Food for thought

So this post will be a little off topic. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now most of my posts at the moment are rehashes of what I’m learning (anatomy of the head, just incase it wasn’t obvious enough!)

However some recent reading has brought up something that I felt like sharing.

I’ve always been interested in animal welfare. Not surprising for someone who wants to be a vet you might say. Well perhaps, but it wasn’t until I started on this course that I realized just how difficult it is to establish what is good welfare is, how to measure it and how to ensure that it is protected.

In class we learned a good basic way of measuring the welfare of an animal species. The Five Freedoms (which can be found on almost every animal welfare site) were established by the Brambell report for the UK governments Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee in 1967.  They have been elaborated upon since then and are defined as.

1.  Freedom from thirst and hunger - by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.

2. Freedom from discomfort - by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.

3. Freedom from pain, injury, and disease - by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.

4. Freedom to express normal behavior - by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal's own kind.

5. Freedom from fear and distress - by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

These are a great way to establish basic standards by which to measure whether or not a welfare standard has been met. As well it actually actively describes a standard that can be recognized and in many cases measured.

However welfare is expensive……. Very expensive.

And we like our food affordable (read: cheap).

In a recent conversation with an animal welfare scientist she had this to say on the matter:

“Cattle are so large that consecutive doses of analgesics may be a substantial cost, and then there are concerns re withdrawal periods and the cost of maintaining a now healthy animal during this period. In the case of sheep and footrot, the problem may also be their low market value. In both cases, one can argue that being pain-free improves recovery, weight gain and incidence of respiratory disease (in the case of calves and dehorning, as I recall--I'm not up to date with literature now). Yet, despite that, our obsession with money and having cheap food creates cashflow problems for many farmers e.g. in 2006, a farmer told me that he was paid 17p per litre for his milk and it cost him 21p per litre to produce...”

This is just a little depressing. Essentially our desire for accessible foods has created a welfare (crisis?) issue in our farming industry. Can we really take our meals at another beings cost?

Recent changes to animal welfare law bringing standards up have cost the industry greatly. For instance the changing over to enriched cages in the poultry industry by 2012 has cost the industry around 16 million euro to support the changes for the farms affected by the change. One poultry farmer I had the chance to work with told me that the changes were cost him £100 000.00. That's on top of the cost of running the business, marketing and general production related costs. What's more is this is a cost that he will not really recoup through his product as the change is mandated but the price will not increase (necessarily) as a result.

There is some good news on this front however, in the same conversation she went on to say that a colleague of hers who works in farm animal practice had told her that the farms in that practice who supplied Waitrose and Marks and Spencers were content, paid and treated fairly.

Why do the other national supermarket chains not follow suit. I will do some more reading up on this but I feel that they could learn something here.

The question now becomes, what matters more? How we feel about what we eat, or how much it costs?

" In 2010, my impression from the sidelines is that the economics of the survival of the farm animal may trump questions of their being pain-free, largely because, as consumers, we are beguiled by the idea of cheap food (cheap everything, in fact... We seem to know the price of everything, and to have forgotten the value of having nothing). "

Perhaps we need to focus more on the value of what we have, rather than what it costs.

Perhaps this is easier to say than to do….. but I sincerely hope not.