The Welfare of Cattle

Terry Engle, Donald J. Klingborg, DVM, Bernard E. Rollin, Terry Engle, Donald J. Klingborg, DVM, Bernard E. Rollin

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315282435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Veterinary Medicine

T he Welfare of Cattle offers an accurate, detailed account of the ethical and welfare concerns related to the human use of cattle. There is currently no significant book dealing with the welfare of cows, animals often seen as archetypal paradigms of 'farm animals'. Covering both beef and dairy cattle, the expert authors provide in-depth information on the husbandry roots of traditional agriculture, the replacement of this system of stewardship by an industrial model, and the resulting welfare challenges associated with industrial agriculture: feedlots, highly industrialized dairies, and slaughterhouses killing huge numbers of animals who have been transported great distances. This important book explores in detail the ways in which people who are providing care for cattle can take their first step, or their next step, toward enhancing the welfare of these animals.

• Contains a selection of White Papers, commissioned to better inform the exploration of cattle welfare. These are prepared by notable experts in their field, to help provide factual context around selected topics that impact cattle welfare and production systems.

• Covers all aspects of cattle use in an accessible style, making this a must have volume for anyone interested in cattle welfare or cattle medicine.
  
  

• Provides an in-depth picture of the distinctive beef and dairy cattle welfare practices and issues, covering topics such as behavior, breeding and genetic manipulation, nutrition and feeding, housing and management, health and disease, and transport and slaughter.
  
  

• Written by acknowledged leaders in animal science, veterinary science, philosophy and animal welfare, presenting a truly multidisciplinary perspective on cattle welfare.
  
  

• Includes a section on understanding and managing animal welfare in both beef and dairy cattle, discussing how cattle perceive the world, animal handling and pain mitigation, and how to assure that the cows have a reasonably good life.

PART I

White Papers

Introduction

We humans tend to carefully select the materials we read, watch, and listen to based on whether the material agrees with what we already believe. Those that present alternative positions don’t receive the same effort from us to try to understand and to thoughtfully consider the point the author is trying to make. You’re encouraged and we believe you’ll find it useful to read all of the book. You’ll find some materials you like, and some you don’t. The goal is to have us all broadly think about the issues and for each of us to apply those concepts we can to improve the welfare of cattle.

It’s my belief we as a society can have whatever kind of animal production system we want. We can’t collectively seem to decide what that is, however, because we have not yet been able to achieve the purposeful dialogue in order to find the common ground required to foster change. This book is one step in the effort to achieve that purposeful dialogue.

As background know that I love cattle, especially dairy cattle. But more important than my emotional attachment to them is the respect I have for what they are and what they do. “My girls” produce one of the world’s highest quality and most nutritious foods, milk, in the extremes of Nordic and desert climates, at high altitudes and at sea level, in high tech production systems and in low and no tech grazing systems. Much of the food they consume is non-competitive with simple stomached animals, including we humans, because the cow’s rumen harvests nutrients from feedstuffs we can’t digest. From 20% to 40% of the average dairy cow’s diet captures nutritional value from recycled waste streams associated with the production of human food, fuel, or fiber products. These products would otherwise be burned or buried, wasting their value, and contributing to environmental degradation.

The nutrients provided by these by-products, along with nutrients coming from hay, silage, and grain, allow cows to provide about 17% of the protein consumed in America today. They’ve also made milk a major economic force in the USA. The number one agriculture commodity in California, the USA’s largest ag economy, is milk. In many other states milk production is critical to the state’s economy as a major provider of employment.

While milk and eggs provide the highest quality proteins relative to digestibility and in providing human’s essential amino acid requirements, meat from cattle is also a high quality and valuable protein. In North America about 20% of the beef consumed comes from dairy cattle. Cattle butchered for meat also provide many important and economically beneficial by-products including leather, felt, fats, lubricants, soaps, creams, buttons, glues, gelatin, and much more. It’s reported that 99% of slaughtered cattle today are utilized commercially to make useful and salable products.

Beef production continues to operate under similar “norms” as those that applied decades ago, but over the last 50+ year’s milk pricing policies and dairy operational costs of production has created a situation where higher turnover rates and shorter cow longevity are economically possible and, in some situations, are financially rewarded.

In the 1996 publication The Lost Art of Healing physician Bernard Lown, emeritus professor of cardiology at Harvard and previously a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, laments the industrialization of human health care and makes a passionate appeal to restore the “3,000-year tradition that bonded doctor and patient in a special affinity of trust.” He notes the biomedical sciences had begun to dominate our conception of health care, and he warned that as a consequence “healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.” The parallels between his remarks and our discussion about animal welfare strike me, and Dr. Lown reminds us all to guard against “managing” at the expense of “caring”. Please also note that the modern germ theory of disease causation, and the resulting attention to hygiene that resulted in improved surgery survival rates, only existed in the last ~150 of those 3,000 years. The goal is to care AND pay attention to science-based facts.

“Caring”, for me in the context of food animals, includes a commitment first to the animal, then to “managing” the animal’s performance. The word “husbandry” reflects a bond between the animal and the farm owner, and implies a moral responsibility on the part of the owner to care and provide for the animals under their care. The animal is and must be more than a “commodity” or “profit center”, and attention to the cow’s needs and wants beyond those required to simply produce milk or meat is more than expected – it’s promised in the husbandry contract we entered into when we domesticated animals. This contract is founded on the provision of benefits to both the involved animals and humans. At the same time the producer that invests more than the value received for their product isn’t in business for long.

Stewardship is another term that will appear often in this book, reflecting the belief that it’s not about what the animal does for us, but what we do for them to compensate for their contributions to our well-being. We rightfully expect more consideration for the animal from people who raise animals for food, use animals as power in their work, or keep animals as pets. Animals are sentient beings and beef and dairy producers as their custodian have a solemn responsibility for their care and keeping.

The commitment to food animals is not, however, one of longevity. Food animals go to market at various ages based on market preferences, carcass yields, and cultural influences. Veal calves and broiler chickens go to slaughter at weeks of age, while lambs and market pigs go at months of age. Beef go to market between 1 and 2 years of age for prime cuts, and younger or older for less valuable cuts. Dairy cattle go to slaughter at whatever age they are no longer competitive with their herd mates.

Rather than longevity, our commitment is to how these animals are cared for during the time they are in our production systems. The contract may include a responsibility for providing some level of protection from extreme weather, predation, starvation, malnutrition, bullying, premature pregnancy as well as avoidable pain, disease, and injury. If injury or disease occurs our commitment is to treat it rapidly and appropriately. At the same time, we should be committed to provide housing designed and maintained to prevent injury or disease and that allows for many normal behaviors.

Dairy cattle have value as meat in the slaughter market, with that option triggered when a cow’s milk production falls to a level that does not provide the farm sufficient income over expense. At that point, they are removed from the milking herd to enter the slaughter beef market and replaced with a milking animal that promises to be more economically competitive. An increase in income per unit of milk, or a decrease in operational expenses, or a combination of the two allows for lower turnover rates and longer herd longevity.

The current discussion about welfare in the dairy industry seems to be distracted by a focus on the business entity that owns the dairy (pejoratively referred to by many as “corporate farms”). The truth is today’s dairy industry is dominated by the family farm, usually with multiple family generations living and working on the property. Dairy businesses are organized into three legal entities: owners as individuals, including sole proprietorships and partnerships (most often family partnerships including parents and kids, or brothers, sisters, and in-laws); family corporations wholly owned by family members; and non-family related corporations. Family corporations are still family run businesses, just legally organized to provide: tax benefits; the ability to more easily transfer assets between individuals and generations; improved liability protection and easier access to borrowing.

According to USDA’s Census of Agriculture there were 5,223 non-family corporation dairy farms in the US in 1997 (3.1% of 168,473 dairies); 3,355 in 2007 (3.9% of 86,022 dairies); and 3,220 in 2012 (7% of 46,005 dairies). Of all farms (including dairy and all other crops) in the US, only 3% were not family owned in 2012.

The change toward larger industrialized dairy operations is a direct result of economic forces that have shaped many businesses since the early 1950’s, lowering costs while improving product quality and consistency. Today, successful dairy operations have “right-sized” their herds to balance operational costs with the price of milk they receive. In general, those areas with higher milk prices and lower operational costs enjoy economically successful herds that are smaller and less industrialized, while in areas with lower milk prices and higher operational costs the need is to be larger and more process oriented.

Between 1992 and 2012 USDA reports that the number of US dairy herds decreased by 61% while the average number of cows per herd increased from 74 to 142. While most of the cows in the USA remain in what we consider to be smaller herds, much of our milk comes from dairies that are larger in size, provide higher density housing, and maintain cattle on solid flooring rather than predominantly on dirt or grass. Some individuals refer to these operations as “factory farms”; a label intended to evoke a negative opinion among many. These farms are definitely industrialized (meaning process and outcomes oriented) and they are confinement operations (meaning more milking cows per unit of land). Milk quality is generally better, and environmental impacts are lower when production per cow is higher.

The issue before us isn’t whether farms should be industrialized, that decision has been made by the earth having a limited supply of arable land (with that acreage shrinking every year due to urban expansion), limited supplies of fresh water with insufficient reservoir storage capacity to support agriculture, and a rapidly growing population of hungry human mouths to feed. Intensive agriculture is here to stay.

The size of the herd isn’t necessarily related to the welfare of the animals in it. Smaller herds often have fewer laborers sharing a wide variety of chores (generalists), while larger herds tend to have laborers with specific training and accountability in a narrow area (specialists – such as dedicated milkers, calf raisers, breeders, ration mixers, and feeders, etc.). Record keeping in smaller herds tends to be via paper, making analysis more difficult and small changes a challenge to recognize and manage. Larger herds use on-farm computers that can provide timely reports or alerts, and can invest in improving husbandry to capture a small outcome (such as 1% less illness or death rate) where that would not be visible in the small herd.

I moved from Colorado in the early 1970’s to practice in California because Colorado had a relatively high milk price to the farm, lower land, labor, feed, tax, and environmental costs, and the farms could survive without paying as much attention to detail. They tended to be more reactive that proactive. By comparison, California had lower milk prices, higher costs for land, feed, labor, taxes, and environmental costs and to be successful the producer had to pay more attention to “the little stuff”. The impact of health programs implemented to prevent disease and injury could be visible and measured in larger herds, and paid for in a shorter period of time.

In my experience, the middle-sized dairy may be the most challenging relative to promoting animal welfare. They may not have right-sized such that it remains dependent on general laborers without specialized training often in cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the White Papers
• List of Contributors
• Part I White Papers
• Part II Concepts Relevant to Both Beef and Dairy Cattle
• Part III Beef Cattle
• Part IV Dairy Cattle
• Index