[Jacob-list] eating lambs

[Neal and Louise Grose]

Overheard a couple of years ago:

Q: "How can you eat someone you have known?"

A: "Why would you want to eat some one you don't know?"

Neal Grose

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: gordon johnston 
  To: jacob-list at jacobsheep.com 
  Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 5:39 AM
  Subject: [Jacob-list] eating lambs


  <<< How in the world can you know 
  these lambs from birth and then eat them? >>>

  My question is : how on Earth can you eat animals you haven't known alive ?  You can only hope they have been well treated and that you are not supporting a producer with a poor welfare record. With your own reared stock, you know how they have been treated, you know how they have been fed and you know that they have been killed humanely.

  We do name most of our lambs, except some Hebrideans which are very black and so hard to tell apart as lambs.  When we eat a particular lamb, knowing it's name gives us the chance to  remember it's life and appreciate the food it is providing - we feel much happier doing things that way than seeing meat as an anonymous, amorphous substance unrelated to a real animal ; that to me is the unnacceptable approach to meat-eating.

  We have a small paddock at the moment with 9 wethers in, 6 Shetlands and 3 Jacobs, which were too small to go for slaughter at the back end of last year, so will go in about May (except Cuthbert who has been adopted by a little girl and will live on as a fleece wether). We have come to know them well, but we know they are destined for slaughter so we cannot be sentimental about them.  They are all friendly and we love watching them run and jump around, and we hand feed them biscuits sometimes.  When the day comes we shall take them to the slaughterhouse ourselves and we know they do not experience fear there, but are dead before they know it.  We hate taking them, but that is our part of the bargain.

  To support a breed requires new stock to be born each year . You need only one tup for up to 50 ewes which gives the breeder the opportunity to choose the very best male to go on to breed.  In order to continue the process, the other males, and any less than perfect females, must leave the breeding pool.  I suppose we could fill up our fields with those animals, but the sensible, responsible and least wasteful action is to add them to the human food chain.  If we did not do that then we would soon have so many non-breeding animals that we could no longer continue breeding new stock and the breed would fall into decline.

  Juliet and Gordon in Scotland UK
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