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BEEF & LAMB
How producing Beef and Lamb impacts animals
Cattle and Sheep are regarded as livestock and excluded from anti-cruelty legislation that protects the dogs and cats we share our homes with. Despite having the same capacity to suffer, these animals routinely endure painful procedures without pain relief or anaesthetic. Sheep are bred to produce multiple births and lamb in winter, a farming choice that results in a 25% mortality rate of lambs in the first 48 hours. Approximately 18% of calves born in the beef industry die from lack of shelter and exposure to extreme temperatures. Grazing cattle and sheep is the largest driver of land clearing in Australia and many other countries. This land clearing is the leading cause of species extinction.
Fast Facts
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Breeding heartbreak
FORCED IMPREGNATIONS, SEPARATION OF MOTHER AND BABY, EARLY SLAUGHTER
Cows can form powerful maternal bonds with their babies, a process that, in nature, ensures they stay close and protect their vulnerable young. Separation of calf and mother is incredibly stressful to both calf and mother. Cows may bellow and search for their calf where they last were. Separation before natural weaning is proven to be harmful to calves, who demonstrate increased heart rates and vocalisations.
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Before human intervention, sheep naturally give birth to one offspring, sometimes delivering twins. Due to years of selective breeding and genetic manipulation, it is now typical for ewes to birth twins, and even delivering triplets or quadruplets is a reasonably regular occurrence. More lambs typically mean smaller lambs, which according to the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development of WA, "differences in lamb birthweight mostly explain lamb survival rate." Lambs born as multiple births (twins, triplets or more) are smaller and more vulnerable than single-born lambs. The smaller, weaker lambs common in twin and triplet births face a higher risk of dying from hypothermia.
Ewes bearing twins, triplets or quadruplets are more likely to die delivering them or from complications than sheep who only produce a single lamb.
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Painful Procedures
LEGALISED CRUELTY
Cattle and sheep are not protected under the legislation that protects animals from cruelty. Some states legislate that farmers undertake practices such as branding to identify animals. Cattle are routinely and legally subjected to this and many other painful procedures without anesthesia, such as:
Dehorning: Dehorning is a process where cattle horns are removed by cutting through the horn tissue. A cow, steer or bull's horns are highly vascular and have a lot of nerves. Dehorning is an extremely painful process routinely performed with no pain relief.
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Disbudding: Disbudding is a process where a calf has their horns burnt off before fully emerging. This is typically done using a hot iron pressed into the animal's skull where the budding horns are. The heat destroys the tissue, meaning no horns will grow.
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Castration: Cattle are typically castrated in one of three ways;
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Surgical – using a blade,
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Non-surgical - using a ring or
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Crushing - using an instrument to clamp and crush the spermatic cord and associated blood vessels.
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Branding: A brand is burnt into the animals' skin using either a hot iron or freeze burnt into the skin using super-cooled liquid nitrogen.
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Sheep are routinely and legally subjected to many painful procedures without anesthesia, such as:
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Mulesing: Mulesing is a practice that is particularly prevalent in merino sheep flocks because of the excess folds of skin they have been bred with. Sheep have the skin on their buttocks and back legs sliced off, causing unimaginable pain. The industry claims that mulesing is necessary to avoid flystrike; however, "crutching", the regular shearing of wool from the tail, rear and between the rear legs of sheep, prevents flystrike just as effectively. The crutching process requires more effort, time and cost. To a profit-driven industry, it is less desirable.
Tail Docking: Because tail docking is so widespread in the wool industry, many people don't realise that sheep are born with long tails. Sheep use their tails to help expel waste from their bodies, and lambs wag their tails joyfully when drinking or being cuddled. There are three standard methods of tail removal deployed legally in Australia, likewise, with no requirement for pain relief:
Knife: The most common method for docking tails is with a sharp knife, which is sometimes heated by flame. Lambs have their tail severed in an excruciatingly painful procedure.
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Banding: This method involves using a device to place a very tight rubber band onto a lamb's tail to cut circulation. Over time, without the blood supply, the nerves in the tail die, and it falls off. Once again, this process has been proven to be painful from the point the band is applied until the tail falls off and sometimes beyond.
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Heated iron: A heated scarring iron sears tails off. Less common than the prior methods, the industry considers this to be especially 'good practice' as the heat results in reduced blood loss. The intense temperature is extremely painful.
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Castration: Codes of practice state that lambs may be castrated without pain relief, using a knife or other cutting instrument, or using rubber rings.
FEEDLOTS
INTENSIVELY DAMAGING
Feedlots are farming systems where animals are kept in pens, often in close confinement, and fed high-protein grain-based diets to ensure they reach slaughter weight as rapidly as possible.
Cattle are typically sent to feedlots for 'finishing' over a few months to a year before being slaughtered. The average time cattle are confined on feedlots is between 50 – 120 days; however, they can be confined for more than a year.
At any one time, approximately one million cattle are confined on Australian feedlots. 60% of feedlots are located in QLD, and a further 30% of them are located in NSW.
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Approximately 80% of 'beef' products in Australian supermarkets come from cattle that spent the last portion of their short lives in an intensive feedlot.
Animals Australia reports that Cattle in feedlots endure the following conditions:
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With no legal requirement in Australia for feedlot operators to provide animals with shade and shelter, animals are exposed to extreme heat stress and adverse weather such as wind, hail, heavy rain and storms.
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Increased disease risk from standing in deep faeces and mud and living in close confinement with so many other animals.
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A rigid grain-based diet without access to their natural diet of grasses leaves them at risk of bloat, gastric ulcers and other health issues.
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Preventative overuse of antibiotics to counter the increased risk of illness and ensure the survival of animals to slaughter weight. A staggering 90% of animals in feedlots receive regular antibiotics, which makes feedlots a noteworthy contributor to antibiotic resistance in our food systems.
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Stress. Different Cattle herds mix as they arrive at feedlots. As social beings, new hierarchies must be established when meeting unfamiliar animals, a process that can lead to stress and injury from fighting.
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Cattle require up to 10 hours of rest per day. In confined feedlot environments, it can be difficult for them to rest effectively due to the number of animals or the wet, muddy, waste-filled grounds.
Live Export
THE MEAT INDUSTRY IS THE LIVE EXPORT INDUSTRY
The wool industry gains hundreds of millions of dollars by selling sheep that are no longer profitable for wool production into live export.
Over the past six years (2017 to 2022), the Australian live export industry sent 5,866,360 sheep to be slaughtered overseas. According to Government reports, 25,422 of these sheep died during the journey.
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In 2022 alone, over six hundred thousand cattle were loaded onto ships and sent overseas for slaughter.
Investigations have shown that live export ships are overcrowded and vastly inadequate in providing basic needs like clean water and personal space. Animals on the long voyages have been documented by those on ships drowning in weeks' worth of urine and faeces, even being cooked alive inside the hot ship.
Impact on Wildlife
THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION
Over the last fifty years, the Amazon rainforest has become one of the main cattle farming regions in the world. With 5 to 8% annual expansion, cattle farming (for beef, dairy and leather) is the leading cause of Amazon forest clearing, closely followed by soy production, of which 80% goes into animal feed. Brazil is second only to China as a top producer of bovine skin. One Brazilian leather bag is equivalent to 1,000 square metres of cleared land.
In Australia, animal agriculture is the leading cause of land clearing, with over 54% of land degradation due to animal farming (particularly cattle farming). Farming cattle for beef, dairy and leather is responsible for 93% of deforestation in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef catchment areas.
Land clearing is the leading cause of species extinction in Australia and across the globe. Every species is interconnected; none exists in isolation. Each species impacts and interacts with many other species in many ways, so when one species goes extinct in an ecosystem, other species are affected, impacting how the ecosystem functions and its benefits.
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Today, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event.
For Lovin' not the Oven
Create a kinder world
Aside from the cruelty, all animal products are inherently inefficient to produce. Because animals are living beings who grow, move and spend energy just living, they use up more calories than we end up being able to extract from their products (meat, milk or eggs). The ratio of how much feed goes in vs how much we get out is known as the 'feed conversion ratio'. The feed conversion ratio for sheep in Australia is between 4 and 6, and for cattle raised for beef it is 6. That means it requires up to 6 kilograms of feed for every kilogram of sheep meat or beef produced.
The hay and grain that must be grown to feed sheep and cattle uses vast amounts of land and water, in fact, it takes 10,400 litres to produce 1 kilogram of sheep meat, and 15,400 litres to produce 1 kilogram of beef. The global water footprint of beef in the period 1996-2005 was 33% of the total water footprint of animal production in the world (all farm animals).
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"Per kilogram of product, animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products. The same is true when we look at the water footprint per calorie or protein. The average water footprint per calorie for beef is twenty times larger than for cereals and starchy roots. The average water footprint per gram of protein in the case of beef is six times larger than for pulses." Water Footprint Network
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Each year, between 10-15 million lambs die before they are 48 hours old. 21 million sheep and 5.8 million cattle are killed each year in Australia for their meat and skins. Each one is an individual who valued their life. Create a more compassionate world, leave beef and lambs off your plate, and you will no longer be contributing to their suffering.
Today there are lots of ways to replace animal products that are better for the animals, the planet, and your health.
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Lambs are for Lovin - Spare millions of sheep and cattle a short and brutal life, and terrifying, painful death, by swapping animal products for plant based alternatives.
Kinder Options
