MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
THE UTOPIAN FUTURE OF DAIRY FARMING “The enormous increases in lactation performance in dairy cattle over the last 60 years have had drastic negative effects on fertility and vitality (fitness). Unprecedented milk production levels have led to an equally unprecedented loss in longevity and reduced lifespan.” Wilhelm Knaus
SUMMARY
Fantasy rules when vets justify and promote themselves.
WORDS ARE CHEAP Having written my own letter to the Veterinary Record (http://ht.ly/3aru5) regarding Mr Huxley and Mr Green's article on dairy farming, I was horrified to discover that mine has been rejected in favour of what is, for all objective purposes, one man's utopian fantasy: "...I believe that we can produce the food we need at a price we can afford from animals that have a life worth living."
It's happy smiley factless speculation of the very highest order: 'I believe that everybody can have their cake and eat it.'
The evidence clearly shows that dairy cow welfare has crumbled as the drive for production has continued, and common sense clearly suggests that that is nothing to be surprised about... "...in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (over a century ago) “Animals have limited resources for carrying out adaptation processes. A series of publications by Rolf Beilharz and colleagues proposed the Resource Allocation Theory. The resources an animal has are limited and, as a result, if output is increased through one biological process, such as producing more milk, other functions such as fertility, maintenance, movement, immune defence, etc will be affected.” Oltenacu and Broom (2010), The impact of genetic selection for increased milk yield on the welfare of dairy cows (http://ht.ly/3arzA)
...but Dick Sibley and friends still think it's appropriate to publish utopian fantasies about the possibility that everybody can have everything they want after all... “Socrates was withering when it came to a polished rhetorical performance. For him a powerful, substanceless argument was a disgusting thing: rhetoric without truth was one of the greatest threats to the "good" society.” Bettany Hughes
...based entirely on following the same path that has led to all the problems in the first place... ‘Intensification is definitely the solution to the problems associated with intensification.’
...and despite the fact that we have been here before: “In their discussions [in the early 1940s], vets increasingly and deliberately abandoned the term ‘sterility’ in favour of ‘infertility’ or ‘temporary infertility’, in an effort to persuade farmers that breeding problems could be cured by veterinary intervention.” Abigail Woods, The farm as clinic: veterinary expertise and the transformation of dairy farming, 1930–1950 (http://ht.ly/3arBU)
1
MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
Vets have made these confident assertions about how wonderful they can make things before, but this new one is just as faithful and just as unwarranted (perhaps less so given that dairy cow fertility is now much worse than it was when vets were telling everybody how effective they were going to be at eradicating it). Mr Sibley even manages to claim some responsibility for contemporary public concerns about the welfare of the national dairy herd, despite the fact that vets almost never criticise welfare standards in public (for any animals) and despite the fact that the veterinary profession has directly supervised the detrimental intensification of the dairy industry over the past few decades: "...it is testament to this profession, and it must be said some of the more pragmatic pressure groups, that health and welfare are now of paramount concern..."
The level of self-important denial is so high it is completely unfightable. It pervades the whole profession and genuinely leads people like Dick Sibley to believe they're the key to doing in the future what they have completely failed to do in the past by continuing to do exactly the same thing... "...it can't be done without investment, planning and the interventions of the veterinary profession."
...even though this is based entirely on heart-warming hope that has little to do with the current state of modern dairy cows: "...I believe that we can produce the food we need at a price we can afford from animals that have a life worth living."
Of course he's going to say that though. Of course he's going to predict that the financial involvement of the veterinary profession will lead to a positive outcome. Would you let a drug company faithfully predict the success of its own drugs in a scientific journal however? Of course you wouldn't, yet that is exactly the kind of factless self-endorsement being attempted here. A quarter to a third of all the dairy cows in this country are limping right now because of the current direction, but according to leading politically connected dairy vet Dick Sibley everything is going to be lovely if we keep going in exactly the same direction. 'I believe what I hope'
There's just no point fighting this denial. "...we should maintain our interest and enthusiasm for an industry under pressure, and demonstrate to all who need to know that disease is not an inevitably of productivity..."
Using what Mr Sibley?! The small number of statistically predictable outliers who are able to manage high-yielding cows at the edge of physiological possibility? I fully accept that preventing cows falling into the precipice is occasionally achieved by some real bright sparks, but using the few that haven't breached the threshold of impossibility to justify the current and future existence of all those that have is just obscene. It's data-mining of the very highest order and yet another disgrace to the veterinary profession. "It is possible that both the cows and their keepers can have a life worth living."
A lot of things are possible Mr Sibley, but that doesn't necessarily make them even remotely probable.
2