In the dark about cows and taboos
Commentary by DICK DORWORTH
To promote an absurdity—that unlimited growth in a
finite world is healthy, desirable or even possible in the long run—should be taboo.
A few days ago a fellow worker gave me a cattle industry
promotional bookmark emblazoned with factoids about the benefits of cattle
to our lives and how much they enhance the environment of the planet.
A few weeks ago a friend in California wrote to ask what I
thought about the power failures and blackouts rolling up and down
California (but not too far south) .
The two are unrelated on one level, but, like everything
in life, they are connected in myriad ways. They are reminders that the
past and the future exist in the present and that problems not honestly
faced continue to grow.
The bookmark was printed for the American National
CattleWomen, Inc. by Merial, a leading animal pharmaceutical company. The
factoids are a mixture of industrial boosterism truths and falsehoods, the
cattle manure, so to speak, covering the beef, so to speak, of the cattle
industry.
I replied to my friend in California that I think the
power outages are an early indication of a phenomenon just emerging in
North America that can be observed in more advanced stages in, for
instance, the ancient country of China: that is, the collapse of regional
biologic systems under the weight of more human beings than those systems
can support. In my opinion, the earth cannot support even its current
human population with a standard of living anyone reading this would call
‘acceptable,’ as evidenced by the standard of living experienced by
most people on earth. As the human population grows, more failures in the
systems that sustains it, like the California power outages, will take
place. My friend is uncomfortable with and not willing to confront the
issue of overpopulation. In this he is not alone. Population control is a
taboo subject in our society. As a result, we are as much in the dark
about the consequences of overpopulation as are the people of California
when their lights go out. By the time China seriously confronted the fact
that too many people live upon its land (more than 1 billion and growing
daily), it was too late. As anyone who has been there knows, the
landscape, the environment, and the quality of life for most Chinese
citizens has been trashed. It is difficult to see how it can get better
there without trashing some other part of the planet.
The factoid bookmark from the CattleWomen includes the
claims that cattle enhance the environment because the land they graze
"can’t be used for anything else;" improve grass and reduce
erosion because cattle aerate the soil when they walk on it while
providing natural fertilizer; that cattle are recyclers because they
"eat non-edible by-products of food production;" and that cattle
are fire-fighters because they "reduce the length of grass" that
might burn otherwise.
It is difficult to know exactly where to start replying to
such self-serving thoughtlessness and the people who serve it up, but,
like the taboo against discussing humanity’s over population of planet
earth, the CattleWomen’s bookmark exemplifies the cattle industry’s
taboo against honestly discussing and confronting the long range
deleterious consequences of food production cattle. It is easy to
understand why people are reluctant to curtail freedoms, whether it’s
the freedom to make babies, or the freedom to graze cattle on public lands
at public expense. It’s also easy to understand that the taboo is a
great place to hide assumptions and actions that need re-examination.
The land cattle in the West graze upon "can’t be
used for anything else" only after cattle have pounded it to powder
and erosion runnels filled with fecal matter that makes any stream in the
vicinity undrinkable. That unusable land supports a lot more life without
cattle than with them. Cattle do not "aerate" soil. The size of
their hooves and their weight pulverize the land and everything upon it,
and while cattle surely defecate upon the land they do not fertilize it,
as anyone familiar with a cow pie knows. "Non-edible by-products of
food production" is doublespeak (if it’s non-edible, why are cattle
eating it?) for the offal of sheep and, in some cases, cattle, making
carnivores and cannibals of the herbivorous cow. It is the source of
mad-cow disease and has been curtailed in the United States; but terming
the practice "recycling" raises some interesting questions,
among them: Is Hannibal Lechter a recycler? Cattle as firefighters is akin
to the convoluted logic of some military strategists who destroy the
village in order to save it.
There are taboos in our society against confronting the
true costs and consequences of our assumptions, beliefs and standards of
living, the status quo. The lights will go back on in California, but the
taboo against confronting the underlying reason they went out in the first
place (and will go out again) is still in place. The cattle industry still
hides behind the taboo against honest discussion of the true environmental
costs of grazing cattle on public lands.
Some taboos are healthy to maintain. For instance, I
believe that making herbivores into carnivores and cannibals should be
taboo. To promote an absurdity—that unlimited growth in a finite world
is healthy, desirable or even possible in the long run—should be taboo.
Other taboos need to be thrown out. The sooner the better.
