Cowed by methane

I grew up milking cows, so

I’m partial to the animals (“All that’s green is gold”, August 25). We intergrazed them with sheep. Today, as people look for solutions to livestock methane emissions, it would be interesting to reflect on the effect monoculture has on bovine health and output.

New interventions may work but existing ideas worth testing include those of Allan Savory of the holistic management movement. Savory based his theories on watching animal behaviour in Africa, leading him to favour mob stocking and resting of the habitat.

The focus is on building up carbon in the soil with improved water retention and more robust soil profiles. Urine also comes into the picture. In the right place, it is a resource that can improve pasture, palatability and fertility.

Savory’s approach is not about stock at all, but about sustainable management and enhancement of the ecosystem. Some bright spark needs to look at his methods.

David George (Cromwell)

Technology is a long way from being a panacea for farming’s contribution to climate change. If this is really an emergency, as the headlines suggest, then we need to pursue all avenues. We need to consider, for instance, our lifestyles, which are characterised by overconsumption, waste and an infatuation with travel.

Regardless of the technology, if we have the same attitudes, will the outcomes be all that much different?

Gray Southon (Tauranga) CHARITABLE INTERPRETATION

The August 11 Editorial is a useful warning that charities are not always what they might seem.

Our natural presumption that those who advertise themselves and their organisations as a force for good in the world are themselves good needs to be regularly tested. None more so than charities that have achieved the status of household names and therefore are accepted without question.

Those who ask for our money, and particularly those who use images of desperately poor people to do so, should have motives that are ethically beyond reproach and must be open to rigorous inspection.

Peter Brown (Marton)

Michael Smythe ( Letters, August 18) suggests that Sir Ray Avery’s many accolades, including his 2011 knighthood, were premature. This is not so. He was honoured, in the first place, for the work he did with the Fred Hollows Foundation, and the game-changing outcome for cataract blindness in the developing world resulting from his creation of a state-of-the-art lens factory in Nepal.

I have worked with Avery for 25 years and know and understand his achievements, foresight and dedication.

Angela Griffen (Herne Bay, Auckland) TEXTBOOK TREATMENT PLANNING

Contrary to the study by Kevin Dew ( Health, August 11), when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014, I gratefully accepted the opportunity to be involved in treatment decision-making.

First, my urologist outlined a possible treatment. I was also advised to see a consultant radiologist, who talked about radiotherapy as an alternative to surgery. He in no way suggested that radiation treatment would be the better course.

At a subsequent visit to the urologist, we discussed the extent of surgery that would be required and that I needed to take account of post-operative bladder function difficulties and erectile dysfunction.

Both specialists had provided me with all the information I needed to make

my decision to have a radical prostatectomy.

My wife accompanied me to all consultations, which I found helpful and supportive. During such inevitably stressful meetings, another listener is invaluable.

KA Wilson (Palmerston North) THE GALL

I understood that gallstones were a result of eating too much fatty food, which seems to me more helpful than saying they form “when the liver produces too much cholesterol” ( Health, August 25).

When I went to hospital with a diagnosis of gallstones, the surgeon encouraged me to have the offending organ and stones removed.

I discharged myself and went home for a DIY cure. Lemon juice and dandelion root tea every morning for 10 days did the trick.

An MRI scan two weeks hence revealed no stones at all. Are gall bladders going

the way that uteruses went 30 years ago?

Annie Wilson (Miranda)