The stark video of sick Holstein cows being prodded at a packing plant to get up and go to slaughter was not so much unsettling for me as a flashback to my days in the 1950s and 1960s on an Iowa dairy farm. This cow boy wasnt always a nice kid. More than a few times, I impatiently and angrily goaded stubborn, deadweight blobs of reclining cow to get up tired, sick or whatever.

The widely seen video, which was covertly shot at the Hallmark Meat Packing Co. in China, Calif., showed non-ambulatory or downed dairy cows that had to be dragged to slaughter. It was repeatedly shown on TV across several days. In the final analysis, its hard to find humane treatment in a slaughterhouse, even if death comes nearly instantly to Betsy the Cow through high voltage or a sharp blow to the head.

When I was just a farm kid with work to get done and few choices, I know I wasnt always kind to the 25 cows in my daily care. In time, some got too aged to produce milk. In the scheme of things, old cows, with their dairying days over, gave their last full measure of devotion at the packing plant in Marshalltown or Waterloo.

If they died on the farm, we called the rendering works that sent out a truck with a powerful cable that towed and dragged the carcass out of the barn or pasture and up onto the trucks flatbed. Then the driver took the cadaver to a plant to be ground into tankage for animal feed. Since those days, such reuse of dead animals is a major health no-no. The mad-cow disease crisis made that rule law.

We, like other farmers, sent old cows literally on their last legs to the packing house, and sometimes they collapsed or sat down passing through the labyrinth to the killing floor. It was bleak, but it was the reality. I remember how we hauled Margie the cow to the Marshalltown plant, but she somehow leaped out the back end on the highway. We had to round up a lot of people to literally roll and push her back onto the truck because she would not or could not get up.

And it was another time and certainly an era when farming was economically grim. You lost cattle to lightning strikes, wild dog attacks, bloating from getting into alfalfa fields and any of a number of diseases. It was just part of farming to try to recoup something from an old cow by selling her to a packing plant.

Milking the cows was my assignment for most of my formative years until I went off to college in 1964 and then some in the summer. I knew barnyard filth and manure up to my kneecaps in cattle lots, especially with the spring rains or melting snow. Sanitation rules were certainly more lax. In those years, my hands had a tell-tale scent of barnyard that no amount of soap could remove. I still remember a classmate who put his hands over my eyes once, and they, too, smelled of his dairy farm, where they milked cows by hand. Not with stainless steel milking machines like we used.

The Hallmark packing plant incident has prompted new calls for better care of animals. As expected the Humane Society of the United States and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) bitterly spoke out. California clergy came out in support of a November 2008 ballot measure, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which would require more living space for veal calves, pregnant sows and egg-laying hens. God entrusts animals to our care, said the Right Rev. Marc Handley Andrus, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California. Denying them the ability even to turn around is surely not an example of faithful stewardship.

Over the years, I have looked back at my farm days and wondered how I could have been a part of perfunctory and systemic cruelty to animals: cutting of the top beaks of chicks so they could not peck other chickens to bloody pulp; pinning down bull calves and putting rubber rings around their testicles so theyd fall off and the critters would grow up to be steers; castrating pigs; dehorning and branding cattle; and more. Of course, all of that goes on to this day, probably in less harsh ways.

So much is just relative here. Depending on who you talk to, fishing, hunting and livestock farming are all forms of animal cruelty and exploitation. For the sake of the creatures large and small, we could move toward other forms of food though it surely would take major change to shake up the food chain. Humans have no proud history on how they have lived among living things.

Posted in: Uncategorized |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.