This is a collection of investigative reports I published in The Animals' Agenda.
My Animals and Society Institute colleague Bee Friedlander remembers The Animals’ Agenda magazine and gives an update on its future. “The magazines take up quite a bit of room on a bookshelf in my office,” Bee writes, “but I keep them there as a constant reminder that a valuable resource to the animal advocacy community needs to be inventoried, digitalized, and indexed.”
So it’s for good reason that expanding the availability of the magazine has been on my agenda of things to do. Enter Carolyn Smith, a long-time animal advocate who has fond memories of Agenda, and who has been looking for a volunteer opportunity with an animal organization near her home in Ann Arbor. She’s a former librarian and has both edited and indexed books. When I showed her the magazines, she immediately agreed to take on the project.
As the magazine’s last editor I’m thrilled to learn that it will become available at ASI’s Web site. Meanwhile, the two anthologies of articles I published from The Animals’ Agenda are still available from Lantern.
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Given it requires the suffering and slaughter of billions of animals worldwide, it’s difficult to understand how any animal food can be called any kind of extravagance let alone a benign one. Anyway, in today’s Guardian columnist George Monbiot discusses a new book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance, by Simon Fairlie.
I admit to not being previously aware of this book and will look for it. Monbiot says with what must be the most tiresome of cliches that Fairlie “butchers a herd of sacred cows.” Apparently, this includes the amount of water required to produce a kilo of beef and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s claim that livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Monbiot declares early on in his article that “I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.”
For one of the country’s leading investigative reporters who specialises in covering the environment, this is an astonishing comment to make. However much anyone tries to manufacture the information and massage the facts at the end of the day raising animals to produce food is inefficient, uneconomic and unhealthy for the animals, the people who eat them and the environment. And then there’s the ethical argument……..
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The abstract (in full below) of the paper, Diet and the environment: does what you eat matter? published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concludes that it does matter what you eat.
Food demand influences agricultural production. Modern agricultural practices have resulted in polluted soil, air, and water; eroded soil; dependence on imported oil; and loss of biodiversity. The goal of this research was to compare the environmental effect of a vegetarian and nonvegetarian diet in California in terms of agricultural production inputs, including pesticides and fertilizers, water, and energy used to produce commodities. The working assumption was that a greater number and amount of inputs were associated with a greater environmental effect. The literature supported this notion. To accomplish this goal, dietary preferences were quantified with the Adventist Health Study, and California state agricultural data were collected and applied to state commodity production statistics. These data were used to calculate different dietary consumption patterns and indexes to compare the environmental effect associated with dietary preference. Results show that, for the combined differential production of 11 food items for which consumption differs among vegetarians and nonvegetarians, the nonvegetarian diet required 2.9 times more water, 2.5 times more primary energy, 13 times more fertilizer, and 1.4 times more pesticides than did the nonvegetarian diet. The greatest contribution to the differences came from the consumption of beef in the diet. We found that a nonvegetarian diet exacts a higher cost on the environment relative to a vegetarian diet. From an environmental perspective, what a person chooses to eat makes a difference. (emphasis added)
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Will Self nails it perfectly.
Supermarkets are the abattoirs of capitalism and we are but so many cattle, driven along brightly lit aisle after aisle until our credit is electrocuted.
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Sociologist Anthony Giddens writes about the Catalan Parliament’s recent ban to outlaw bullfights and the British Government’s recent ban on hunting.
Whilst short-term political manoeuvring is part of any explanation of the timing of such bans, for sociologists there has been a discernible long-term modern trend or social process towards the appreciation and conservation of nature and increasing concern with the welfare of animals. Modern cultures are generally animal welfare cultures. From the sixteenth century onwards, but gathering pace during eighteenth-century industrialization and nineteenth-century urbanization, as more people became less directly involved in working with animals in agriculture, a more detached view of human–animal relations emerged that spread across social groups and classes. With the growth in power of the modern state and its monopolization of the means of violence also came a revulsion at the use of violence against both humans and animals so that previously enjoyable animal ‘sports’ came to be re-classified as just so many instances of intolerable cruelty. Gradually, animals became the subject of increasing moral concern and any social practices which harmed or injured them were called into question. Similarly, the mass slaughter of animals for food had to be hidden out of sight behind the scenes of everyday life. Adopting this long-term perspective helps us to better understand why we remain so much more disturbed by animal cruelty than people were in previous times. But whether that makes us ‘better people’ is an entirely different matter.
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Joanna Blythman writing in The Daily Telegraph.
Cloning is predicated on extreme animal suffering. Cloned food brings no additional nutritional benefits for human health, and insufficient research has been done to say with any authority that it presents no risks. As with genetically modified food, cloning is a standard-bearer for the increasingly dysfunctional, hi-tech agri-business system that has gripped farming for half a century, a system obsessed with churning out more food, faster, irrespective of the damage done to animals, human health and the environment.
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The elephant enclosure was extensive.
I made my first visit to Howletts earlier this week and will only briefly comment on it here. This is because I also want to visit soon Port Lympne. Both Howletts and Port Lympne are run by the Aspinall Foundation and was established by John Aspinall in 1957. His son, Damian, continues his father’s work. The foundation’s objectives are:
- To halt the extinction of rare and endangered species in the wild
- To continue to provide the most natural environment possible for the animals in both parks
- To re-introduce these animals back to their wild habitat where this is possible
- To continue to be world leaders in animal husbandry and breeding
- To be a partner and catalyst to conservation efforts at home and abroad
- Increasing public understanding of animals and their welfare and the issues involved in their conservation
- To manage wilderness areas
- To develop sustainable conservation-minded activities which provide economic benefits on a local and national scale.
There are many positive things to say about Howletts and the way in which the animals are kept; however, the visit raised many issues of concern which I want to consider further and, after visiting Port Lympne, I want to write a more thoughtful post than this brief mention. These issues of concern are not directly to do with the animals’ welfare as they appear to be very well looked after but more about the challenge of an organisation like the Aspinall Foundation (and others) in achieving their objectives.
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What does John Thompson mean by “intellectual horticulture“?
It seemed like intellectual horticulture. Seeds of knowledge planted in fertile minds were given an opportunity to germinate in a nourishing environment. Like plants that open their flowers to the wind, seeds from their work at the Fellowship will spread to and grow in other minds. Wherever the careers of these scholars take them that knowledge, and the spirit of active inquiry, will continue advancing our understanding of the human-animal relationship.
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