Age a factor in livestock neglect

When I visited Southland sheep breeder Leon Black, we took a drive to inspect sheep in one of his paddocks. Hands stuck in his pockets, he looked out over 200 plump ewes and let out a loud: ‘‘Baa’’.

The ewes immediately lifted their heads, ‘‘baa-ed’’ back, and walked towards him. When he walked away, they followed.

Black told me he often moved his sheep considerable distances by simply walking out in front of them. No dogs needed.

After a decade of covering farming, people like Black are my frame of reference for how livestock are treated by farmers.

But every few weeks, reports pop up on the Ministry for Primary Industries website of prosecutions of farmers under the Animal Welfare Act, of fines and infringement notices.

In the past year, MPI has prosecuted 32 farmers. Last year, it issued 492 infringement notices to farmers and 298 to companies, and gave 83 written warnings.

Succession facilitator Mandi Mcleod says farmers are entrepreneurs and that people with entrepreneurial personalities find it difficult to accept it when their physical capabilities are declining.

When she sees a tie between farmer age and animal welfare issues, it is because basic farm management is suffering, fences not kept, and basic production principles have been forgotten.

MPI national manager for animal welfare Gray Harrison says there have been several prosecutions over the past year of older farmers.

However, considering the average age of a sheep and beef farmer in New Zealand is around 60, and the average of dairy farmers is around 50, this is not surprising.

Farming people come to the attention of the ministry because of financial instability, a lack of experience with managing animals, physical or mental health issues, or significant weather events.

MPI considers education and prevention effective ways to ensure animals are being properly looked after, Harrison says.

Harrison says the most common animal welfare complaints are of animals in poor body condition, usually caused by underfeeding, a lack of access to water, problems with animals grazing in mud, and a lack of veterinary care.

Mcleod believes that, among those callous enough to mistreat animals, there is a large cohort of older farmers just not aware of what their behaviour means.

The younger generation are mostly different, she says. A lot of it comes down to whether people believe animals are sentient or not.

She went to a dairy cow welfare conference in the United States in 2019, attended by farmers, veterinarians, university students and representatives from academia.

A poll on sentience showed almost 50% of attendees did not believe animals had the capacity to feel pain, distress or suffering.

Mcleod has also found that on farms where there were breakdowns, people operated in silos with no outside support.

When she looked at a farm’s books, those who had a bad rap for livestock handling often also had financial challenges they could not overcome.

The public views on farmers were skewed, because citydwellers didn’t understand the level of skill needed to run a profitable farming business, she said.

Mcleod says good stewards of livestock don’t see their animals as a number, but as the reason for doing what they do.

Good handling and increased level of productivity are linked. A general awareness of animal health is tied to more profits. The way animals are treated has a ripple effect – people who treated animals better felt better and performed better.

Farmers who neglect animals are a tiny percentage of the group, they say. But negative stories about them spread to taint the rest of the industry.

Stats NZ numbers show that in 2019 there were 49,530 farms in New Zealand.

Andrew Burtt, Beef and Lamb New Zealand chief economist, says, based on Stats NZ data, there were 9165 commercial sheep and beef farms in 2017. This does not include smallholdings.

Dairy NZ figures show there are about 11,000 dairy farms, with 37,000 people working on them.

The number of prosecutions, infringement notices and warnings, when weighed against the official farm and farmer numbers, show only a small percentage of farmers not caring for their livestock.

Farmers say no-one sees the countless winter nights they might stay awake, hand-feeding lambs rejected by their mothers.

Often, when one farmer does something bad, the public immediately thinks all of them act that way. It is not how other industries are treated, farmers say.