I am a bit disturbed by the reaction from farmers over the sensational coverage of the treatment of newborn calves, caught on camera by an animal rights lobby group and presented to the nation by TV One on Sunday.
I acknowledge I'm a "townie", having lived in cities much of my life, including Wellington. But, at the same time, you can't live for any length of time in South Wairarapa without getting used to the realities of farming. It is not unusual, at certain times of the year, to see the small piles of dead calves at the entrance to a farm. My great-aunt and uncle, dairy farmers from Tokoroa, were always fond of the rural axiom, where's there's livestock, there's dead stock. Animals do die on farms.
There is also the element of "activists" who will, by default, be extreme with their views and promotion, and full of hyperbole and rhetoric about how the dairy industry should be boycotted. Nonetheless, what is absolutely clear is the video evidence of unacceptable cruelty to animals, and I suspect it is not just "a bunch of cowboys" but an indication of an attitude towards unwanted animals by the rural industry. What we are in real danger of is making this an activists versus the dairy industry war, with PR spin leaping to the rescue of farmers with cries of "unpatriotic" if the dairy industry as a whole is attacked. PR will also try and tell us this is an isolated situation, and outside of farmer control anyway. They'll probably try and say the activists are using this footage as a hidden agenda to get rid of meat products.
Farming is a business where animals die from time to time.
As Federated Farmers dairy chairman Chris Engels says in our front page story yesterday, there's a lot of things on farms the public don't need to see. Sure, I accept that there are some tough decisions made about animals.
