Misconceptions in agriculture

Thank you to Chrissie Laymon for the use of her photo. You can follow Chrissie on Twitter @the_farm_life.

In my last post I talked about #farm365 and how farmers are opening their barn doors to the public by using social media. In this post I am going to stay on the agriculture topic, but shift the focus to some lies and misconceptions I see and hear all the time.

 The first one, I talk about a little in my last post #farm365 (COM0011 – Blog Post #5). All the time I hear people talk about farmers abusing their cows or other animals. I find this funny as one adult cow is worth over $2,000 each (more than I payed for my car). Do you really think someone would want to hurt something that is worth that much? I will admit that I have hit a cow, but it was for the better of the cow. In a blog post by Dairycarrie titled Sometimes we are mean to our cows, she talked about a downed cow and how sometimes being mean to them by slapping them or using a cattle prod is for their own health.

Another misconception that I see all the time, is PETA and other animal rights groups take a photo or video and editing it to say something other than what is really happening.

 About a week ago, there was an article going around my Facebook feed called Why I am an Anti-PETA Activist by by M-K Jones. In the post on her blog she tells us about a recently ad put out on the PETA Facebook page using the photo shown to the left. There is just one problem with this ad, if you know anything about sheep you would know that this is a Suffolk which is raised for meat, not wool. A few years back, I worked on a sheep farm and just like when you get a haircut if you move well getting it cut you might get nicked with the clippers, same goes for the sheep when they get Sheared.   

 Back in August 2014 PETA posted a video about a dairy farm in North Carolina, where they claim that the cows are forced to live in their own waste. Dairycarrie also wrote a blog post about this titled PETA’s Undercover North Carolina Dairy Farm Video. Now if you look at this screenshot from the video you can see that their legs are dirty, But if you look closer you will see that they have clean tails and clean bellies which goes to show that they are well cared for as every cow I have seen has had at least a little bit of dirt on their tail/belly. My guess is that in this photo the cows were being moved to another part of the farm but run through this area. Make sure to read the blog post as Carrie goes on point out other problems with the video.



The 2 stories above are some examples of PETA and other animal rights groups trying to tell you lies about what is really happening. The last example I am going to show you is a common one I see all the time. Can you spot which photo has beef calves in it and which photos dairy calves?

Photo #1

Photo #2

Photo #3

   Photo #2 is the beef calves and Photos #1 & #3 are dairy calves. PETA likes to use photo like #1 but say that they are beef calves and think that they can get away with it.

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How do you feel about PETA and other animal rights groups spreading misleading and inaccurate information?