As an ex farmer there were some rather awfull practices I did, lopping off calves horns even though the horns were only around 3 inches long when the calf was around 8 months old resulted in about a 500 mm long thin squirt of blood for about 20 seconds , that would cake on the calves face, Use to put a powder on which resulted in the wound healing over in a day. I feel it looked a lot worse than the pain that resulted but hay we self justify ourselves dont we.
Rather than dehorning at 8 months one can dehorn calves by placing a caustic paste on the calves horn buds at about 6 weeks which seems less gruesome and what I ended up doing from the mid 1980s on.
Probably the worst though is inducing cows to calve early as the calf is born premature and must be put down it is something that seems far more calous than dehorning to me as a life is lost, however the mother of the calf if it had not been induced would have had to be culled so inducing is the lesser of two evils however better heat detection/cyst removal and syncronised mating with ciders can reduce the need for inducing.
Farming has many tough decisions that need to be made by farmers, it is not in a farmers interest to be malicious to cattle, which animal rights people gloss over. calving a cow in the rain on a muddy paddock at 2am with your hand stretched up to its cervix with the calving ropes positioning aroind the fetlocks on a breach birth seems like a prick of a job, but its satisfying seeing the slippery calf shake its head and open its little eyelashes under the flashlight.
