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Barn fire kills veal calves
#1
This is a sad story. A barn fire killed 110 veal calves.

Veal calves are usually confined in small pens, so they would have had no chance of escape. We can only hope that they were overcome by smoke and died quickly.
http://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/110-animals-...-1.2512189

I noticed that very little was made of the loss of life in the news broadcast. The barn had no sprinkler system. Also hay was stored above the calves. When a fire broke out it spread and was not easy to put out. There was no provision made for rescuing calves. The fact that they all died means there was no rescue attempt.

Barn fires are nasty. The animals are confined in small spaces with no hope of escape, surrounded by highly flammable material.
There are reports of deadly barn fires all the time. We are doing something wrong in the way we keep animals in barns. It is not good enough that the insurance will pay for it. What about the 110 little calves that died in fear.
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Catherine

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#2
Indeed. Keeping animals in tiny calf boxes is cruel and meant that they had no means to escape the fire. If they had been outside with their mothers, as nature intended, there would have been no casualties.

Where was the farmer? Why wasn't he tending his animals? Why did he store hay in the same barn as the animals? That creates a tinderbox. Hay should always be stored in a separate outbuilding.

A very sad case.
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#3
I guess it is cheaper to stash the hay in the rafters of the veal calf barn than to have a separate safer place for the hay.
Because they are insured farm animals are not kept safely.

You are so right, the calves should have been outside with their mothers. They should never have been confined in a small pen in a small barn. The calves' lives were short and sad and in the end they died of a certain carelessness in the way we raise animals.

Sadly these fires seem to happen all over the place.
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Catherine

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#4
How very sad indeed. I hope those poor calves were knocked out by the smoke...and that would have been bad enough. There can't be much greater terror than to be in a fire with no means of escape. Bless their Souls and I hope they will find care and healing in the next world.

It is NEVER farming practice to keep hay in the wrong places. There are usually specially-designated places for hay. It is not hard to move bales of hay around a farm, that's what tractors with different attachments are for. Good farmers don't violate that practice for safety reasons. And common sense reasons, as their stock is their money! Someone was too lazy there. And it ended in tragedy.
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#5
Quote:It is NEVER farming practice to keep hay in the wrong places. There are usually specially-designated places for hay. It is not hard to move bales of hay around a farm, that's what tractors with different attachments are for. Good farmers don't violate that practice for safety reasons. And common sense reasons, as their stock is their money! Someone was too lazy there. And it ended in tragedy.

That was my thought when I heard about the hay above the calf barn.

I suppose the big factory farms are careless of animal lives because they are insured.

Years ago I went with someone on an insurance claim(he was an adjuster). An egg farmer with chickens in little cages, had the power knocked out by a hail storm. That shut off the ventilation system and three thousand chickens suffocated. It was a shocking disregard for life.
They did not even try to save them. An open door might have helped.
They were insured for this so they did not see it as a loss.

They buried the chickens in a pit on the farm. I wonder now how well they checked to be sure the chickens were all dead.
It was a shocking disregard for life. That was 35 years ago and I am still stunned by the callousness and cruelty.
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Catherine

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