Self-Sufficiency in Style
Animal farm
introduction
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Self-Sufficiency in Style Animal farm introduction |
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The sound of silence |
Regular readers must have wondered why we said so little about animal
husbandry. We were happy enough to write about cabbages but had little to say about cattle, sheep, pigs or poultry beyond a passing mention or perhaps the odd photograph. There was a reason. But things are now about to change, we are now able to speak freely. |
| The animal health disasters
of BSE (Mad Cow), Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth, all happened, with others
yet under recorded, here - on our doorstep! The repercussions to us were horrendous. With others, we dug our heels in and fought against the repression and arbitrary rule imposed by a series of panicking governments. We exposed criminal activity by government employees, reporting them repeatedly...to media, parliament and, eventually, to the European Union investigators. The EU held back six hundred million pounds from Britain, perhaps partly as a result of our efforts. The veterinary profession were in the front rank of the wrongdoers: determined as a group to blame the innocent for their mistakes and, incidentally, to line their pockets at the expense of England's freedom. They did a pretty good job of brazen intimidation with a whole series of contradictory and generally stupid rules applied when and how it suited them, backed by the threat of criminal prosecution to anyone, like us, prepared to complain. The government veterinarians were supported and protected by their colleagues in private practice and those employed by Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. The animals and the smallholders suffered the most. |
Veterinary medicine in Britain - a once decent profession now being strangled by corruption and greed. |
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Targeted for daring to speak out. |
The writer and Mrs P were the
number one targets and we knew it. Britain's mad bad State Veterinary Service were out to silence us, probably by a faked up charge of animal cruelty coupled with a threat of subsequent criminal prosecution. They, or their proxies, were always creeping about our ditches and hedges, hoping they might strike lucky, find a technical infringement and threaten prosecution. A criminal record would have meant that in theory Mrs P would have been unable to accompany the writer to the US, which, as you will see later, would have cramped our style. We would have been effectively silenced. They did not succeed. Mrs P is an excellent law abiding stockwoman who loved her animals and the writer was busy outwitting the ditch crawlers. The writer, not the animal man, was concerned that anything he wrote in detail, might have provided some Byzantine validity to an investigation of some obscure aspect of Mrs P's husbandry. |
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But the writer is, consequently, free. Free to write about animal husbandry and free to campaign about cruelty and human rights abuses by Britain's crazy veterinarians. |
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Wasn't it Corbett in his famous "Rural Rides" that reckoned that freedom
was a pig fattening at the bottom of the Cottager's garden? If so, he was right. The right to raise animals humanely for your own consumption is a basic human right. It is now impossible here for us, if not others. Under Britain's lunatic husbandry repression, you have to have at least two pigs, duly equipped with toys: two for company and toys for recreation. Any pet pig owner, who wishes to take their animal for a walk, not apparently unknown in pet pig circles, has to get special permission. This permission is contingent on a government veterinarian accompanying the pair and agreeing the route. Bizarre? We can leave the reader to judge. The necessity of keeping more than one pig at all times, means that you get too many pigs each year for any family to eat. You then have to sell some, which makes you a business. They then apply the same rules on you as they would to a business with 10,000 pigs. In fact, because they don't like individualists prepared to criticise them, the rules will be applied to you; whilst the factory agri-businesses corrupt all the officials in sight, exploit their subcontracting small farmers and get away with obvious industrial scale cruelty on the way to produce an inferior product. The inferior product is accompanied by misleading marketing paid for by an unsuspecting taxpayer. |
Walkies! |
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So, we are going to be writing about how it can be done in more enlightened lands and better times Not, alas, how it has to be done in Britain's persecuted fields and furrows. |
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Mao actually used the apparent freedom of speech to flush out his opponents for appropriate silencing. |
There are many ways of
keeping any animal. We will merely be recording one way, suitable for a
self-sufficiency small-holding. Pets are treated one way. Small farmers and small-holders producing for the market will, quite rightly, do it differently. Larger farmers differently again, and factory scale producers have different systems. Pure self-sufficiency needs systems that are different from any of these. The climate and type of land impact on the husbandry system too, as do many other factors, not least the individualism of the keeper. Mao Tse Tung once said: "Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools of thought contend." On that he was right. One of life's ironies is that one of the most repressive dictators should have recognised the value of non-standardisation, probably for all the wrong reasons. |
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You can now move on to an overview of the whole idea of minimal production - a system of raising animals for food suited to the self-sufficient, or to these specific articles CHICKENS (for eggs) Articles to come will deal with its application to these individual species:
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Obesity is out. |
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...promoting new systems - at the original Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. May,2005 |
