Day 113 - 03 Apr 95 - Page 10
1 include bulls, bullocks and all the others.
2
3 If we start off with a newly born heifer calf -----
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Take it slowly and steadily and have a little
6 pause from time to time, Dr. Long.
7 A. Yes, please, if you tell me when I am going too
8 rapidly, I will hesitate. The heifer calf when she is
9 newly born would, obviously, need colostrum for certainly a
10 day or more. One of the problems that arises, first of
11 all, with welfare is that she may be taken away from the
12 dam, that is the mother, before she has had her fill of
13 colostrum.
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15 Tests have been done at livestock markets to look at calves
16 going through the markets. Some of this work was done at
17 the Royal Veterinary College to find that a number of
18 calves, possibly 50 per cent, had not had their fill of
19 colostrum. When I use these terms I am assuming that many
20 of the physiological matters are similar to those in the
21 human species because they are, so human babies should have
22 colostrum -- a very important part of breast feeding. Of
23 course, the calf is going to be subjected to stress, and so
24 it is even more important that it should have this milk.
25
26 But there is a competition at that point because the farmer
27 wants to get the cow and mother back yielding milk for the
28 milk market, and wants to get the calf on to cheaper,
29 replacement rations -- those, of course, are unnatural --
30 and also wants to train the calf to give up what it knows
31 as a way of feeding, that is, to suck. That means the calf
32 has to be trained at a very early age to abandon its
33 natural habits and to lap up. So, you have to train the
34 calf. That means also that one does invite digestive
35 troubles; it is just the same way as if you do this with a
36 human baby.
37
38 Now, the young heifer calf can go off into the beef side or
39 the farmer can retain the heifer calf for his dairy herd.
40 He has to make his decisions largely on the beefiness of
41 his stock and the milkiness because these two attributes
42 are not necessarily the same.
43
44 One has to look at an animal of that sort for its source of
45 saleable cuts which is off the back part, the hindquarters,
46 which are steaks, and one also has to look at the capacity
47 of the udder, the milking equipment, to see if that is
48 going to be a milky animal. That is his dilemma. So, when
49 he is looking at his stock, to put it crudely, it is a "bum
50 and tit" operation. He looks at the back side, the
51 hindquarters, to see if the animal is going to be useful
52 there, and looks at the udder and the reproductive
53 equipment to see if that is going to perform
54 satisfactorily.
55
56 Now, having done that, the sequel depends very much on the
57 fact that if he later on introduces two much beefiness, the
58 sort of dairy animals, typical Friesians and Holsteins,
59 which have narrow pelvises, will have difficulty in
60 delivering a very beamy sort of calf. So, a very beefy
