Forty years of silence from the veterinary profession on the welfare implications of factory farming was broken last week.
After uneasy correspondence in the specialist veterinary press, six vets spoke out at a news conference sponsored by Compassion in World Farming. They included Dr Henry Carter, former president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and Derek Evans, recently assistant chief veterinary officer at MAFF. They castigated vets’ acquiescence in such cruelties as battery cages for laying hens, and the British Veterinary Association’s failure to demand reform at a political and legal level.
David Redfern, a Kent vet, summed it up: “It is time that we had the courage to put the interests of our patients before those of our clients when the two do not coincide.”
Of course, vets face a dilemma. What if the treatment demanded – routine antibiotics for overcrowded, stressed chickens, tail-docking for pigs rendered aggressive by boredom – is occasioned by the very environment in which the patients are placed by the clients? Should vets criticise the farmer, lose his money and leave the animals suffering, knowing that some less scrupulous practitioner will do the job and pocket the fees?
It would be easier if vets could say: “Sorry, I can’t do that or I’ll be struck off the register.” But the British Veterinary Association has never given a lead on livestock welfare. There has been too complacent a relationship with the farming and drug industries, and with clients rather than patients.
So vets have stood by while conditions have steadily worsened for animals in intensive systems: first one hen per cage, then two in the same space, then three, four, five, with equally dismal histories for turkeys, pigs, calves, feedlot cattle, dairy cows. Vets, like doctors, are sworn to protect the welfare of their patients; but “welfare” has come to mean mere continuance of life in sufficient flesh to be profitably butchered at the end of it.
Growing public concern has at last given vets the confidence to admit that perhaps welfare means more than that. If only Dr Carter and his colleagues had the full backing of the British Veterinary Association. But Howard Hellig, the association’s president, is a defender of some intensive systems. The BVA is due to announce a new welfare initiative; it will be interesting to see whether it dares to upset any factory farming applecarts.
