Down on the farm
Saturday, October 15
In an endeavour to toughen myself up and/or drag me kicking and screaming from my authentic wood veneer IKEA closet, I spent a Saturday morning around the farm with Dave Land. It was Gabriel’s idea: ‘You’re completely ignorant of the facts,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, fine, turn veggie if you want. But you’re thirty five, Bailey and you’re a smart guy. People are going to want to know why. You can’t just say “Oh, cos Dave Land killed my pets!” ’
She was right. I needed to interrogate my vegetarianism more intensively. And to do this I needed to inter-rogate meat. Feeling about as apprehensive as a boy setting out on his first day at school, I set about doing just that. I spent all morning and part of the afternoon out and about with Dave Land who was clearly chuffed at my sudden interest. Crammed rather intimately in the cab of a John Deere tractor towing a slatted trailer, I saw and heard rather more than I would have liked.
Essentially our task for the morning was to move two hundred sheep from a valley field sinking beneath the overflow of a flooded river after two days of steady rain. With more rain predicted overnight, Dave Land didn’t fancy doing the same job at two in the morning or, worse, waking to a paddock full of drowned sheep.
I have to say it was boring, repetitive work, because it was. Not initially. It was quite invigorating herding our first twenty potentially doomed sheep into the slatted trailer in fine moor land mist. Delivering them to higher, drier ground ten plodding minutes of thirty mile an hour tractor journey away in a lush, leafy field high on the back road behind Hartley Castle House. A field with views that would inspire even the simplest sheep to do something more with their life; lead rather than follow – a recipe for disaster where sheep were concerned.
By the time we delivered sheep numbers sixty to eighty into this field of drown-free dreams, the saviour novelty was wearing off. By the time we delivered sheep numbers one-hundred-and-eighty to two hundred, we may as well have been delivering pizzas. I was almost thinking like a farmer and I hated myself for it.
We rested side by side on a drystone wall overlooking our woollen handiwork, job done for the day, drizzle momentarily fizzled, me having lit my first cigarette for hours. There was nothing left to do but ponder the merits of sheep.
‘Food and Safety make our lives hard work with e coli and all that,’ Dave Land said with one of those odd grins my way. ‘We have to clip all these sheep’s bellies before we sell them. I shouldn’t tell you this, but you know when it goes to the abattoir, right?’
I nodded like the whole-beast-for-my-freezer-buying bloke I was.
‘Stunned in the head, out cold, it’s hung up, stunned. Hung up on a hook and it goes along the line and a guy gets like a knife, razor sharp, slits its belly open, you see?' He grinned. 'But problem is, when sheep have been outside, like my sheep are outside now, what’s going to happen to their bellies when they’re lying down in the soil? They’re lying down in their own muck; all that wool on their bellies gets infected. He goes in with a knife, cuts through all that wool…’ He paused for effect, imaginary knife poised like a mugger. ‘It’s infected his knife, hasn’t it? Which in turn infects the meat.’
I tut tutted. ‘Really? People could die!’ I hoped my tone wasn’t too hopeful. Then, remembering why I was there: ‘How do they actually, you know…kill them?’
‘Well, like I say, the sheep walk along a little race and there’s a guy with a great bolt gun who stuns them, then they’re hung up and another guy slits them open and pulls all their guts out. They’re not dead, but they’re out cold. It’s like a general anaesthetic. They’re stuck on a hook and all their guts are pulled out. So you’re dead, aren’t you? You can’t survive.’
He caught my grizzled expression. Laughed. ‘It’s not very nice. It’s just a process so we can feed everybody. It has to be done.’
I squinted into the fields. ‘Paul McCartney once said that if all slaughterhouses had glass walls, none of us would eat meat.’ A step in the right direction – Gabriel would be proud.
He laughed again. ‘He’s probably right! It’s not very nice, the whole process. It’s just massive! All these animals coming through all day, every day. The guy with the gun. Another guy with an apron slitting the tummies. That’s all he does all day, all day he slits the tummies, pulls all the guts out into a big hopper, you know what I mean? There’s one down here by dual carriageway. An abattoir. You’ll see the conveyor belts loading wagons up, literally conveyor belts dripping with intestines loading big twenty five tonne muck bins. It’s utterly vile.’
And it was. I didn’t need to see it. I’d heard it and that was bad enough. I chose my words carefully. ‘So the animals you rear…I mean…they’re animals, but do you find yourself getting attached to them?’
Dave Land’s eyes narrowed as he stared proudly out over his land and his animals. He inhaled long and deep through his nostrils as if somehow sucking in the answer, rung great hands. ‘You never want to lose sight of the fact that sheep and cattle don’t have the same intelligence, nowhere near the intelligence we do.’ He nodded a slow, satisfied nod at the fields. ‘That’s what makes it humane. That’s what makes it okay.’
‘They’re still killed fairly brutally, aren’t they?’
‘They are.’ He thought about this, then his great head swivelled ten degrees my way. ‘Have you ever been fishing, Bailey?’
I said I had. I hadn’t.
‘You see on the telly all these fish being hauled onto a boat, all these fish flapping about suffocating to death. They don’t knock them on the head like I do when I go fishing, they just leave them to suffocate to death, you know? I mean what a cruel way to die. They’re drowning in air. I know fish aren’t very intelligent, but they must feel that they can’t breathe. They must. It must be awful! Then again I don’t know if fish or animals are intelligent enough to know they’re dying. We know.’ He laughed. ‘If someone clonks us on the head and we’re going, we know! I think we know we’re on the way out. I don’t think an animal has the intelligence to know that.’
I found this unbelievably arrogant. Almost said so. Did say: ‘I’m…not so sure.’
‘Well, I can tell ye, during foot and mouth outbreak we had here, blokes going round the farms shooting all the infected cattle, right? All these cattle are wandering about and their old mate, Jack gets shot in the head, just drops dead before them and they just stand there. They might have a little sniff – why’s Jack lying down? – but they don’t know what’s going on. Well, you wouldn’t think they do. That’s the intelligence, you see? That’s the good thing about it all. That’s what makes it humane. You can’t get too attached, you can’t get attached at all!
‘A sheep’s a sheep and a bullock’s a bullock,' he said with finality. 'They’re all the same really in my book.’
The Bible, the Koran or American Psycho? I thought.
‘I do feel sorry for the animals, I must admit,' he continued. 'I just try and do the best I can for them really, but at the end of the day you’ve got to survive. You’ve got to feed yourself, haven’t you? They have a short life, but I think they have a good life. They do on our farm anyway. Some farms aren’t good to their animals. Pigs and chickens and that sort of thing, I doan’t really know about them. But, you know, people say animals haven’t got the intelligence to know any different. I mean everything’s got nerve endings. You crush an ant,’ – he demonstrated by clomping a size eighteen work boot in the mud – ‘Cuuugsh! It’s going to have a momentary bout of pain, isn’t it? But it hasn’t got the intelligence, they rate it on intelligence, not pain and it just hasn’t got the intelligence. If they knew, if we thought for one minute they knew what was happening, we wouldn’t do it, would we? It wouldn’t be allowed!’
We both dwelled on this in our own, I’m sure, quite different ways.
‘By the way,’ he said at length, eyes on the fields. ‘I think I might have something for you.’ His head turned and his eyes were twinkling.
***
We were behind the castle ruins looking into the field where Duncan and Archie had ruminated and masticated their last, a field which had sat eerily empty ever since. It was no longer empty. Two great white bullocks ambled about in a tight, noticeably limp-free twosome.
‘Wow! What beautiful animals!’ I said. ‘What are they?’
‘Charolais,’ he said, leaning in and gazing admiringly at his latest mobile meat packs. ‘Bought them at market this morning. Fine beef bullocks both.’ He nodded at them. ‘Leave those other two for dead for quality and quantity, they do.’
Dead being the operative word. Yet I could see what he meant. Were I of a mind to slaughter and eat them, we would be gnawing for a millennium. The two Charalais bullocks made Duncan and Archie look like undernourished greyhounds; big, muscular, ‘beefy’ animals with coats like soiled white shagpile.
‘How much for both?’ I asked.
Dave Land gritted his teeth and sucked. ‘Well, I can’t honestly say. It depends. It depends how they fatten out and on t’market at the time. You see, you’ve got live weight, where you get a price per kilo for what they weigh when they’re alive. Or if you send them straight to the abattoir, which we do with nearly all our cattle, then it’s dead weight where they don’t weigh them until they’re a sliced up, carcass – they take the head off and get all the bad bits off and you get a nice confirmation carcass. It’s called a confirmation carcass and it gets a confirmation grade.’
‘Fascinating.’ I said shuffling impatiently. I wondered if there was a calculation for Pet Weight. ‘Just give me a price.’
‘Well, see,’ he said in no hurry to sell his bullocks down the road, ‘you’ve got a carcass hanging up on a hook and a man will come and he’ll look at the bullock’s ass, legs, he’ll look at the whole thing. You know when you look at a woman’s ass and think God, what a fantastic ass she’s got and you look at someone else and think fookin ‘ell, you know what I mean? It’s exactly the same. You’re grading her in your own mind, you’re thinking I’ll give her a three out of ten, but I’ll give her a nine! It’s the same thing and you’ll get paid more for a better confirmation of the carcass.’
‘How much, Dave?’
‘Where as live weight, you see, the butcher is literally taking his own judgement. He’s sat there looking at your bullock running around the ring and he’s got to take his own judgement as to how that bullock’s going to kill out. He’s doing the same job as the abattoir, but he has to do it while the bullock’s still alive, which is a bit more difficult.’
All of which was completely irrelevant to my live ‘die of old age’ pet bullocks to be. ‘Last time. How much for both?’
‘Well, I know what we paid for them, see, but I can only speculate as to what we’ll get.’
‘Then speculate.’
‘About eight hundred pounds each.’
***
I felt like dead weight for weeks, a pitched battle of heartfelt longings and mental arithmetic like psychological warfare to my already bombarded brain as I became utterly obsessed with the two Charolais; even more obsessed than I’d been with Duncan and Archie, leaning on the fence and petting them on a thrice daily basis, telling them I was going to find a way to save them from the slaughterman if it was the last thing I did. I even named them to raise the emotional attachment and ensure it was.
Ping Ping and Yang Yang.
That’s what I called them. Names based on what could only be described as their extremely tenuous re-semblance to polar bears, or more particularly two beleaguered polar bears incarcerated at the notoriously awful concrete, compassionless hell that was Beijing Zoo. More to the point, like their miserable namesakes, they were in dire need of Good Samaritan intervention.
‘If you do decide to buy them, young Bailey,’ Dave Land had said. ‘Make sure you kill them before they’re thirteen months old. A bullock goes past thirteen months of age, they’ve got a high BSE rate.’
‘A high what?’
‘BSE. Bovine…something rather. You know, the brain disease. BSE You must have heard of BSE, it’s been in the news.
‘Mad cow?’
‘Yeah, yeah, that one. When a bullock reaches a certain age, it’s high risk. High risk of getting it and passing it on. If you send those two bullocks t’abattoir over thirteen months old, they’ve got to take the brain out, they’ve got to take the spinal cord out, they’ve got to take all the nerve endings out. They’ve got to really dissect the bullock to make sure there’s no spinal cord or anything in that bullock. Whereas under thirteen months old, it’s classed as low risk and they take all that stuff, mash it all up in a meat grinder and serve it as burgers.’
‘Get out!’
‘Well, that’s what they do, in’t it? That’s what you get in burgers. You get the brains, the spinal chord. Like your cheap supermarket blue and white packet minced beef, low grade, will be brains, spinal chord and all the poor quality cuts off that bullock, like the calf and bits of the body they don’t want, ribs and all that. Next burger you eat, have a look at the meat and see if you can see any tiny little white bits. That’s spinal chord. It’s bone, it’s fat and it’s all crap.’ He chuckled at my revulsion. ‘You want some nice spotty burgers out of those two, make sure you kill them quick smart.’
‘Thanks,’ I said with a grimace at Ping Ping and Yang Yang. ‘That’s quite an incentive.’
But to be honest, with Dave Land and his slatted trailer forever on the prowl for animals ready for market, I had all the incentive I’d need.
