Farming as an activity has been in existence for around ten thousand years. Sheep, having been early domesticated, have been farmed for about the same amount of time.
Industrialisation began in the eighteenth century, and arrived in a major way - and with its result of huge change to life and lifeways - during the nineteenth century. Farming formed part of this. Mechanisation, improved transport methods, increases in farm sizes etc, brought an alteration to traditional farming practice.
Industrialisation of livestock farming, however, arrived later, not emerging until after the Second World War. Industrial farming is a process which is product of, and driven by, a wish not merely for modest maintenance of an existing amount of production, but for growth. Into the picture has come greed. It is part of the wider, same entity, known as the Great Acceleration. This ‘thirst for growth’ phenomenon, and its cause of huge harm to the world, David Attenborough alerts us to in his book A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future (2020).
As the names of industrial farming, or the other often nomenclature, factory farming, suggest: the type of farming demands intensification, and increases of size to achieve scale economies. Industrial farming demands utter focus, and for chance and serendipity to be ruled out, and for wider dimensions not to intrude or cause disruption. In relation to animals, industrial farming means that these are treated not as beings with individual characteristics and tendencies but as robotic machines. They are vessels of production, items of produce.
What does industrial farming render for sheep, and how does this contrast with the circumstance of normal farming practice? The overall dangers of a size of a flock being increased beyond traditional farming norms are those of depersonalisation and dehumanisation. A sheep is treated to a format. It is seen as one unit of the whole. A flock has become too large for each sheep in it to be treated and regarded as an individual with individual characteristics and individual requirements. Human contemplation of a large mass has the potential to engender less care and concern about any one item of that mass. For example, regarding shearing, the chance must be there for a difference of approach and attitude from a person, or group of persons when coming to shear a vast number of sheep, as opposed to sheep of a small group each of whom are known individually. Lots of people, shearing lots of sheep, and with the shearers - perhaps especially if they are contract workers - trying to do the task as speedily as possible, is a scenario of risk to sheep that they will not to be treated to the best.
In various dimensions, in industrial farming a ‘one-size fits all’ approach will just have to pertain, often to sad outcomes. As example, in the circumstance of a large flock, and which is mixed, put to a pasture, the representatives an individual breed may not be given the type of grazing most suited to them and which they most enjoy.
What must be terrifying to sheep, very nervous creatures by nature, is the horror action, sometimes utilized in large flock contexts, such as in the USA and New Zealand, of using a helicopter to check on sheep, and/or to drop down and catch them. If a helicopter is being used to sheepwatch, how can such as limps and illness be identified from the viewpoint of a helicopter in flight?
On time and money constraints alone, customized and individual attention to any one sheep of a huge flock is unfeasible. Overall, in industrial livestock farming, that live creatures are the entity of attention is a matter that can become subsumed and forgotten. Sensitivity and reaction to individual instances and situations are in danger of loss.
Industrial farming is a situation fraught with danger for sheep.
4th February 2021