Newborn goats are separated from their mothers and are kept in different pens in order to reroute milk for human consumption. You can hear them calling back and forth to each other.
JESSICA SCOTT-REID: ‘Susana Romatz doesn’t consider herself to have been a farm kid, per se, but her grandfather did raise rabbits for meat. Looking back now, she says that navigating that as a child is likely what gave her the “skill-set for disassociating” early on. “I knew what he was doing with them, and it gave me that toolbox to shut that feeling off,” she says. It was this ability to turn away from her emotions and instincts that would allow the animal-loving, on-and-off-again vegetarian to take work as a farmhand on a goat farm in western Oregon. It’s an experience, the now-vegan—and vegan cheese-maker—says she is still trying to heal from.
At the time, Romatz was a new teacher seeking additional work for extra cash. She wanted something outdoors and physical. That area of Oregon is considered quite progressive, she says. “Ethical,” “free range,” “organic,” products abound. So when a “humane” goat farm was looking for help, she says that she was on board. “I kind of started to buy into that line of reasoning, that you can keep an animal, do animal husbandry, in a way that is kind to the animals,” she recalls. It didn’t take long though, until “things started to disintegrate that idea”…
Romatz soon realized, though, that these things meant very little… At the top of that list, she says, was the disbudding of baby goats—kids—without anesthesia. Disbudding is a standard farming practice, done to stop the growth of horns, and purportedly to prevent property destruction and horn-related injuries. (Horn-related injuries to other animals commonly occur in confined spaces.) Without anesthesia, most animal welfare and rights groups condemn the practice, though it remains common.
“It was really horrifying,” she recalls. “They actually shrieked. [The farmers] would have to hold them down and basically burn off their horn buds with a hot electric poker.” She says some of the kids would never go near humans again. “It was one of the things I had to work really hard at shutting off. I had to not think about it. I could tell it was very, very painful”…
The separation of mothers and newborns also weighed heavily on Romatz. “The baby goats were taken away from their mothers almost immediately,” she says. In the dairy industry, mothers and newborn calves are routinely separated in order to reroute milk for human consumption… Romatz says that the calls between the moms and babies were indisputable. “This is something I would experience on a daily basis during kidding season,” she says, “when there were lots of babies kept in a pen, and lots of the does [mothers] kept in other pens, and you could hear them calling back and forth to each other”…
Eventually, Romatz left the farm to focus on teaching. She says that it was a relief to no longer have to mentally block out many aspects of her professional work. “All that work you’ve been doing to hold back those thoughts, you can’t do it anymore, and the flood comes, and then you can’t see it the same way ever again”… Now, Romatz feels a sense of wanting to make up for her past. In addition to being vegan, Romatz is a vegan cheese advocate’. SOURCE…
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