Animal, Vegetable, or E. O. Wilson

September 12, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Some of you reading this are farmers, I know.

The farmers amongst you will love to read a common-sense, objective and down-to-earth demolition of the mistaken claim that if we were all to be vegetarians, the Earth could accommodate more people.  All of you farmers must have had to defend against the accusation, at one time or another, I am sure, that by raising animals for slaughter, you violate animal rights.  I had to do that on occasion, but more about that after the introduction excerpted from the following post.

Animal, Vegetable, or E. O. Wilson

Posted at wattsupwiththat.com on September 11, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Buoyed by the equal parts of derision and support I received for writing in “I am So Tired Of Malthus” about how humans are better fed than at any time in history, I am foolishly but bravely venturing once again into the question of how we feed ourselves.

In a book excerpt in the February 2002 Scientific American entitled “The Bottleneck”, the noted ant entomologist Professor Edward O. Wilson put forward the familiar Malthusian argument that humans are about to run out of food. He said that we are currently getting wedged into a “bottleneck” of population versus resources. He warned of the dangers of “exponential growth” in population, and he averred that we will be squeezed mightily before the population levels off….(Full Story)

Quite a few years ago, when our youngest was attending Grade VI, one of his school buddies spent some time with him after school on our farm.  Later in the evening, his mother came to pick him up and had a cup of coffee with us.  She was properly attired, in Harrowsmith fashion, as it behooves an acreage-owner married to one of the bosses in one of the nearby chemical factories: knee-high leather boots, a nice, expensive woolen sweater  (probably bought but hand-knit), a knee-length lamb-skin coat, with the wool on the inside, and a nice woolen scarf (perhaps hand-knit by herself).

She did not want any cream in her coffee, as that would have interfered with her dietary regimen, which, she proudly exclaimed, strictly excluded all things not vegetarian.

We came to the subject of what we were producing on our farm.  “We produce sheep, more exactly, lambs, but our main crop is hay, the excess of which we sell to other livestock producers, while we use most of the hay for our flock of sheep,” I replied, “After all, we do need rather a lot of hay, given that we must feed our sheep for about 210 days of the year.”

She asked, “You produce the lambs for the wool?”  I explained that wool did not come off the lambs we sold but was taken off our ewes, while the lambs were shipped to the livestock auction as soon as they were the right weight, before they had enough wool worth the shearing.  That was not enough information, because she asked, “What are the lambs used for, breeding?” and I explained that virtually all of them were destined for human consumption, and perhaps only rarely would any have been used for breeding.

She grew visibly cool and somewhat silent.

I did a bit more explaining, after I felt that it was my turn to ask her questions.  “You have nice boots, real leather?”  Yes, they were.  “The sweater and the scarf you wear are real wool?” Yes, they were.  “That is not fake but real lambskin that was used for the making of your warm coat?”  Yes. it was real lambskin, and the coat was indeed comfortably warm.

I told her, “You have no problem with wearing animal products derived from animals that were produced on someone’s farm, produced for slaughter, but you won’t eat animal products, because you wish to save the lives of animals, on account that animals have a right to live.  Is it not a little bit incongruous to find fault with people who raise animals for slaughter and with people who do the slaughtering, skinning and butchering so that the raw material can be produced for the clothing you use to dress yourself with?”

She had no answer to that and changed the subject.  If I remember right, we discussed her dog, a great white Pyrenee, a livestock-guardian dog, traditionally used to protect sheep against predator attacks, sheep she did not have, but she claimed that her dog herded her chickens.

We talked about the problem we had with increasing predation on our sheep by the coyotes in the neighbourhood, and that soon we would have to buy a couple or three guardian dogs to keep our losses down.

She thought that killing coyotes was cruel and unjust, “The coyotes were here first.”  That is the wrong thing to say to a sheep farmer, but I patiently explained to her that our sheep were here a long time before the coyotes began to move in because we had started raising lunch, dinner and supper for them.

I wish I would then already have heard the story about the livestock-predation seminar and what had happened there, but I did not know it then, or I would have told it to her.

At the livestock-predation seminar, a woman from Greenpeace in the back row stood up and commented, “You farmers!  All you can think of is better methods for luring, trapping, snaring, poisoning and shooting coyotes.  Surely you could device and employ more humane methods for controlling their population, such as neutering them!”

A man stood up in the front row and responded, “Lady, you must understand.  We are worried about that the coyotes kill our sheep, not that the coyotes breed them.”

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