Heard in a shop

[den]

"I snuck down the crick and shot im, then I drug im up the bank and skun im there."

Comments

[psaakyrn.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but then, burgers are still (in some sense) food, and I do believe people actually care for the cows. The cows are at least garanteed a sort-of safe life, while the foxes have to deal with natural hazards..

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

But cows are significantly more defenseless than foxes, and are likely to have a shorter term in their sort-of-safe life than most wild larger mammals. Farm animals live in conditions where they're castrated without anasthesia because it saves on cost, to give you an example. And don't get me started on chickens.

Just because the animal doesn't have a gun of its own doesn't make hunting evil.

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

Now, now, there's more than just the cost reason. I have actually castrated piglets before and the reason they don't use general anesthesia on the little squealers is because anesthesia is inherently risky on small animals. Pigs are really tricky because its hard to get a needle in them in the right spot. (to take a large blood sample or inject straight to the blood stream, for example, you need to go into the vena cava, which was something we always called the state vet in to deal with because even the local large animal vet didn't feel confident he'd hit it right all the time). You do use a local anesthetic to deaden the skin.
So, piglets are castrated without general anesthesia. Its a two person process, takes two people (one to hold, one to operate) and if they're even reasonably competent, takes about 30 second all told from grabbing the pig to putting on the antiseptic powder at the end.
Within about 30 second after that they're back to nursing off their mother, not really much the worse for wear.

This is of course a whole different ball of wax if you are doing it on a fully grown animal or something other than a pig. It isn't always just straight up costs or cruelty though, and its not fair to tar everyone with the same brush.