Wedding bells

Congratulations to Sarah Upfield and Liam Slattery, our very own Head of Investigations, who are marrying today in Midhurst, West Sussex. This happy occasion inspired me to review some of the recent happenings for farm animals through a special wedding day lens...

Something old... the use of outdated, and outlawed, practices on farm animals in Europe. The EU prohibits the routine cutting off of piglets’ tails to make them fit bad intensive systems, yet, as Liam's recent investigation shows, this mutilation is still commonly carried out.

Something new... our re-launch in France – see our new dedicated website for our exciting plans to engage with opinion formers, food companies and the general public. France is, of course, one of Europe’s most iconic countries when it comes to food, and a political heavyweight too.

Something borrowed... the time that barren battery cages are on, thanks to this week’s rejection of Poland’s call for a delay to the 2012 ban in Europe.

Something blue... the clear water that thousands of calves were spared crossing thanks to the work of the Beyond Calf Exports stakeholder forum. This Compassion initiative, with the RSPCA and a wide range of industry and other stakeholders, spared 61,000 male dairy calves from export journeys or an early death last year.

Animal Sentience

Reading the article “Smarter than you think” by Jonathan Leake and Georgia Warren in The Sunday Times recently got me thinking about animal sentience.

“Increasingly scientists believe,” they wrote, “we are merely at the top of a spectrum of intelligence across the animal kingdom, rather than standing apart from it. We may be better at thinking and more able to articulate our feelings — but animals can do all the same things.”

After all that we now know about animals, I thought, how can anyone disagree with this statement? But, sadly, many people still do. I know they do because through my work at Compassion I come across people who don’t think animals are capable of thinking and feeling. Or, if they do, the animals’ capacity to behave like us is unimportant when it is compared to our needs. Fortunately, I think this narrow-minded perspective is being challenged. There is a rapidly growing weight of evidence and official acceptance of the importance of recognising – and respecting – the sentience of animals.

Animal sentience is particularly important with respect to the animals whose lives Compassion seeks to improve. Chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, sheep, fish, ducks, geese and other animals raised for food are, I often feel, those creatures who, through no fault of their own, are often last to be thought of as having any thoughts and emotions.

As my close colleague, Joyce D’Silva, said in The Sunday Times article, “We can see their [factory farmed animals] physical distress but this research tells us it goes much deeper than that and affects their emotional health, too.”

That is why, after 10 years of campaigning, we achieved an important victory in 1997 to persuade the European Union to legally recognise animals as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and suffering. The recent adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, means the animal sentience protocol is upgraded to an Article in the Treaty. Compassion will use the increased status of this Article in our campaigns to improve the welfare of billions of farmed animals across the EU.

One of the highlights of the EU animal sentience campaign was a conference we held in London in 2005. “From Darwin to Dawkins: The Science and Implications of Animal Sentience” brought together scientists, veterinarians, ethicists, students and representatives of governmental and inter-governmental organisations and of industry and of non-governmental organisations to discuss the growing scientific and ethical understanding of animals and on how we treat them.

The conference was a landmark event in the long struggle to get the acceptance of animal sentience in public policy. Please contact our Supporter Services team today for your free copy of the DVD which contains highlights of each speaker's presentation. You can also download a free copy of our comprehensive report, Stop – Look – Listen: Recognising the Sentience of Farm Animals, which gives examples from scientific literature on how farmed animals think and feel. And, if you want even more information, there is a book, Animals, Ethics and Trade, which includes the conference proceedings and much more.

There is no doubt that significant progress is being made but there is a lot more to be done. Animal sentience goes to the heart of animal welfare. This is why Compassion supports the campaign, Animals Matter, which is led by the World Society for the Protection of Animals and calls for a Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare. The goal is to recruit 10 million people to sign the declaration. Have you?

If you, or anyone you know, needs more information about animal sentience, please do visit our Animal Sentience blog, The Lives of Animals, to read about animals and their emotional lives.

Fish factory farms exposed

Congratulations to Jonathan Safran Foer for his article in The Guardian newspaper today exploring fish farming and the serious issues that it raises.

The welfare of farmed fish has long been an interest of mine. In fact, it was the subject of my first ever published report here at Compassion way back in 1992. I remember it provoked quite a reaction from the salmon farming industry at the time and, I’d like to think, raised the profile of this little known area of factory farming. Because that’s what it is; tens of thousands of fish often crammed at high stocking densities into barren cages or pens.

Jonathan’s article makes the link between factory farming on land and the intensive rearing of water-borne animals:

“Factory-farmed chickens, turkeys and cattle all suffer in fundamentally similar ways. So, it turns out, do fish. We tend not to think of fish and land animals in the same way, but "aquaculture" – the intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement – is essentially under-water factory farming.”

Jonathan expands on some of the welfare problems evident in intensive salmon farming:

“The Handbook of Salmon Farming, an industry how-to book, details six "key stressors in the aquaculture environment": "water quality", "crowding", "handling", "disturbance", "nutrition" and "hierarchy". To translate into plain language, those six sources of suffering for salmon are: water so fouled that it makes it hard to breathe; crowding so intense that animals begin to cannibalise one another; handling so invasive that physiological measures of stress are evident a day later; disturbance by farmworkers and wild animals; nutritional deficiencies that weaken the immune system; and the inability to form a stable social hierarchy, resulting in more cannibalisation. These problems are typical. The handbook calls them "integral components of fish farming".”

Fish farming is growing rapidly worldwide. Some see it as a way of taking the pressure off wild stocks of fish by providing an alternative. However, the reverse is true. When farming carnivorous species, such as salmon and trout, it actually adds to pressure on wild fish populations. This is because it takes over three tonnes of wild-caught fish to produce one tonne of farmed salmon, for example. As with other farm animal species, farmed salmon and trout do not produce protein – they waste it. Simply put, feeding wild fish to farmed fish puts wild fisheries under pressure.

You can find out more about the welfare and environmental issues raised by fish farming on our website including our latest in-depth report by Peter Stevenson and advice to consumers on higher welfare alternatives.