – TWO PAGE SPECIAL.
I took a closer look and noted the signs of suffering: the botched partial beak amputation, the damaged nostrils (aka nares). How could this photo have got past the picture editor? The end of this bird’s beak was blunted, with strange additions like stunted feathers growing from it. The nostrils were blocked, apparently completely, as if a protective skin had grown over them. I bought the magazine so I could at least lodge a complaint.
I wrote to Mrs Theresa Dent, Chief Executive of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, expressing Chickens’ Lib’s disgust at the image. The GWCT is based at Fordingbridge in Hampshire, like the Game Conservancy, but the two are separate organisations (34).
I received a reply from Christopher Davis, a veterinarian attached to the GWCT. After letting me know of the Trust’s firm belief in its instrumental role in encouraging the FAWC ‘Opinion’, he went on to refer to DEFRA’s Draft Welfare Code for Gamebirds. This stressed the aspiration that alternatives to management systems that inhibit birds from fully expressing their range of normal behaviours should be ‘worked towards’. The code would also recommend that only fully trained and experienced stockmen should fit or remove bits. Etcetera, etcetera.
Mr Davis left any mention of the Countryman’s Weekly cover photograph until the very last. It transpired that he still hadn’t seen it and felt unable to comment, as any such comment would be pure conjecture. Within the doubtless grand and well-staffed walls of Burgate Manor, it seems nobody had been instructed to get hold of a copy of the magazine, let alone asked to discover the source of this blatant representation of illegal abuse.
But there’s more to come. Only a few weeks after I’d bought The Countryman’s Weekly, an article appeared in Veterinary Record describing DEFRA-funded research carried out into the condition and behaviour of bitted pheasants, based on birds on eighteen game farms in England and Wales. And who collated the information on the effects of these bits? None other than Christopher Davis himself! So why the ‘pure conjecture’ line, when he (and his colleague D.A. Butler) had already admitted that: ‘During the present study, bits were found to cause damage to the nares and bills of some pheasants. Most injuries occurred in bitted birds five weeks after bitting, when the birds were more than seven weeks old and it is probable that the bills had outgrown the bits…[which] did, however cause inflammation of the nostrils and crossed mandibles in some birds…’ (35).
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So the cruelty of intensive gamebird rearing goes on. Even before the dawn of that costly day out in the country, when shooting enthusiasts get together to enjoy the company of like-minded people, over one third of the birds specifically reared as gun fodder may have died from disease or fatal injuries.
The remaining targets, now free of bits and brails but probably not of the pain they inflicted when in place, unknowingly await their fate, victims of an industry that knows no mercy.
Chickens’ Lib to Farm Animal Welfare Network
By September 1992 we’d changed our name. There were two reasons for this, one more valid than the other. First, the valid one:
Despite our ‘poultry only’ rule, distressing information about other farmed species did of course concern us. Not only were we in touch with leading organisations worldwide, but we were based in a rural area. We couldn’t avoid hearing cows grieving for their lost calves, and knowing that those tiny calves could be exported for the white veal market. We’d witnessed pigs, filthy beyond belief, being forced onto transport wagons, perhaps in for long journeys, knowing that pigs suffer the miseries of travel sickness (1). On a regular basis, vehicles loaded with sheep passed us heading for local markets, some perhaps later to endure transport by sea, and slaughter in countries where the process might be even more haphazard and painful than in Britain. It was hard to turn our backs on all this and the name Chickens’ Lib began to seem less appropriate. But in changing to the Farm Animal Welfare Network (FAWN) we’d discarded a clever name, though our new headed paper made it clear that we incorporated Chickens’ Lib.
The other reason was perhaps feeble. In recent years, MAFF had come to accept that our pressure group was here to stay. We’d gained a reputation for dealing in facts, and disseminating them with some success. The result was that now we were routinely invited to meetings alongside veterinarians, academics, and those working for long established societies. Together we’d sit around the table and one by one announce the name of the organisation we represented. When it came to my turn, Chickens’ Lib sounded a bit light-hearted, almost as if I’d come along to lower the tone.
On these occasions there were always two or three men, always the same ones, who simply refused to have any truck with me, steadfastly avoiding catching my eye. Apparently I was beneath contempt. (Changing our name didn’t actually improve things…)
But back to an account of how Chickens’ Lib transformed itself into FAWN, an acronym rather too similar to FAWC, we were soon to realize. I did once receive a misdirected invitation to speak at a conference. Had I been bolder, I could perhaps have taken advantage of the confusion.
Not wishing to confuse rea
ders, I’ll continue to call our pressure group by its original name – Chickens’ Lib.
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In 1992 we produced a leaflet on the dairy cow, that overworked and generally little understood animal. But surely dairy products are acceptable? The very word ‘dairy’ has a fresh, reassuring ring to it. But it’s an inescapable fact that cows feel deeply for their calves; in order to produce milk a cow must calve annually and the practice is to take the calf from her, often only hours after birth.
In her book The Secret Life of Cows (2) Rosamund Young, an organic farmer, writes of cows’ strong family bonds. Not only does the mother care for her calf, but the mother of the cow about to give birth, the grandmother if you like, has been seen to show concern and commitment. The author gives the example of Dolly, a cow whose first calving went terribly wrong – the calf died and Dolly’s womb was displaced. After the vet had visited, Dolly was made comfortable, propped up and covered with a blanket. But when checked on only an hour later, there was no sign of her. The policy on this farm was to leave gates open for the animals to roam at will and finally, after much searching, Dolly was found three fields away, being licked and comforted by her mother. How the distressed cow had known where to find her mother remained a mystery.
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We had luck with a photo for our dairy cow leaflet. One gloomy day of heavy rain I steeled myself to take a full bucket of vegetable peelings to the compost heap at the far end of the garden. And there, grazing just beyond the boundary fence, was a cow with the hugely distended udders typical of a productive dairy cow. I hurried indoors for my camera. To my amazement, and despite the relentless rain, the resulting photos were remarkably good.
Our leaflet’s wording, accompanying the startling image, ran: The Milk Machine – producing pintas even while heavily pregnant. The text on the reverse read as follows:
The Dairy Cow’s Work is Never Done!
Produce a calf (have it taken away after only 12-24 hours), give milk for almost a year, produce another calf, more milk… So it goes on, with the repeated distress of birth followed by separation. Traditionally, a cow’s udder holds approximately two litres of milk at any one time. THE DAIRY COW’S? A STAGGERING TEN LITRES! Every year, over 50% of UK dairy cows suffer lameness due to deformations caused by huge udders, poor housing (especially in winter) and diseases such as laminitis. John Webster, Professor of Animal Husbandry at Bristol University, has written: “To understand the pain of laminitis it helps to imagine crushing all your fingertips in the door then standing on your fingertips.” Prematurely worn out by physical and mental stress, most dairy cows are slaughtered when around six or seven years old – a cow’s natural life span is nearer twenty years.
THE PINTA CERTAINLY COSTS A LOT
IN TERMS OF ANIMAL SUFFERING.
The leaflet demonstrated fine co-operation between organisations. In addition to our contact details, we suggested that people wanting further information should write to CIWF (they would have far more than we did) or Hillside Animal Sanctuary (where rescued dairy cows were cared for). NSAFF’s name was there too, since that organisation had paid half of the leaflet’s printing costs.
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Early in 2010 Nocton Dairies consortium applied for planning permission for dairy units that would house 8,100 cows and produce 250,000 litres of milk daily on one single farm at Nocton, south east of Lincoln. The cows would be kept indoors and milked three times daily, under a system known as ‘all year round’ or ‘continuous’ housing . Milk yield would be higher than average and the cows only allowed out onto pasture in their dry period. Those whose dry period coincided with winter weather would in all likelihood not go out at all.
Compassion in World Farming, the World Society for the Protection of Animals and the RSPCA joined forces in opposing the plan, as did possibly every other animal protection organisation in the country. The problem with planning applications is that moral issues count for nothing, at least when it comes to the welfare and feelings of animals. Objections on the grounds of cruelty, the condemning of cows to boring lives, pushed ever further beyond their natural biological limits – these matters could not and would not be considered. (Chickens’ Lib has frequently suggested to planning departments that objections based on morality should be given equal weight to concerns about traffic nuisance, noise, environmental pollution and so on.)
Many objections – on grounds acceptable to Planning – were put forward by local residents. The application was withdrawn following new environmental demands from North Kesteven District Council’s Planning Department, only to be renewed a few months later. As might be expected, Nocton Dairies presented its plans as a ‘state of the art’ venture – only the best of everything for their cows! What they failed to recognise is that cows are intelligent, cows like to make their own choices, and cows’ natural food is grass and herbs.
By chance, I heard a radio item mentioning the drying off process in dairy cows, to prepare for the few weeks in the year when milk production ceases. And it set me wondering how painful this process might be. Any woman who has breast-fed will know the acute discomfort of overfull breasts. How do cows cope with the distress of overfull udders, before lactation stops altogether? Hoping for information, I turned to Dairyco, an organisation funded by dairy farmers, only to find that it indulged in anthropomorphism in a big way. In an email dated September 18th 2012 a spokesperson for Dairyco told me that when its members explain the drying off period to children (in school parties visiting farms, I assume) they liken it to the time when an expectant mother goes on maternity leave. Farmers drawing on this comparison must live in hope that no bright child will point out that a cow’s baby is snatched away a day or two after birth, leaving the cow to grieve over her loss.
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On April 29th 2009 a symposium had been held in Copenhagen: ‘Experts Unite to Discuss Ways to Improve Dairy Cow Health, Fertility and the Environment’. Dairy cattle experts and ‘management scientists’ attended from several European countries, as well as America and Japan, all eager to share their knowledge of recent developments in dairy cow nutrition. USA’s Randy Shaver Ph.D. of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dairy Science Department apparently took the view that the bodily condition of the cows was not the issue – it was the price paid to farmers for their milk that mattered. Shaver spoke of US dairy farmers’ attempts to find cheap replacements to bulk out the diet of a dairy cow: by-products such as soya bean hulls were suggested. His dismissive attitude to welfare rang warning bells. Are British dairy cows to go the same way as America’s – confined in vast feed lots, where the animals’ food is of the meanest kind, calculated to keep the milk on coming while ignoring the physical and mental health of the cows?
It was depressing to note that Japan, a traditionally dairy-free country, was represented at the symposium. Japan has allowed itself to be seduced by the Western diet, high in dairy products, meat and junk food in general, so it’s no surprise that clinical obesity is already in evidence there. Similarly, China’s demand for a Western diet has meant a huge increase in suffering, especially for dairy cows. I’ve just watched footage of a vast circular Chinese milking parlour – a chilling image of animals reduced to the status of machines.
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‘We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the
lower animals.’ So wrote Henry Salt in his 1892 book ‘Animals’ Rights – Considered in Relation to Social Progress’.
There’s a persistent misconception that sheep are stupid, almost amusingly so – people who unthinkingly follow a trend do so ‘like sheep’. An article in Nature tells a very different story, bringing the maltreatment of sheep into uncomfortably sharp focus (3). ‘Sheep don’t forget a face – the discovery of a remarkable memory shows that sheep are not so stupid after all’, ran the heading.
According to the art
icle, sheep, like humans and monkeys, have cells in the temporal and medial prefrontal cortices of the brain, which encode faces. Sheep, again like humans, have a ‘remarkable ability to discriminate between, remember and think about many hundreds of individuals’.
The researchers found that individual sheep could remember 50 other different sheep faces for over 2 years, as well as human faces, even after long periods of separation. Twenty sheep were trained, with the incentive of food rewards, to discriminate between frontal pictures of pairs of sheep. Eventually, the sheep achieved an 80% success rate.
The conclusion to these experiments was that a sheep’s capability for long-term recognition of faces is similar to a human’s, and that sheep may remember and feel emotion about other sheep even in their absence.
It’s something to think about, when you see one of those double-decker vehicles thundering past on the motorway, loaded with sheep on their way to market, or perhaps just beginning a long and arduous journey to end their lives in two or three days’ time in some foreign slaughterhouse.
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In 2000 we produced a sheep leaflet, pointing out the serious welfare problems afflicting large numbers of UK sheep. Sheep are different from most farmed animals – many are not confined on farms but roam on deserted hillsides, basically looking after themselves for much of the time.
Before going to print with our leaflet we turned to Professor John Webster, to ensure that our information was correct. We’d sent him a copy of a photo we intended to use of a sheep in Wales, grazing on its knees. Professor Webster emphasised that sheep do sometimes naturally graze on their knees. It’s when they move forward on their knees that foot rot and lameness must be suspected.