Desperate for maternal comfort - young bull calves seek reassurance from each other on a barren veal farm
Through the manipulation of light, diet andlittle black and white orphan sucked eagerly
medication, producers have reduced theat my fingers. I could feel his tooth buds on
chick stage of a meat chicken’s developmentthe back of my hand. How was I to know
to little more than days. He takes the journeythat he was hungry, confused and
from birth to death in just 42 days when hisbewildered, desperate for maternal comfort
skeleton sags under the burden of his 2.5and reassurance and life-giving milk?
kilograms of weight. Heart, lungs and bones
struggle to cope under the ludicrous strain – It still happens as hundreds of thousands of
and frequently fail. new-born baby bulls are sold from market to
market before enduring the journey to
On the day this ballooning travesty of Europe’s obscene veal farms. For others it is a
creation faces the slaughterer’s knife, alongshotgun to the head just days after birth.
with the 30,000 others with whom he sharedMiracles of creation dismissed and dispensed
his allotted tiny space, he has the blue eyeswith as unwanted trash because they can’t
of a chick and cheeps like a chick but is a produce milk.
muscle-bound Titan. Even if spared the knife,
this unwitting creature would survive onlyHe may be able to hear his mother’s bellows
days or weeks because he has been bred andof grief for him – her lost baby – even as the
manipulated to die, not to live. trigger is being pulled. It is an ordeal she will
endure year after year until her body breaks
As a tiny child I would slide my fingersdown under the strain of almost constant
through the bars of the calf pens at Oswestrymilking, relentless pregnancies and recurrent
market and squeal with delight as a beautifuldiseases. These are likely to signal her end at
5
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