The knackerman: the toughest job in British farming

Probably the structure of the industry: American farms are (as I understand it) not generally family affairs and are run by big companies. In the UK there's still a heavily feudal element in terms of who owns the land, with many tenant farmers etc who won't have press offices and the like. Willing to bet it is that.

And “Knacker” is also a sausage because it “knacks” when you break it in half. Knack in German has the meaning snap or crack.

>not generally family affairs

You're absolutely right in that most of the food we eat in the US is grown on a relatively small number of huge commercial farms, but interestingly enough about 80% of the ~2 million farms in the US are classified as small, which means they earn less than $350k annual revenue. That's 1.8 million small farms in the US, by comparison there are ~200,000 farms total in the UK. It's just a numbers game, there are vastly more farms in the US than the UK.

Keep in mind, many of these small farms are __very__ small, half of them generate less than $10k annual revenue and 80% earn less than $100k. At that scale they can't compete on price, so they usually focus on the quality of what they grow, and for that to work you have to market your crop which means farmers markerts, facebook, youtube and any other way they can think of to get their product out there.

Also at the $10k or less annual revenue level (about 1 million farms), often the the farm is only nominally a business and in practice it's closer to a hobby or lifestyle. I live in a semi-rural area that's close to a high-income metro and there's always been a constant stream of people retiring from city life to go live in the "country" and farm, in most cases they have savings or other income and only sell their produce to offset some of the cost of production or just because they are proud of their produce.

This is not how my Humane Society dealt with putting down a friend of mine's dog.

I've sadily had be in the room where a few animals were put down over my life.

The pricy vet drug was great. My dog felt no pain. Died in a millisecond. I died a bit that day too. The worse pain I have ever felt was over a pet.

My point is my Humane Society used a drug that slowly killed the animal. The animal did not look content. She looked at me, like "What's going on?". It wasen't my animal, but I felt it's misery. The only reason I was there is the owner couldn't handle the prolonged death. It was a good 8 plus minutes of dying.

My point is I don't know if the Humane Society purposely used a drug that didn't kill the animal immediately so the family could spend time with a dying pet. I don't know why they didn't use a drug that would stop the heart completely?

The horrid reason these dogs were put down was due to Section 8 housing laws. A busybody in the complex didn't like my friend who fell on hard times, and was trying to get her to move in abusive verbal ways. This horrid human just didn't like my friend, and had pull at the housing complex. She turned the dogs into Sec. 8 authorities for being a few pounds over 25. My friend put the dogs down. I still recall her asking me if by putting the dogs down was she being egocentric. I didn't say anything because she was literally living in a beach parking lot a few weeks before.

(Sorry about going on, and on. The death of any animal just tears me to pieces. Oh yea, I looked at the 42 page Section 8 lease. Yes---42 pages of "You can't do this, and you can't do that." My main point was I feel the Humane Society should use the most effective, fast acting, drugs available when they put an animal down.)