I found myself explaining my thoughts about this in detail to a friend recently. The trouble is, there’s a lot of explaining. And in the end, although I bring up some ideas which are based in reason, it’s a personal choice located in my particular view of the world. It’s not a religion and apart from animal cruelty issues I’m not seeking to convert anyone.
Sustainable farming
It seems to me that well designed sustainable farming techniques almost always involve animals. Two incredibly effective systems spring to mind as examples: Southern China and Grenoble area France.
The first is based on wet field rice, getting two or more harvests per year. But it’s far more complex than that. The population of China tripled in the period from the beginning of the Ming to the middle of the Qing dynasties (1368 to 1750), and it did so without major violence or famine in part because every single calorie was extracted from the available land. It was said that when a family had 11 acres of land they were rich, because they could lease it to two other families and live off the rents.
Our modern system, which I call broad acre monoculture farming, relies on in excess of 1 calorie of inputs (in the form of oil) for every calorie of food produced. Worse, it effectively reduces the soil to a simple hydroponic carrier medium, rather than a biologically and physically complex structure. The result is actually less total food output per acre than the zero input sustainable methods. 11 acres of kansas wheatfield would not come close to supporting the food needs of three families. But there is a reason modern techniques have florished and it has to do with economics. A single farmer can raise crops or animals on many acres using fertilizers, pesticides, and tractors. It takes the daily work of at least two whole families to farm even 11 acres by traditional methods, so it’s just not a viable way of earning a living.
Personally I think we should be learning from sustainable farmers, and trying to integrate their approach with the advantages we can gain from technology. The French high farms practised crop rotation, they raised seeds under cloches early in spring, they made effective use of every idea and every resource to get more and more varied production from their land. We have found out a lot about biology, mechanics, and even chemistry which can help us, but we have had the arrogance to forget a great deal too. By the way one of the main things we’ve forgotten is that the health of a farm is the health of the soil.
Anyway I’m getting way off track here – the point I wanted to make is that there is no way to get the most out of a sustainable farming environment without domesticated animals. Every pond should have fish. Pigs plow and manure as they clean up roots and scraps which would otherwise be wasted. Cows and goats turn fallow or marginal grasses into essential protein, both from milk and flesh. Then there are chickens, ducks, bees, silkworms, and more.
Ecology and Symbiosis
Humanity has a death grip on the throat of the world’s environment. Our waste, or energy use, or agriculture, our habitation is the dominant factor in every ecosystem excepting the few wilderness areas we have either not yet exploited or have chosen to keep apart. So animals don’t exist, at least in the longer term, except under the conditions we allow. For that reason it is quite possible to say “we will not kill animals for food”, but only if we also say “few or no animals will live.”
I don’t think this is necessary or desirable. There is a model of inter-species cooperation which we can use to think about this: symbiosis. Ants may farm aphids. Sharks get along with pilot-fish. We have such a symbiosis with our domesticated animals right now: sheep, cows, chickens and so on could not live without us and while we might find alternative foods we have chosen to live with and on them.
The question is then whether it is better for cows, say, to exist as only a few specimens in zoos or as a large population of domesticated animals. I think the answer depends very much on how they are treated. In the west, by and large, the answer for all our domesticated food animals is: abominably. Throughout their lives feedlot and battery animals suffer, and then they suffer worse on their way to and at the abbatoirs. Our farming methods for livestock are incredibly inefficient, unsustainable, unhealthy, and cruel.
Living with
rather than living on
So these two ideas, sustainable farming and symbiosis, clearly go together. We need to create an environment which is rich, sustainable, and productive. I think this will involve domesticated animals, but not the feed lots of today. I think it can be done without much cruelty. We and our symbiotic species partners, and the ecology we create, are one whole and worthwhile part of the world.
By the way we need, desperately, to have access to wilderness. I think we need this for our psyche as much as for the depth of species diversity it retains. In the end we will have to limit our population growth and I hope we do so while there is still somewhere to be alone and to allow nature to be without our influence.
Agribusiness
When I first stopped eating meat I continued to eat fish. It was 25 years ago and wild fish stocks seemed in need of management and cooperation rather than being in danger of complete collapse. I was conscious of the cruelty of battery chickens, and believed that the west lived on an untenable diet of corn-fed beef. United Fruit had proven that agribusiness disregarded people as much as it did animals. Organic and cruelty free meat production was unknown.
Since that time I have kept pigs and goats, and I have seen that when kept humanely they have a great deal more personality and intelligence than is generally understood. Meat eaters who are horrified that dogs are kept for food are guilty of a double standard, I think, or at least a convenient blindness. Chickens really are pretty stupid, though!
But the rich eat so much meat. Doing this is like our carbon footprint – it insists that others exercise a restraint that we will not. In most people’s western diet meat consumption could be cut by three quarters with benefits to both health and taste. Say for example, that half main meals had little or no meat component and that in the other half had half as much meat as at present. Because there’s no doubt that food grown ethically would be more expensive. We live in an entirely unreal food chain, supported only by the availability of plentiful cheap oil. Growing food in a mixed, sustainable, small scale, integrated, and organic farming environment would once again make food a significant cost of life, especially in terms of labour.
The thing is that we really have no choice. Current farming techniques really are unsustainable, simply from their energy and environmental costs. On a world scale, we must as a species find a stable population and a sustainable agriculture. If this cannot be achieved the population will one way or another contract to a point the environment and farming methods can support.
Ethical consumption
So here is a checklist of what I believe is wrong or unsustainable:
- Broadacre monoculture of cereals, with high fertiliser and pesticide input. Increasingly this is being exacerbated by the use of GMO varieties.
- Cruelty in feed lot farming and the abattoir system.
- Energy cost of grain fed beef, and health implications of required antibiotic and hormone regime this method entails.
- Energy, environment, and production inefficiency implications of western diet.
- Overfishing of most wild fish populations.
In my view we should be heading toward the creation of a sustainable and rich human ecosystem which has mixed organic farming, including animals, at its heart. Humans and animals are symbiotes in such a system. By the way the abattoir system needs a major overhaul. I don’t see any reason that it should be undesirable to kill and process animals on-farm in a healthy way.
We have tried to section away important parts of life, in the west. This ends with “commuters” living and working in glass boxes protected from birth, death, food, waste, and nature. When we can integrate the whole of our lives in an organic way we will be far more at peace with ourselves, I think.
So how to get there? Vegetarianism is a tactic for raising consciousness about food and consumption, to my mind. It’s not especially desirable as an aim in itself because it implies either blindness to the reality of human influence in the world or else an animal-free future. But it is a way to break free of the unwise, cruel, big-agribusiness model of growing food.
Other important ideas include buying organic, avoiding GMOs, buying locally grown produce, cooking at home, and buying unprocessed food in place of prepared and packaged.