Ecocidal quest for ever-cheaper meat

DEAD ZONE WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE Philip Lymbery Loot.co.za (R260) Bloomsbury

REVIEWER: JULIAN RICHFIELD

MANY people may be unaware of the threats that endanger the sources of the food they eat. Some key factors threatening food supply are the effects of climate change and the destruction of natural habit and the fact that many animals face extinction.

Some blissfully consume without giving any thought as to where the food they eat comes from and whether or not there is a limitless supply of it.

Globally, the impact of an ever-increasing consumer demand for cheap meat is devastating.

Philip Lymbery’s new book, Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were, is an eye-opening and frightening examination of the impact of industrial farming on the environment. In it Lymbery highlights iconic species and asks what would happen to them if we don’t change some of the ways we farm.

Lymbery is chief executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation, Compassion in World Farming, and a visiting professor at the University of Windsor.

He has played a leading role in many animal welfare reforms, including Europe-wide bans on veal crates for calves and barren battery cages for laying hens.

Described as one of the food industry’s most influential people, he has led Compassion’s engagement work with over 700 food companies worldwide, leading to real improvements in the lives of over three-quarters-of-abillion farm animals every year.

Lymbery’s book, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat was one of the Times Writers’ Books of the Year and was cited by the Mail on Sunday as a compelling game-changer.

It surveyed the effects of industrial livestock production and industrial fish farming around the world.

He believes it completely wrong that livestock need to be factory-farmed in sheds and fed one-third of the world’s grain so that they grow as big and fast as possible.

“There’s already enough food for everybody,” he maintains, as more than half the world’s food rots, is dumped in landfills, or feeds “imprisoned” animals.

We are wrongly led to accept that squeezing animals into factory farms and cultivating crops in vast, chemical-soaked prairies is a necessary evil and an efficient means of providing for an ever expanding global population, while leaving land free for wildlife.

If anything can provide an alarming wake-up call, reading Lymbery’s Dead Zone will certainly do the trick.

He takes us to the Gulf of Mexico where we discover what a Dead Zone is: “About 15 miles out, I was looking at something that resembled a construction site. All around me were oil rigs. It was blistering hot and the sea was eerily quiet.

“I’d heard a lot about this place in the media: somewhere out to sea where nothing lives. An expanse of water so polluted that nearly all the oxygen is gone. They exist all over the world, but the Gulf of Mexico one is the worst.

“As a dead zone spreads, some bottom-dwelling fish are forced to the surface, where they are vulnerable to predators; and the rest just die.”

As a bottom-fish, shrimp take a particularly heavy hit.

In the book, we encounter the elephant, neither the African nor the Asian, but the lesser-known Sumatran elephant (which like the Indian, is a subspecies of the Asian), the barn owl whose numbers like other farm birds in Europe have dwindled dramatically, the majestic American bison (also known as the American buffalo), the red junglefowl, the primary progenitor of the domestic chicken, the white stork, one of Poland’s best-loved wildlife treasures, the water vole, Britain’s fastest declining wild mammal, and the peregrine, a fearless hunter that catches its prey on the wing.

The island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel is a prime site for seeing them; it is also the site of an amazing experiment: the very first reintroduction of a bumblebee, which were officially declared extinct in Great Britain in 2000.

Then there are: the iconic Jaguar, a big cat and the largest feline species in the Americas, penguins from Robben Island in Cape Town, the marine iguana also known as the Galapagos marine iguana, and lastly, the nightingale, whose numbers have declined by 43% in Great Britain.

Be warned, the sections of Dead Zone where Lymbery discusses industrial farming are not for sensitive readers.

The topic is depressing and makes for jaw-dropping, harrowing, horrific reading.

I hope that we don’t practise the extremes of industrial farming in South Africa.

The book includes this powerful appeal from Lymbery:

“Helping to revive a living countryside can be as easy as choosing to eat less and better meat, milk and eggs from pasture-fed free-range or organic animals.

“Through our food choices three times a day, we can support the best animal welfare and bring landscapes to life.”

Dead Zone is well conceived and a work whose subject matter is of significance to everyone on this planet.

Although much of the book is necessarily “quite serious stuff”, I found the opportunity to learn about creatures less familiar particularly rewarding.

Philip Lymbery has superbly manged to balance imparting much that is informative, with engaging personal and charming anecdotes. This excellent book provides for a read that is enjoyable, informative and important at the same time.

Be warned, the sections on industrial farming are not for sensitive readers