i see how you think that is a good answer to the facts i mentioned, but it is merely a glib one. a) the presence of predators would be a qualifier to how many of the stock throve, not if they COULD do so, Australia and Papua both have predators and wild cattle. and b) . . . many free roaming predators capable of killing large livestock, around the majority of humanities farmlands, are there?. dogs, and that would be about all. i don’t think you understand how fecund livestock is. nor how dangerous wild cattle grow in one generation
wasn’t playing on anything at all, especially not sympathy for farmers. and the USA, which i guess is your ‘here’ doesn’t raise the majority of domestic animals in the world, nor was i talking about exclusively its experience. so, pretty much you were talking entirely to a strawman you built, not me. fail post failed…
however, my point about the farmers holds even truer if it is corporations, of course, they would instantly destroy all the stock animals once the silly veggies made the stock worthless, and while the human farmers would feel bad bout it, the corporations would feel nothing.
Cattle and other animals can defend themselves pretty well, against most predators. The horns and hooves are not just fashion statements. But cows are bad at jumping, and typically do not avoid humans, except to sort of casually move away. When we do a cattle drive, it mostly involves getting close enough to the herd to invade their personal space, and on the opposite side from where you want them to go. Then, as they start easing away from you, you just follow.
Elk are completely different, and more representative of wild animals in general. They are very smart, very agile and fast, If they smell, see, or hear you, they are are gone.
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mate. i probably know as much about stock as you, Kiwi farming family, been around livestock for fifty years, milked 350 cows twice day for six years. And from your comment, i clearly have had experience of wild cattle that you have not, been chased by wild cattle that were in a State forest in Northland here, that were trying to kill me, and would have done if i had not been able to get into the sea and swim away. And in Aussie, wild cattle are considered one of the most dangerous things in the bush.
the beast that chased me down a bush clad hill and into the sea, had no trouble at all jumping down the hill. moved so quick, i am not sure to this day if it was bull or heifer, if i had waited to see, i would be dead.
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Are you under the impression that – poof! – on a specific date at midnight all human consumption of animals will cease and now whatever will we do with all those animals?
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We do not have that many wild cattle here. This year we did have a bull show up in the herd, and he was pretty uncooperative. Surly, and I did not want to get very close. I did put the word “typically” in my statement, because obviously people do get gored and trampled. But clearly the wild cattle thing is something that you have more experience about than I. It also looks from a little wikipedia-fu that where you are, some of the wild cattle are Banteng, or Banteng/Bos hybrids. All of ours our Bos Taurus, Hereford and Limosin. I did see that the Banteng are considered a much more aggressive breed than my Herefords. I look forward to doing some research to see the relative time of domestication of the Banteng and Bos Taurus. Are those the wild ones that you have experienced?
If you read your own post, you spend quite a lot of time doing more or less the same thing only the other way round. Your first paragraph makes a lot of blanket statements unsupported by evidence.
You may be correct in what you say, but you are (unconsciously?) espousing an ideology.
True.
Hell for vegetarians, on the other hand, is Italy. Especially around Bologna and Parma, where the local religion is the worship of pork in various forms. Primo Levi wrote that his father was unable to resist the lure of Parma ham.
An American journalist was posted to Bologna a few years back and did a piece on the impossibility of explaining vegetarianism to the Bolognese. On one occasion she thought that she had got across to the waiter that she wanted pasta with cheese sauce and that was it. It came with lardons “to give it a bit of flavour”.
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I strongly suspect that I’m only able to not be a vegetarian because I deliberately don’t think about the moral implications.
You see, I don’t believe in human exceptionalism. That is, I admit that our problem-solving and language centers are more developed than other animals, but I give animals credit for having emotions, memories, drives, friendship and pretty much everything else we credit to humans except a certain level of intelligence.
I also think that the value of a human life is completely unrelated to the intelligence of the person. For example, I think that the ideas of euthanization or sterilization of less intelligent people are thoroughly abhorrent concepts.
Now, at an abstract level, I know that “humans are just more intelligent animals” and “less intelligent humans aren’t okay to kill, but animals are” aren’t a consistent viewpoint. However, I haven’t had that gut-level realization that animals are people, and I’m trying not to, because, frankly, I like eating meat, and switching to a vegetarian diet would be annoying.
So I’ll just stop thinking about that and let the doublethink take over so that I can go back to being happy about eating meat again.
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Those are Aurochs, the extinct wild ancestor of modern zebu and taurine cattle. The Nazis tried to resurrect the species, leading to a small group of animals that: “The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could,” Gow told the Guardian this week. “They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not a lot of fun at all.”
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Aurochs. Pretty though. I bet they were damn tough! Uh… before we wiped 'em out.
Here in Texas, cattle ranchers who care about such things (like not getting killed by their own livestock) prefer longhorns if they want an heirloom breed. In my home county, longhorns are visible from a lot of roadways and are a marker, a kind of status symbol that shows the rancher has quite a large chunk of land, and the mountain of money it takes to purchase longhorns, whose horns easily span 5 feet (something like 1.5 meters) tip to tip at maturity.
The longhorns I have met and fed and petted are docile in the extreme. Good news, since a quick toss of their heads will knock a grown man flat.
Tough as nails. Give birth unassisted unlike modern cattle breeds according to some friends who keep a few on their land for the ag exemption. Longhorns can take the heat (today’s high 12 August will be 102*F [~39C] and it’s been this hot for at least 3 weeks here). Can survive on minimal water, sparse browse…
… and are excellent defenders against the usual varmints ranchers detest: coyotes, wolves, mountain lions. They do actually use their horns.
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Interestingly enough it was written just as the techniques of “The Green Revolution” were really starting to take hold.
Global food scarcity is not the same problem it was in the early 70’s. Periodic famines in countries such as China and India are largely a thing of the past. Both countries are now net food exporters. The real issue these days is less food production as it is food distribution or more accurately technology distribution (the ability to enact Green Revolution methods)
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The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
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Ahhhh… CAFOs. Confined Animal Feeding Operations.
This is the price Americans pay for “cheap” meat. Apart from the steroids, the antibiotics, the questionably clean practices inside American slaughterhouses, CAFOs are heavy tolls on the water and air of areas they occupy. CAFOs are located commonly near railways and highways, the better for convenient transport, and to isolate them from residential areas (only the poor people living in the worst housing in town deserve to breathe the bad odors and listen to the noise). Heaven forfend some bovine illness sweeping through such a crowded and totally unnaturally numerous confined collection of cattle.
I unplugged from this kind of system when turned my back on meat-eating in 1981. No regrets. It’s not for everybody and I don’t preach. But I have well and truly withdrawn my consent and participation re CAFOs.
Barbara Kingsolver made an argument for the return to sanity in our food systems years ago with her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and it’s got meat recipes, vegetable recipes, and some fact-based insider perspectives on meat production in the U.S. I learned plenty. She narrates her own unabridged audio book version, if you find yourself in a situation where a printed book isn’t going to fit into your life/schedule. Funny and wise and useful. Strongly recommended.
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/
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I agree with this. It is all a very difficult grey area ethically. Why do we befriend dogs and eat pigs, which are at least equally intelligent?
The truth is that our rulers, even the supposedly democratic ones, do treat the majority of human beings as little more than cattle. When Bush decided to invade Iraq he knew that hundreds of thousands of people would die, at one level, but I’m sure that at another he thought about it much as he thought about pork chops - he vaguely knew pigs were involved somewhere, just as he vaguely knew that bombs killed people, but it was all a bit abstract*. It all comes down to the view quoted, among others, by Stalin, that one death is a tragedy but the death of thousands is statistics.
I am sure that my own view is inadequate and open to criticism, but it’s this; that it is OK to eat animals provided that, left to themselves in the wild, their numbers would be limited by predation. We’re simply a top level predator. We owe it to those animals to give them a life which minimises suffering (yes, I am a bit Buddhist) and that rules out intensive animal farming - but the fate of most of the world’s wild piglets and chicks is to be eaten, and from their point of view it makes little difference if it is us or a member of the felidae.
Or, to put it another way, we can call ourselves human if we do our best to look after ecosystems, but we should not be trying too hard to change the shape of the food pyramid.
A complete conversion to vegetarianism would result in a reduction in biological diversity, and probably have dramatic effects on bird and insect species, so vegetarianism per se is not necessarily going to be ecologically beneficial. But, to repeat myself yet again on this thread, I don’t think there should be any place for intensive animal farming, any more than most of the human population should be kept in concentration camps. And the achieve that, people need to be weaned off the idea that when it comes to meat, quantity is good.
At one time my company used to put up US visitors in a small country hotel adjacent to a farm. One of our frequent visitors was what we secretly classified as a “nice Texan” - from Austin, perhaps naturally.
Another visitor, from Chicago, complained about the size of the steak at dinner. At which point the Texan marched him over to the window, pointed to the field next door and said “Look, those are the cows that make this beef. No antibiotics, no soya. This is beef from happy cows, and you can taste it!”
*During WW1 Haig, the architect of many British massacres, refused to visit the wounded in hospital in case it affected his judgement. Both Stalin and Hitler isolated themselves from the actual effects of the war.
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“Eating meat is cruel but all right; incidentally, people that were responsible for the deaths of millions in ww2 isolated themselves from the reality of it” - for someone that says meat-eating is all right, you sure paint a bleak picture of it.
As for ecosystems, you’re headed straight for a case of naturalistic fallacy with that one. Animal behavior is replete with rape, cannibalism, killing the young of your own species, etc things we consider deeply morally wrong. That a certain behavior is prevalent among wild animals says nothing about the morality of said behavior.
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I like longhorns as well. never have owned one, though. My wife is a double UT grad, so she has longhorn symbology everywhere.
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