Never mind the price - pity the animal

MEAT factories are cutting the price they pay sheep farmers for lamb. This, we are told, is forcing sheep farmers out of business.

Where should one’s sympathies lie? With the sheep farmer who, after all, is only trying to make a living by producing what the market demands, or with the meat factories, who are trying to run a profitable business?

Or should our sympathies lie with the young lambs brought into the world only to be slaughtered weeks later, when their lives are just beginning? Should we also, perhaps, have just a little sympathy with the broiler chicken that lives a mere 41 days in a crowded, windowless shed before being carted off to the slaughterhouse?

And the pig that never sees daylight in its six-month existence? I know where my sympathies lie.

Gerry Boland

Keadue

Co Roscommon