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Quickly sick
Because the animals are so close
together, they get ill very fast. The diseases spread very rapeatly. If
there are also many farmers nearby, viruses can spread over a big
area. Most diseases are fatal for the animals, but there are also diseases
that only exhaust the animals. Because the farmer don't want to lose his
animal, he will use antibiotics The diseases
usuraly are a disaster for the farmer, because he loses his income. Meat
of diseased animals can be dangerous for people to eat . They can get sick
or die.
What's
on this page?
Pigs
Cows
Chickens
Fish
The mad cow
decease
Swine
fever
Why
can't this be stopped?
Pigs
The pig was the most kept
animal in The Netherlands. If you counted all the pigs in The Netherlands
before the swine fever epidemic, there were about 15 000 000 pigs. That's
as many as the whole Dutch popularity ! Esspecially in the south of The
Netherlands there were lots of farmers who kept pigs, but because
the government wants to spread the pigs, there are more and more farmers
with pigs comming to the north and east of The Netherlands. Because it
isn't a big animals and because it is an animal which produces a lot of
meat, the pig is a favorite animal for the farmer. 
Cows
The cow is much bigger then the
pig, so it is much harder to keep a cow. You can keep cows for 2 reasons:
for their milk and for their meat. You have to have more place for cows
then for pigs. Moreover, you have to make the cows give milk and that's
harder then it seems. To get the cows give as much milk as possible, the
calf has to be taken away from the mother as soon as possible and you have
to feed it with imitation milk. That's bad for the calf, because it needs
the milk which the mother produces in the first weeks. This kind of milk
is called 'beestings'. If the calf doesn't get the beestings, it 'll not
grows very fast.
Chickens
Chickens are easy to keep and
they don't take much space. You can keep about 25 (!) chickens on just
1 square meter! In The Netherlands, chickens are the animals
most kept in the bio-industry. A well known sight of a chicken is that
in a battery. In The Netherlands 95% of all the egg laying chickens
is also a battery chicken. A chicken is in a battery during between 16
and 19 months and she lays between 250 and 300 eggs in a year. The chickens
which are kept for their meat have a much shorter live: They live between
48 and 60 days and their weight is after the fattening about 1,6 kilos.
A farmer earns a lot of money if he keeps chickens.
Fish
Fish are also found in the bio-industry.
They swim in water, like all fish, but they haven't got enough space to
swim naturally. Fish which are bred, are for dinner most of the time, but
sometimes they are also kept for breeding. This is useful for people who
have got an aquarium, because they can have rear species of fish in their
own aquarium. If this fish comes out of the bio-industry, it isn't sure
if it is going to have a better live. Most of the people who have
aquariums, have to many fish in their aquarium.
The mad cow
disease.
This disease
is mostly known as BSE. The disease
became known because the disease occurred in England in 1997. Farmers in
England couldn't transport their cattle anymore, because transport might
spread the disease. Buyers of meat from England panicked. Many people were
affraid they had eaten meat from a mad cow. The real problem came when
scientists thought there could be a relationship between BSE and a human
illness called Creutzveldt Jacob.
BSE normally is a pig sickness.
Because cows had eaten offal it spread among cows too. Cows with BSE behave
really weird. That's why the sickness is called mad cow disease.
Swine
fever
Swine fever is a real unpleassant
disease which can spread very fast. This can occurre because the trucks
which transports the animals weren't cleaned thoroughly enough. Some
time ago in the south of The Netherlands, this disease was common. For
most of the farmers This means their animals had to die and they had no
income anymore. Farmers thougth it was terrible because there was
a big change their pigs were sick too. It was also emotional for the farmers
to walk through their empty sty and see that their 'pets' weren't
there anymore.
Why
can't this be stopped?
Bacteria that cause these illnesses
are very difficult to destroy if at all. They have become resistant for
many pesticides. A farmer can't stop a disease in this way, because the
pesticides don't work. He can only hope the disease won't visit his farm.
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