Kim Stallwood

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……..

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

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)

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

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.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Not quite Jack Sparrow but more like the drunken fool in Captain Pugwash.

Life in the Old Town is nothing if not interesting. For example, I chronicled over the last few months the growth of a group of five baby Herring gull chicks who I watched from the back of my house. We know one didn’t survive and as the other four have gone I presume they all made it. But we’ll never know for sure. From time to time, a fledged gull will sit on the same roof and an adult gull will be with her. It’s difficult to tell but I assume that’s one of the four with one of their parents. Most of the gulls are fledged now but there’s still the occasional one or two on rooftops around and about. Their unmistakable cry like a squeaky wheel is omnipresent. The babies will be recognisable through to next year because their plumage doesn’t become fully white until after their first birthday. The gulls still kick up a racket all day and night. They’re at their noisiest now but as we approach the autumn their numbers begin to decrease and all the hyper-activity of rearing a family diminishes. So, they quieten down but their cries are part of the audio soundtrack of living in the Old Town. Frankly, I love hearing them and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else now without their banter and chit chat to catch up on daily goings-on.

The Old Town comes into its own three times a year when it’s Jack in the Green in May, the Carnival in August and Bonfire Night in October. These phenomenal events are community driven and organised as well as fundraising events for local charities. Talk about the Big Society! David Cameron would learn a lesson or two from the big-hearted folks who live in the Old Town and its environs.

Anyway, we’ve just had Carnival Week, which is basically a traditional English seaside summer celebration with a busy programme of various activities. One of the highlights this year was the attempt to break the world record of the greatest number of people dressed as pirates in one place. Apparently the record was held by somewhere with an unpronounceable name on the European mainland with some 1,500 people. The good people of Hastings couldn’t have that and smashed the world record with more than 6,000 people dressed as pirates in one place.

Jamie is in the blue shirt. I felt sorry for the young actress who had to pick up and look at with interest a Sainsbury's pork pie at least nine times.

If that wasn’t enough excitement in one lifetime this week telly chef Jamie Oliver was in the Old Town filming an ad for Sainsbury’s, the supermarket company, which recently won an award from Compassion In World Farming for its policy in support of higher welfare systems for broiler (meat) chickens. I believe in acknowledging people like Jamie and company’s like Sainsbury’s when they take steps away from animal cruelty. Sure, I wish Jamie and Sainsbury’s would go vegan; however, they are no indications that this is going to happen in the foreseeable future. So, I believe, we thank them for the steps they’ve taken and encourage them to do more.

Anyway, Jamie and what seemed like a crew and extras (local residents) combined of more than one hundred plus loads of equipment packed into the small garden outside my home to film some of the ad. While trying to work from my home office I periodically went to the front of the house to take photos. My interest in such things is not necessarily the “glamour of show business” which, frankly, leaves me cold, but more to do with observing the organisation and effort that goes into producing a film albeit an ad for the telly. It was equally astonishing and frightening. All that expense for a telly ad?! There’s no telly in our house.  They’re evil machines that keep people stupid. I doubt whether I will ever see the ad, which is fine by me. Nonetheless, the experience was interesting if for no other reason than seeing a film production company behave like a monolith invading and then disappearing as quickly.

A telly series based in Hastings and filmed quite a bit here is Foyle’s War. (Carnival Week includes Foyle’s War Walks.) This is one of those British costume dramas which marry nostalgia and a not-too-challenging plot line. It is based around the character of Christopher Foyle, a Detective Chief Superintendent, and set during and after World War Two. It’s in stark contrast to where I used to live and the detective series filmed there! I’m speaking of Baltimore and Homicide: Life on the Streets. As interesting as it was to watch Jamie et al filming, it was nice to see them leave so that the Old Town and its residents, including the gulls, can have the place back to ourselves.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

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.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

With so much published I want to read I confess to reading often the end first. Conclusions quickly let you know what the rest of the article says and how the author is saying it. Then I decide if I want to bother with the rest of it. Take, for example, the New Scientist and its article, “Veggieworld: Why eating greens won’t save the planet.” Here’s how Bob Holmes concludes the cover feature.

Would people really accept pricey free-range beef and scrawny barnyard chickens perhaps once or twice a week? Certainly most do not today, opting for price and abundance over environmental impact. But change happens. Given the deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that will result if worldwide meat production continues to rise, some people are already choosing to eat less meat. And the message is definitely less, not none. For best results, meat should be medium-rare.

Reading this paragraph didn’t inspire me to want to read the rest. And, so, I didn’t. I quickly scanned it, which confirmed an expectation that it was too much to expect the New Scientist to publish an article that would have been a thoughtful consideration. There’s some nice graphics, however. What did you think?

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

The New York Times editorial, “A Humane Egg,” is so outstanding that it deserves to be reproduced in full.

The life of animals raised in confinement on industrial farms is slowly improving, thanks to pressure from consumers, animal rights advocates, farmers and legislators. In late June, a compromise was reached in Ohio that will gradually put an end to the tiny pens used for raising veal calves and holding pregnant sows, spaces so small the animals can barely move. In California last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law requiring that all whole eggs sold in the state conform to the provisions of Proposition 2, the humane farming law that was embraced by state voters in a landslide in 2008. By 2015, every whole egg sold in the state must come from a hen that is able to stretch her wings, standing or lying, without touching another bird or the edges of her cage. This requirement would at least relieve the worst of the production horrors that are common in the industry now. Since California does not produce all the eggs it eats, this new law will have a wider effect on the industry; every producer who hopes to sell eggs in the state must meet its regulations. Heartening as these developments are, there is also strong resistance from the food industry and from fake consumer-advocacy groups that are shilling for it. In fact, there is no justification, economic or otherwise, for the abusive practice of confining animals in spaces barely larger than the volume of their bodies. Animals with more space are healthier, and they are no less productive. Industrial confinement is cruel and senseless and will turn out to be, we hope, a relatively short-lived anomaly in modern farming.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

More sanctimonious and self-righteous justification for killing animals to eat them by Guardian food critic Jay Rayner. This time — and for the first time — he watches the animal he will later eat be killed. The animal in question is number 365, which happens to be the number of days in the year. This is lost on Rayner, however, who fails to acknowledge that commercial slaughterhouses throughout the world kill animals 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

What’s also brushed aside is that Rayner is visiting Fodder, a “unique food shop,” which is a charity that has part of its educational remit to help people who want to know how their food is produced. All well and good, you would think; but one of the farmers who raised 365 and others says, “No, I don’t think anybody should be forced to make the connection between animal and carcass, because that might put them off and that wouldn’t be in people’s interest.” Well, of course, we need to define whose interest. Meat and other animal products people eat are luxury items we can no longer afford from the perspective of human health, animal welfare and environmental protection. Most likely Rayner witnessed an efficient and clean slaughterhouse which paid attention to how it killed animals and dissected them. Now, Jay, go and visit the greatest number of commercial slaughterhouses you can to see how the meat you eat is truly produced.

This may question your simplistic ethical justifications: “And if the likes of me weren’t here to eat it, this animal would never have existed in the first place.” And your conclusion that it “brings a certain seriousness to what we are doing.” Clearly, not sufficiently enough, as taking the life of another for momentary hedonistic pleasure is difficult to justify in my mind.

You see it differently, however, as you conclude, “It is what it is, a matter of expediency.”

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

The agreement struck between The HSUS with Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and the Ohio Farm Bureau to stop the ballot initiative scheduled for this November which was to promote humane standards and prevent cruel factory farming practices is causing outrage in the state’s farming interests and raising questions by animal advocates. The core argument in support of the agreement, as made by Wayne Pacelle of The HSUS, is the

agreement in its collective form that constitutes the single biggest ever animal welfare package I’ve seen in our movement. It represents a pathway forward for much stronger animal welfare in a state that has lagged badly on this set of issues. All parties also recognize that it is not the end of the discussion, but the beginning.

The agreement achieves the following:

• A ban on veal crates by 2017, which is the same timing as the ballot measure.
• A ban on new gestation crates in the state after Dec. 31, 2010. Existing facilities are grandfathered, but must cease use of these crates within 15 years.
• A moratorium on permits for new battery cage confinement facilities for laying hens.
• A ban on strangulation of farm animals and mandatory humane euthanasia methods for sick or injured animals.
• A ban on the transport of downer cows for slaughter.
• Enactment of legislation establishing felony-level penalties for cockfighters.
• Enactment of legislation cracking down on puppy mills.
• Enactment of a ban on the acquisition of dangerous exotic animals as pets, such as primates, bears, lions, tigers, large constricting and venomous snakes, crocodiles and alligators.

David Cassuto, professor of law at Pace Law School, wonders if the deal is strong enough and gives too much away.

Compromise, by definition, is never ideal. Still, this agreement, wherein pig gestation crates can remain in use until 2025 and existing battery cage operations can remain in operation indefinitely, gives up a lot. A heartbreakingly large amount. Sometimes, not nearly enough is just not nearly good enough.

Whereas Erik Marcus thinks it’s a smart move.

In short, it’s a smart compromise for both sides. All things considered, HSUS would have been foolish to reject the offer that was on the table.

My take is that in the real world of politics when deals are struck between competing interests to find common ground to move forward finding the right compromise and agreeing to it is pivotal.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion as to whether this agreement compromises too little or too much. One encouraging sign, however, is reading the comments of agricultural interests who are condemning the agreement as a sell out suggests to me that in the long term this will be a significant and positive development for animal protection in Ohio and throughout the U.S.

Cliches abound in politics. The art of the possible. All politics is local. The devil is in the detail. And so on. Who wouldn’t want more gains from agricultural interests? But I wasn’t a member of the negotiating team. All I can do is comment and wonder what would have I done? Nonetheless, I think Wayne’s comments here are insightful and resonate well with me. 

As a movement, if we do not sit down with our adversaries and try to solve problems, we will never succeed. Instead, we will be wrapped up in an endless cycle of wins and losses and polarizing political campaigns. At times, we must pursue such campaigns when lawmakers or industry slam the door in our face and reject the common good. But, in the end, we need not only to change laws, but also to understand human nature and build on our shared concerns and values. That’s what happened yesterday in Ohio. Serious-minded dialogue with our traditional political adversaries occurred, and resulted in a good set of outcomes. Ultimately, we will need them to change and to view animals in a more sensitive way if we are going to achieve our goals. At the end of the day, our work is more about human behavior than animal behavior and more about solutions than political victories.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post