So, you can’t even contend with the possibility of the workers slaughtering the occasional goat or other animal EVER?
It’s not like they invited (or expected) you to attend the processing.
And if this barn otherwise provides what you require for horse care it seems like a weak reason for relocating.
When I moved to my farm, I discovered the former owners had converted the garden shed for 2 purposes.
Front 2/3 was for poultry. They kept & slaughtered chickens & turkeys.
Back 1/3 was a smokehouse, where they processed a pig annually. After 18yrs, it still smells faintly of smoke.
I started keeping chickens about 10+ yrs ago, using partitions they had left behind.
I don’t keep meat birds, but have had to cull sick & injured hens over the years.
I was not raised on a farm & had to learn to do this humanely myself.
Prior to moving to my farm, I had zero contact with processing animals for food.
My meats came from the grocery, neatly wrapped in plastic.
But I had gratefully accepted gifts of venison & wildfowl from friends who hunt & goat from Amish friends who raised Boers.
If I wore my Past on my sleeve as you are claiming, should I sell this farm to avoid living where slaughter had been routine?
A nearby neighbor gets turkey poults every Summer & processes them in Fall.
Is that a reason you’d move?
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Whatever else… this thread has got to go down as a classic in COTH archives of did you ever think we’d discuss this topic??? threads lol
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To paraphrase Grouch Marx
(saying he’d shot an elephant in his pajamas)
How the shark got in the wash stall, I’ll never know!
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I say that all the time (the elephant thing not the shark thing lol) and people look at me like I have extra heads 
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It’s definitely a weird one. Unfortunately the Opening Post is a sign of the times. There are many people who are ignorant about livestock (they usually aren’t here on COTH.) When I learn something new I ask about it if It seems unusual to me. That is a much more productive response than is freaking out. In this case a proper response would have been to ask, “who owns the goat and do they know that it has no food or water”, not to take it upon yourself to interfere.
You (g) do what you choose as far as eating goat goes, but interfering with other peoples animals is something every educated horse owner knows not to do.
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@islgrl: this must be a strong contestant for the funniest thing I’ve read on this forum! 20+ years - it’s a tough contest to win, with lots of competition! Thanks for a great laugh! That’s an AWESOME story, and really good for lending some perspective to low-level complaints about people leaving mess in tack up and wash areas.
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I think this thread…
…jumped the shark.
(I’ll see myself out, thankyouverymuch.)
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Ahh my bad I get it now! Could not for the life of me figure out how a shark had gotten into the barn. I was literally thinking it somehow was just flopping down the road, up the driveway, through the parking lot, and finally went to the wash stall to find water.
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For those who are interested, one of the classic reference books for meat processing…The Meat We Eat.
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I know we are raising a generation divorced from food production. But the stories about the clueless kids are rather shocking. I suppose cooking habits have changed too. I grew up with roast chicken, roast turkey, whole salmon, and cuts of beef ham and pork that had bones and some anatomical integrity to them. Idea of a child facing their first bone in chicken breast at 8 or 9 is… amazing. It gives me some insight into how children go vegan in their early teens when they suddenly realize what a McNugget is.
You just get inured to eating it when you grow up on roast chicken, even from a plastic package. Pulling the wishbone!
And cook books and supermarket diagrams showing the cuts of meat mapped out on the animal. Actually a long time since I’ve seen a poster in the butchers or supermarket!
As far as “the past,” though. Farmers and people closer to animal husbandry ate far less meat 150 years ago, relied more on eggs and milk. Killing and salting a hog in the fall was a big deal, it wasn’t like the whole family sat around watching animals get slaughtered weekly. Possibly the wife and the younger children did not witness this.
Wealthier people who could afford meat every day bought it from the butcher, either delivered or their cook went shopping at the butcher. The people who ate the most meat did not participate in the slaughter or butchery or even cooking it.
So even in agricultural based societies there has always been some remove from slaughter.
Even in hunter gatherer societies, the calories from big game hunting by men tended to be less than the steady gathering efforts of women. Hunting was often seasonal too. And often embedded in ritual and spiritual practice.
So animal slaughter has never been something that most people have been totally blase about, or even that most people witness on a regular basis. But animal protein is a very useful food source.
What it does to people who work full time in slaughter houses, I can’t say.
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will pass that along to the barn owner
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Totally agree…
I know I’m ancient, but don’t people have grandmothers who talked about scalding the chicken to pluck the feathers?
Or went fishing with their grandfathers? I have to say getting the hook out of a wriggling fish, or gutting a fish is pretty messy and disgusting.
I had a discussion with a butcher clerk about the advantages of tenderloin tails vs the tenderloin…seemed like new news to him.
I have to say, I had to do a half-halt, and think to connect the dots when I was talking about veal with someone who grew up in a dairy farm. I had to put 2+2 to understand that veal is a by-product of dairy production…yes, the night lite got a little brighter that day.
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I’m surprised you’d have to, but it looks that way. It turns out that there was a reason for no food or water and you just don’t approve of the reason.
What if the goat had been under veterinary care and the vet said no food or water for this many hours? Ask before you interfere, it’s not your goat, not your dog, not your horse etc…
Edited for clarity and punctuation.
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I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “by-product”? As in its more unintentional? I always envisioned the stories of fatted calves being kept indoors so as to stay fat, not get muscle as the source of veal?
Dairy farmers are not breeding for bull calves, they’d definitely prefer heifers, for future milking cows. Bull calves become veal most of the time, since most dairy farms don’t keep their own bulls and if they do, I imagine it wouldn’t be more than one. Dairy breeds don’t tend to bulk up as much as beef breeds, so what else are they going to do with them? By-product would be a good way to describe it.
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Ok…you are having the same “connect-the-dots” moment that I had.
So, think…Where does milk come from?
Milk is the liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals…eg., baby cows…eg, calves…eg., little veals.
So how do you get milk? You get a cow to get pregnant… then the pregnant cow gives birth. Voila, a calf is born…eg., a little veal arrives. An the post-partum cow is now milked for human use.
So, veal production is a by-product of dairy production.
Think about that next time you have a glass of milk…or have your favorite cheese with your favorite glass of wine.
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If I recall Bio-101 the Male-to-Female birth ratio in mammals his higher for males. So yup, dairy farmers needed to figure out what to do with the male baby calves that were not pre-destined to be milkers.
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They still brought a live animal - without permission - to an agricultural business. You want goat curry, you bring it back refrigerated.
I’m with OP, provided her account of the BO is correct. I don’t begrudge anyone meat, but don’t be bringing unapproved livestock to a property. Different if the BO was like “yeah sure no worries, stick it in the shed”.
I have to wonder, what if this was a pony? Plenty of people eat horsemeat. But it would be incredibly bad publicity for the BO, and a potential biohazard risk if pony had EIA or strangles.
Eat goat. Don’t eat goat. But don’t risk your employer’s reputation and safety of their business.
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I have an acquaintance who drifted out of horses into small scale dairy stuff. She explained once that the AI sperm can be tweaked in a way to give a much higher percentage of female calves which could be sold to other small holders for house cows. The bull calves became steers. Some were eaten, I believe one pair became oxen for the kids to harness train for 4H or something.
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