if we hate beak cutting, then why horn burning....

Kid goat, amazing meat. Sylvie Lesvesque, an amazing woman. We met at her farm in 2009 at Les Elevages du Sud in St-Denis Kamouraska. What is most important to me was, as we see in this photo, as cute and almost religious as they are, that they have horns. Most producers of goats burn the horns off when they are young. I once watched the process and wondered if it was really necessary. I am always told it is because the animals are aggressive and tend to hurt each other; a lot of punctures, and wounds and deaths. I began thinking of this logic when applied to tail docking in pigs and beak cutting in chickens. Deduction? Space. Because every farm I have visited who do not burn their goat`s horns have told me that there is perhaps one incident every decade. And looking around their herds, I realized that they do strike, they do hit, that that is their nature, but the difference was indeed a lot of space. If we ask for ethics in pigs and chickens, then it is for one and for all....