Friday, March 29, 2024

PULPIT: Animal welfare is not black-and-white

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I reply to your opinion writer Alan Emerson regarding my knowledge of vets. My father was a large animal vet and was second in command of the practice which had seven to 10 vets.
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I grew up with vets and went on rounds during my growing up years. I play golf with vets, I’ve worked for and with vets, and many of my friends are vets. I have spent all my life in rural communities, have many farmer friends and every day see for myself what is going on. 

I have done analysis of the vet business and have talked for many hours to the heads of several large (10-plus vets) production animal practices about these issues. This is a genuine ethical problem for many of them, and they are unable to reconcile it. The whole issue is easily researched, and the conclusions are plain.

Regarding his misconceptions about framing of the problem, this is not about vets being cowards. It is about a conflict in the relationship between animal welfare, vets and farmers that cannot be resolved by the present system.

Vets are trusted confidantes of farmers and it needs to stay that way. 

If a farmer believes that by calling the vet they may be dobbed in for an animal welfare issue it destroys that trust, and may well result in much poorer welfare outcomes. 

If the vet has been called to a farm, then there is a client relationship and the vet will do all they can to help their client. The vet is there normally for a specific reason, like a calving or pregnancy testing. If, in the course of the visit, the vet sees broken tails, or skinny cows or lameness, but that is not the reason for the call, those conditions will not normally ever be treated. It is possible but not guaranteed that they will even be mentioned. Nor will they ever be reported.

Simply, to report it would destroy the trust between vet and client. Also, that farmer is 100% likely to discuss the reporting with other farmers, and those other farmers will not be happy. They do not want to invite onto their farms someone who may end up getting them censured or prosecuted.

Not only that, to breach such trust in a rural community can have severe social implications, as any vet who has either reported or thought about it will tell you (and they have told me).

Alan is naïve if he thinks that a vet could ever report without serious risk of blowback. It’s not a rural mafia, just human nature. This makes it near impossible for a vet to report a welfare issue to MPI. 

The proof is in the evidence, which I have OIAd, and shows virtually no reports from vets for any production animal welfare issues.

I want to explain the problem so you can see what I am really getting at.

This is about a suffering animal in the paddock that the vet is not called for and the farmer is not attending to.

Put yourself in the position of the animal. Let’s say you are lame (but having acidosis, or heat stress, or a damaged tail, or being heavily pregnant with nowhere to lie down except freezing slush, or desperately thirsty because there is no access to a trough, or very hungry – all will do just as well as examples). No one comes to your aid. You just want to be relieved of your suffering. Who has your back? There is no one to call. Members of the public can’t see you, and mostly don’t know what they are looking at. Vets drive by but your farmer is not their client, or they can say nothing for the reasons above. The worker can’t report (and may even have been the one who caused your problem). There is no surveillance from MPI, so they never see you. 

You are doomed to suffer, and there are hundreds of thousands just like you at certain times of the year.

It is not difficult to put in a fair and effective system that solves this problem. I have a proposal I’m happy to share.

I want to have a grown-up conversation about this. It’s real, it’s big and it’s important. Alan’s reaction of denial and rubbishing in the face of the evidence is deeply unhelpful. As to me being anti-farming, that charge could not be further from the truth.

Until New Zealand farming has a defensible backstory, and can walk the talk of animal welfare, we will continue to see the mass exodus of people eating animal products because they have the option and are taking it. I’m trying to stem that flow and show what we need to do to help preserve animal agriculture as a legitimate and ethical eating choice.

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