Show Heifer, I am in total agreement with both of your statements.
There are radical people who have hidden agendas sometimes and they thrive on junk like this. I would hope that many in the cattle industry will not sit on their duffs but come out and condemn what the slaughter plant has done.
No one here will allow a downer cow to be unloaded, salebarn or a slaughter house....
Milkmaid, I have wondered why some in the dairy industry allow their cows to get into such horrible shape before they take them to the sale barn. I have milked cows off and on all my life. We never kept a cow that long and if she had problems we laid her down and buried her on the back forty. I laid a brangus and a charlotte down last year. I bought someone else's bad girls. One had a lung disorder, and one a double prolapse and was so wild the vet would not touch her.
I unloaded a brangus cow last year that was 12 years old and it was hot, very hot, at the sale barn. The woman in charge kept hitting her with a hot shot. The cow crawled under other cows in line to get tagged. If I had not gone back to pick up my sheet I would not have seen it. She was down, and bloated up, and foaming at the mouth. I jerked the side gate open. Held her head up. Then helped her get up and she became fine. Had I not done it, they would have kept hitting her with the hot shot until she died. I wanted to take the hot shot and give the old gal a shot of it but you can go to jail for what came to my mind. I was so angry that I just stared at her and kept my mouth shut. The cow was healthy but she did not bring as much as I thought she should have, due to all the manure all over her and you could tell she had been down.
DL, My sisters had a fit when Dad and I pulled big bull calf from a heifer and it was really cold. We put him in the Mother's bath tub and got him warmed up in the house. He did his thing in the tub. Dad cleaned it up after we took the fellow back to live with his momma. I had twins in my brand new pickup this past December. They were too cold to get up. I saved both of them, but it took me a long time to get them warm and their first milk down them....but I got in bed by 3:00 a.m. and went back at 6:00 a.m. to check on the new family.
To those who blame a particular political party, I do not agree. There are radicals in both parties. There are radical farmers, preachers, and news personnel. I distrust all of such. I have lived long enough to witness the media focus on all of our presidents and it is a wonder that any of our presidents have been able to keep their sanity with the attacks that are upon them. Some of you do not remember all that Truman and his daughter faced, or Johnson during the Viet Nam war, or Bush Sr. for his read my lips comment; or watergate for Nixon. These people and their families are open game to the media and I personally do not like it. Our media has the power to destroy these people, and will use it to hurt farming. They have an agenda to make self important by making statements that are exaggerated to an extreme, which is called NEWS WORTHY. It is the same in sports with ESPN, etc. Last night was the NBA all star game, and look how long it took to get all the junk over with before the game got started. It takes 3 to 6 people telling us how people are playing or what they are doing and why. We have analysis to tell us all type of stuff before and after games....political debates...etc. I am for firing the whole lot, show the game and let me figure it out myself, whether it is a ball game or apolitical speech or farm report. The media controls public opinion and therefore, Show Heifer has the right idea about public stands by the farm industry bureaucracy.
