I want to conduct an experiment. I’ve tried it at home and reckon it’s ready for a bigger venue. The Sydney Opera House would do. Or perhaps the Louisiana Superdome. I want a huge audience and plenty of space in front of the stage. People with sensitive ears be warned, there will be opera. I need divas. I want Wagner and cleavage and buxom plaited blondes.
I want helicopters and Robert Duvall (without the napalm). There will be a monster flower garden planted in front of the stage and when the time comes to bond the divas with their bouquets, an army of florists will prowl the garden. They’ll be picking, snipping and binding the most exquisite and beautiful of the freshest opening blooms.
Here’s what would not happen at my opera.
People would not rush to disarm the florists. There would be no mass walkout. Newspaper editors and blogs would not be flooded with angry missives. The event would garner praise dependent entirely on the quality of the performance, with hopefully a little modest mention for my floral adornments!
At this point, you may be wondering about the point of my experiment. Easy. Picture the same event, but with a veritable Noah’s Ark of a zoological garden instead of a flower garden. Picture the heads being picked and snipped coming from animals of many sizes and kinds. Now you would see chaos. You would see rage. There would be gnashing of teeth. Placid gentle opera buffs would turn into avenging grunting Rambos.
Why the difference?
Plants don’t feel pain.
Over the years I’ve lost count of the number of meat eaters who, when clearly on the losing end of the ethical argument, burst into the “but carrots have feelings” chorus. The latest in this sequence is the Telegraph‘s Miranda Devine in a comment seemingly prompted by the vegetarian habits of former High Court Justice, Michael Kirby.
Miranda states as though it’s a fact that scientists have discovered that “plants have feelings”. It isn’t. They haven’t.
But would it even matter to the argument if were true? Not in the slightest.
Now, like me, Miranda has a maths degree. But even for those readers who don’t, the following should feel familiar from high school. Let’s assume that plants do have feelings. Let X be some quantity of plants in our diet. If we replace those plants with meat having equivalent caloric value, then the animals concerned would need to eat some quantity Y of plants. It’s easily shown that that Y is bigger than X. So, which diet reduces both plant and animal bereavement? It’s every kind of obvious. If suffering matters to you, then you should eat plants, even if the little darlings scream blue murder at every mouthful.
Which of course they don’t.
So the carrot argument is rubbish and wouldn’t cut jelly if it were true.
But Miranda doesn’t stop at carrots. She says animal activists aimed to destroy “the ready availability of protein” by opposing live exports of cattle to Indonesia.
The cattle we export to Indonesia are fattened in feedlots in Indonesia using palm kernel cake (15 per cent protein) from palm oil plantations on what used to be tropical forests filled with wildlife, often including orangutans. The sum total of the protein provided by beef in Indonesia is 0.7 grams per person per day. That includes local beef as well as that from our live exports. This is the “readily available protein”, and of course the undernourished poor are easily outbid for the lion’s share of this beef by wealthy Indonesians, Australian and other tourists.
On the other hand, if we sent Indonesia just half of the 12 million tonnes of cereal that we currently feed Australian livestock each year, it would provide 5 times more protein than that beef. Why don’t we do this? Because the pigs, chickens and cattle people eat easily outbid Indonesians for that grain on global cereal markets.
Speaking more generally, factory farming animals for meat turns large amounts of perfectly good protein into much smaller amounts of protein. Grazing animals for meat frequently starts with deforestation and wildlife extinction before turning vast amounts of vegetation which would normally prevent soil erosion and support wildlife into small amounts of protein. Only about 8 per cent of global meat comes from pure grazing systems anyway. Whether it’s grass or grain fed, the resulting protein is packaged with plenty of saturated fat and, in the case of pig, sheep and cattle meat is also a potent cause of bowel cancer.
Estimates of cancers due to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl pale into insignificance next to red meat’s toll. Plot the two as per capita impacts on a graph and you wouldn’t see the former. Australia’s livestock are also responsible for about 70 million hectares of deforestation and a raft of extinctions - even before 1900.
I can understand meat eaters being annoyed by vegan moralising, but spare a thought for the anguish vegans endure before wave upon wave of the same poor arguments year in year out. Peter Singer demolished the “carrots have feelings” argument over 20 years ago and it’s not a tough argument to follow, but we are still putting up with it. The penultimate insult from Greg Hertzler, Associate Professor of Agriculture at Sydney University, who hypothesises that “the number of animals killed per loaf of bread, per peach, per egg and per pork chop are all about the same”.
Ouch ... this man is allowed to teach science?
Google ‘trophic levels’.
If you didn’t bother to, here’s the short version. The world produces about 245 million tonnes of meat each year. This obviously involves, at the very least, the deaths of 245 million tonnes of animals of various shapes and sizes. The world also produces over 2,000 million tonnes of cereals which provide 6 times more energy and 2.3 times more protein than the meat. Does anybody seriously imagine that there are 2,000 million tonnes of little critters killed in harvests but unnoticed?
Or perhaps the number is proportional to the protein, so would imply 869 (2000 divided by 2.3) million tonnes of rodents and fish scattered around wheat fields and rice paddies all over the planet.
I’ve met 12-year-old vegans who would be embarrassed on behalf of the Professor for this hypothesis.
Of course some animals do die during grain harvests. The issue is not whether anybody can eat without causing any suffering anywhere, the issue is always ... quantify and compare. This is the essence of good reasoning and good science. I’d suggest any Professor of science whose respect for quantified reasoning is illustrated by the above hypothesis should be sacked.
But I can’t finish this piece without a comment on the vicious little poem at the end of Miranda’s piece, which she says was recommended by Prof Hertzler. Most Australians have worked out that desexing cats is preferable to drowning kittens. And drowning the next season’s kittens. And drowning the next and the next and the next. The fact that a Professor of Agricultural Science is defending bucket barbarism explains something that has bothered me for decades.
Younger Australians won’t remember what Australian sheep graziers did to their sheep back in the 1980s. It was a very dark episode. Following the lead of some anonymous idiot, graziers figured they could extend the productive wool bearing life of their sheep by sharpening their ovine munchers ... with angle grinders.
And so they did. Pretty soon a bunch of contractors sprang up to service this new red necked sheep mutilation industry. It’s simple. Anybody can do it. First, jam the head of your unanaethetised sheep in an iron frame so he or she can’t move. Then apply the angle grinder until those dental edges are nice and sharp.
Would ewe like a complimentary floss with your grind?
Guess what? It doesn’t even work. No matter. The current Code of Practice on keeping sheep in Australia continues to protect graziers from RSPCA cruelty prosecutions by allowing this procedure.
What kind of barbarism was afoot in the Australian bush to endorse and support such savagery? Exactly the kind exemplified in the poem. Exactly the kind exemplified in the crocodile tears and quick resumption of sending cattle to be tortured in Indonesia.
Miranda got one thing right, We do all have to eat. The question is whether you make choices that minimise suffering, greenhouse emissions and wildlife habitat destruction, to name but a few, or you make choices to maximise your cruel and destructive impacts on the planet and its other creatures.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Greece makes the final and Ireland gets in on a golden ticket. How awkward and embarrassing. Love it. #sbseurovision
The weird thing about #eurovision is you've got this massive collection of dorks in a room and no one is wearing Spock ears #sbseurovision
Europe has the large hadron collider which is light years ahead of its time and #eurovision, where the eighties never die
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Mining money talks the loudest in Australian politics
When North Queensland Liberal MP George Christensen got the idea of launching a new political organisation…
Please enter your password
Help! I’ve succumbed to a crippling modern illness that can strike at any moment. Symptoms include:…
This concern for Thomson won’t change the script
Under pressure himself over his crusade against Craig Thomson, Tony Abbott has moved to present a softer…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented