Calves & Lambs
Helping Children & Horses
We are not wrong as a horse sanctuary to take these poor little calves and lambs for they can grow and enjoy a useful adult life doing their share towards the natural ecology of the Sanctuary grazing. – Billy Wilson Reporting.
Happy Children Feed, Groom & Walk Calves & Lambs
Knowing our difficulties passing lines of cattle, sheep and pigs corralled for sale and slaughter Celia and I took the brave step of visiting the local livestock market on Monday 1st March to buy cade lambs (those orphaned by their mothers through lack of milk or death)
The small live stock market has changed.
It no longer sells lambs and kids in need of bottle feeding to kindly homes, because some rather senseless do-gooders took photographs and declared it cruel in a national newspaper. Without a point of sale for these hapless creatures they die a lingering death or are culled for economy.
Peering inquisitively in the calf sale area I enquired how much these ten day olds fetched. A very quick answer was £49, the very limit that kindly transport men could pay. The calves were then transported to the Ministry of Death, where the Government would pay £55 maximum to the carters. (£6 per their journey). The poor calf’s destiny was then to be shot and incarcerated. Having starved for a day or two its misery would be ended. We could not, of course, walk away from the life saving act of purchasing them and granting them sanctuary.
Here lies a cruel table of Government bureaucracy under the frantically misdirected B.S.E scare legislation to burn hundreds of thousands of cattle. All farmers know this is totally ridiculous and cry a million tears.
The calves are necessarily born and taken from their mothers so that the cow’s milk can be extracted for suckling and sufficing humans.
B.S.E cruel legislation
Because of the B.S.E scare these calves are worthless to rear for later slaughter (a bag of calves milk is £40 so is a bag of feed pellets, they need two of each to wean them to grass) so the Government gives the farmers £55 for each calf.
The wickedness is that the calf has firstly to have its ears tagged and issued with a passport before being taken at 10/14 days of age to market. Then onto the place of slaughter, lonely, scared and starving for one or two days. Anyone can see by the scrawny appearance of these poor creatures that they are not being fed by anyone.
It would be as cheap if not cheaper and certainly more humane to send a travelling gunman to the farms to shoot the poor calves at birth!
Because of this I haven’t drunk milk for twenty years and I have no ill effects. Surely the Government could pour such millions into science to find a replacement for cow’s milk and cease this cruel production?
Haven’t we read of far lesser cases of cruelty being sued in court by the R.S.P.C.A?
In days of old, before the invention of chemicals to fertilise the fields and destroy the cycle of life with insects, birds, bees and flowers.
Farmers rotated their grazing fields with horses, cattle and sheep. Their different bodies eat the grass in different ways and they eat different herbage. This creates a kind of manure which, by rotating the fields, these different manures keep everything fertile. It is also a fact that the different worm cycles which affect each species are killed by passing through the acids in their particular stomachs.
So we are not wrong as a horse sanctuary to take these poor little calves and lambs for they can grow and enjoy a useful adult life doing their share towards the natural ecology of the Sanctuary grazing.
