It seems to be popular once again to claim the environmental
and ethical benefits benefits of meat eating. This morning I find myself
reading Mike Brown on the poor long suffering mice that vegetarians kill. http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/ordering-vegetarian-meal-there-s-more-animal-blood-your-hands.
And how livestock on Australia’s otherwise “unusable” rangelands is a good thing.
Really, I wonder if these people have thought through what
they are arguing? Maybe Mike hasn’t been to outback SA or Qld, so he hasn’t
seen the devastation caused by sheep and cattle grazing. Tim Flannery has had
an extensive go at sheep farming being the major source of trashing the SA
landscape. He also argues that habitat clearance and food competition by sheep
has had more impact on small mammals than predation by cats. And we know
everyone loves to bag out cats as the environmental scourge of the nation. Phenomenal
amounts of inland Qld are bare paddocks with cow prints in the dust. Then you
can wander into far northern Australia, where feral cows, pigs, horses, buffalo
and donkeys run amok. And even those still within the confines of stations, well,
those stations don’t look like pristine habitat anymore do they? Northern
Australia is currently undergoing a mass extinction of small and medium sized
mammals similar to that which has already occurred over central Australia and
groups like Australian Wildlife Conservancy have a particular focus on the
north for this reason and rehabilitate former stations. Livestock animals clear
vegetation, spread weeds, trash waterways, spread diseases, compete for food
with native animals, their hooves disturb our fragile topsoils and if you are
worried about their health as well, they aren’t the fattest and happiest
looking animals, because it’s still a bloody harsh environment out there. Rangeland grazing remains hugely problematic
.
Then there’s the carry on about all the negative effects of
grain farming. Now, I’m not going to defend mass grain farming as being a
wonderful thing. But, since when did meat eaters stop eating grains? It’s not
the sole province of vegetarians. That sausage or hamburger needed some grains,
as did the bun you ate it in. Have some pasta with your bolognaise? Some rice
with your beef korma? Aside from this ridiculous omission, I think you might
notice that not eating meat correlates with more consumption of vegetables,
legumes, pulses, nuts and seeds, not grains. And all those poor
anthropomorphised mice. Mice are a pest animal that are killed. Sheep and
cattle are pest animals that are bred, then killed. And how cute are little
lambies? Does that interfere with your enjoyment of Sunday roast? I don’t think
so.
Arguments against ethical choices so often seem to invoke a
pointless slippery slope. Yes, it sux that mice are poisoned. Does that somehow
delegitimise any attempt at more ethical and environmentally sustainable
eating? Well, no. It seems to be expected that once you take an ethical stance,
you have to live up to everyone’s interpretation of every possible related
issue. What about the poor lettuces???? Some people would have us all be
breatharians for making the slightest objection to their comfort zones. But
actually, you don’t have to be. It’s ok to draw lines of what you consider reasonable
for you, your situation, your ethics and the environment. Eating a few grains
does not devalue not eating hooved animals totally unsuitable for grazing the
Australian environment. Animals which are still rounded up using helicopters,
transported via roads, contributing their own share of carbon emissions, then
slaughtered in those rather horrible things called abattoirs.
I’m hardly the strident vegan I was in my youth. Mike does
have a point about kangaroos. Kangaroos are culled across Australia and dumped
in pits. Most of the roo that is used is exported or turned into pet food. Ok,
so pets have a rather large environmental impact and sustainable pet food is a
good thing, but we really are killing a lot of animals for little return here.
When done according to the RSPCA approved guidelines, kangaroo harvesting is
humane and sustainable. Then there are emus. We cull them as pests as well, when
we should really consider them a suitable source of meat for Australian
conditions. Then there are all the feral rabbits, goats, camel and buffalo. We
already kill them. We should actually use them instead of growing still more
animals to eat. If we are going to eat meat, hoofed animals should be on the
way out even when they are range grown, let alone intensive animal farming.
People need to get over the idea of eating Skippy. If you can eat Babe, Peppa
and Clarabelle, what’s the difference?
