HBM122: Should Cows Have Names?

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

Mike Paros lives in two worlds. In one world, he’s an animal welfare specialist and mixed animal vet, meaning he works with both “companion” animals like cats and dogs, and large animals like horses, cows, goats, and sheep. He spends much of his time as a veterinarian working with animals that eventually become meat, and most of his human clients are farmers that lean right politically.

In the other world, Mike is a college professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. There he teaches anthrozoology and agriculture to a predominantly liberal student body -- lots of vegans and anarchists. Crossing back and forth between these two worlds invites Mike to have many discussions about how to ethically treat animals, within and outside of the meat industry.

Producer Bethany Denton spent a day shadowing Mike as he disbuds and castrates dairy calves, and she asks him whether he thinks meat can be eaten ethically.

Bethany interviewed Mike in 2018 about a class he was teaching called “Liberal Education in the College Bubble: Crossing the Political and Cultural Divide.” You can listen to that story here.

Producer: Bethany Denton

Editor: Jeff Emtman

Music: The Black Spot, Circling Lights

Images: Bethany Denton

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. A quick content note this episode is in part an exploration of the meat industry.
0:15.0	It includes the sounds of calves being dehorned and castrated.
0:19.0	There's nothing too graphic, but it could be potentially upsetting. So this is where the heifers are. I'm going to spend like 30 seconds you can just get
0:40.1	out and record.
0:41.1	Sure. Sure. I've had time to let that one we aren't trying to lose.
0:55.0	And it's actually one person. So I'm putting a lot of can't keep
1:09.4	so I'm putting a lot of can block in right now.
1:13.4	So this is this is like, I try to block it as best I can, but sometimes the block doesn't work, but this
1:19.1	one's pretty good.
1:19.9	This block looks pretty good. When dairy cows are still calves they have these little
1:24.8	round bumps on their heads called buds. These buds are the beginnings of
1:28.8	horns that could eventually be dangerous to farmers. So farmers hire large animal veterinarians like Mike Perros to use a hot circle of iron to
1:37.2	cauterize the buds.
1:39.4	So their horn is sort of like your finger now and and we're burning the tissue that will become the horn and will destroy it.
1:48.0	You can do it chemically or you can do it by burn.
1:51.0	And so this is what we're doing here and that's good. We'll go to the other side.
1:59.0	What you're hearing is the first of several disbuddings Mike will do today.
2:03.0	This is a big organic dairy farm.
2:05.0	These cows have numbers, not names.
2:07.0	In a year or two, they'll join their mothers and aunts
2:10.0	and start producing organic grass-fed milk.
2:12.0	Later in the day day Mike has an appointment
	...

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