Brexit – Animal Rights or Quantity Britain Needs To Decide

The one aspect of Brexit which is rarely discussed is the amount of meat currently consumed versus the animal rights.

Many Brits are animal lovers like myself, and wouldn’t choose to eat Animals such as Cows, Sheep, Pigs of Chickens if they knew what conditions they were bread and raised in. However this causes a slight problem.

As we all know the amount of Meat we are eating is having a detrimental effect on our environment, and over 80% of Wales is currently farmed.

If the British People, want to consume Meat at the current cost and quantity we will need the single market to bring in the amount of meat which we currently do not produce ourselves. Otherwise we run the risk of paying more for imported meat, which many people will not want. As an Island we simply cannot produce the amount of meat that we currently consume as well as vegetables, and dairy. Like many other countries.

According to statistics found on http://beefandlamb.ahdb.org.uk/markets/industry-reports/uk-statistics/ By end of year in October 2017 there have been 24672 tonnes of imported of Beef and 9553 tonnes of exported.

So what about the Animal Rights?

It astonishes me that people in the UK are unaware that cows, pigs and sheep are being raised and killed without every seeing grass. That people are unware that you can’t have that many cows going back and forth to the parlour to get milked without causing problems with the land they graze on.

So the option is mass produced meat, where animals are born and raised in a shed, they are kept in a cubicle not much wider than a metre. Some of the intense farms you could argue are cleaner and better managed than a traditional farm. Yet this depends on what your beliefs are on the life of the animal.

In my opinion all animals should be able to wander free that’s their right as much as it is ours.

Now the opposing side to this is, we only eat our own Meat, which is what a lot of Brexiteers wanted. In which case would mean that we would be eating considerably less Meat then we do now.

In my ethical, eco-friendly eyes this is fantastic, we eat less meat, we are all given a meat quota and we stick to it.

Yes we want our own meat, yes we want to diversify the meat that we do eat which allows more farmers to grow and a more competitive market. Which will lead to more small holdings and more farms.

This has its own problems. If you cast your mind back to Bird Flu and Foot and Mouth they caused disaster for our agricultural industry and whilst the big farms can afford all the equipment, staff and cleaning products it’s much harder for a small holding to do this. In addition the amount of paperwork, passports, testing that has to be done can hinder a small farm massively.

My Dad is a farmer and I am only too aware of the issues of a modern day farmer.

So the question is- Do we stick in the Single Market and keep onto our meat imports or do we keep our meat local and hopefully care about it enough to warrant eating it once or twice a week.