the year is 2018- how am i getting this much use out of this photo? is there this much ambiguity about a basic craft which has been practiced before humanity figured out mud bricks that people are still confused about how sheep work?
A lot of people today have extremely limited understanding of how anything rural works, thinking only of animals in the abstract.
Hence people who don’t understand that cows can continue to give milk way longer than their calves need it, or that you don’t have to kill sheep to get their wool, or who think that a good way to save the bees is for everyone to stop eating honey.
Like, if people don’t want to eat meat because they don’t want animals killed, and want to avoid eggs because of the cruelty prevalent in that industry, or milk because yeah, there are a fair number of issues with the dairy industry too… I will support that 100%.
But then there are people so woefully misinformed I can’t take them seriously at all.
its baffling- if you assume wool requires a sheep to be killed, thus each sheep in its lifetime will only provide one ‘crop’ of wool, then how freaking expensive would you then assume yarn to be? youd assume mutton would then be exceedingly common in the meat market as well
they make a logic tangent, and obviously abandon it two seconds after it passes where they want to go because thinking too hard will reveal that to be stupid
I have discovered that usually, the most militant and unpleasant vegans absolutely have no fucking idea how farming works. Ecological, sustainable farming – not massive, planet-damaging, animal-torturing industrial farming. If you don’t know that sheep have to be sheared before summer or they can literally die of heat, I am not going to listen to you. If you don’t realise that it only makes sense to use leather from animals if you kill them to eat them and that your vegan ass buying cheap plastic shoes three times a year is doing more damage to the environment than me buying leather shoes every five years, I’m not going to listen to you. If you refuse to consider that cows’ udders get painful if they don’t have a calf and aren’t milked, I won’t listen to you. And if you don’t have the basic biology knowledge required to realise that properly, sustainably raised farm animals have their place in the biosystem and that it would not, in fact, be a good thing to stop raising them, I am not going to listen to you.
I was told by a vegan I am otherwise good friends with that “all farmers lie about everything to do with farming” and I just ???? do you have any idea how exhausting it is to fucking farm no one has the ENERGY to lie about stuff like “we need commercial bees as pass pollinators for fruit farms so you might as well eat honey tbh since they’re making an excess anyway”
by all means campaign for safer and better slaughterhouses (which btw is a current hot-button issue in the uk and is something one of my clients is backing and pursuing legally) and better animal welfare and make a point of pushing high-welfare products over shitty ones but demanding that everyone stops buying wool coats on the basis of a lie is stupid because the alternative is artificial fibres which are polluting the fucking oceans and killing off all the fish
This. We need to do better on animal welfare, as on so many things. But if you’re coming from a standpoint of ‘all farmers are evil soulless murderers’, then… I don’t really know how we’re going to have a conversation, so I’m going to politely back away.
Story time!
So, I worked on a dairy farm briefly in my teens, and there was a cow who had stepped on one of her teats as she stood up. Cow hooves are sharper than they look, so she’d straight cut the tip off, the poor girl. Despite the best efforts of all the farmers, this had led to mastitis. If you have a strong stomach, Google that one.
So this injured, ill cow was deeply cranky, eating nowhere near enough, no matter how we enticed her and couldn’t be milked normally. She’d end up dying later that week, because the vet made the call that she wasn’t going to get better. I think she knew her end was coming. This was a cow without a single fuck left to give. That said, in a bid to save her life, she did still need milking, despite being too unwell to make it to the milking machines.
One day this very weak girl moved her head too fast and threw me across the cowshed. My feet left the floor. I think she was trying to see if she could throw me into a nearby pile of cowshit. I tell you this to emphasise how physically strong she was, even when (by her standards) weak and unwell. If she’d have kicked me, she’d have almost certainly have killed me, depending on where she hit. She was cranky enough with being unwell that she might have done.
And yet, this cow, blessed with a lack of fucks known only to the dying, stood patiently and calmly while she was milked by hand. Remember, healing wound on one of her teats, painful infection in all of them that makes milking deeply unpleasant. If she’d been milked a little carelessly, she’d have been in great discomfort, to say the least. But she stood there to get milked. She mooed at the farmhands to remind them it was milking time. She was impatient to get it done, even though it hurt, because she knew she needed to lose this milk somehow.
Afterwards, she was a little less cranky. There were affectionate head boops of thanks to the farmhands who milked her. It was a relief from her discomfort, one of the few she had in her last days.
But sure, cows don’t need milking and hate every second of it, go off, I guess.
The worst (and most dangerous) thing about radicals is their refusal to accept reality and fact when conflicting with their agenda. Seriously, never ever trust what such people tell you without checking sources. It doesn’t matter which ideology they claim to follow; their ignorance and lies both can cause a lot of damage.
Loki is the Philosopher King 