Week that proved the oddest animals of all are... humans
My daughter’s favourite job when I had a dairy farm was feeding the baby calves if their mothers couldn’t. until the day she asked me what happened to the male calves that would not end up in the dairy herd.
I told her. that was 40 years ago. she has not swallowed a mouthful of meat since.
today she makes a pretty good living as a vegan chef.
I can barely remember a meal from those days that did not include something that had once mooed, baaed or clucked — but I now relish her magnificent vegan dinners.
Veganism, once a ridiculed cult, is becoming mainstream. It is we carnivores who feel we must justify ourselves. What’s going on here? this past week the nation has gone into spasms because an alpaca called geronimo was put down after testing positive for bovine tB. the reaction was, quite simply, mind-boggling.
the reaction to what happened in afghanistan was on a different scale but far more disturbing. after an extraordinary lobbying operation, dogs and cats were rescued while desperate families were left to the tender mercies of the taliban.
Pen Farthing, who ran ‘Operation ark’, denied that he was prioritising pets over people. But Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, told MPs that soldiers on the ground had been diverted from saving people and Farthing’s supporters had taken up ‘too much time’ of senior commanders.
the case of geronimo did not have the same overwhelming moral force. In fact, it had none. But it said a lot about our weirdly divided society. the animal had been tested twice for bovine tB and found positive both times.
Bovine tB is a horrible disease. I know dairy farmers who have had half their herds destroyed because of it and no one made a fuss. But geronimo was cute, and cuteness counts in this strange moral debate. dairy cows aren’t cute.
the philosopher Peter singer sowed the seeds for the animal rights movement nearly 50 years ago with his book animal Liberation. his critics said it
would run out of steam. the opposite has happened.
AyOugOV poll last week found that 40 per cent of the British public believe animal lives are worth as much as human ones. Politicians have received the message.
the Mail revealed yesterday that there is to be a new criminal offence of ‘pet abduction’, which could mean people who steal pets could spend seven years in prison. that’s the sort of sentence that might be meted out to a thug who viciously attacks another human being and causes serious injury.
Boris Johnson, who seldom sees a popular cause of which he doesn’t approve, has committed his administration to putting ‘animal sentience at the heart of government policy’.
When Parliament reconvenes this month, it will debate a Bill which will ‘formally recognise’ animals as sentient beings.
there’s a problem with this. Nobody has come up with a suitable definition of what ‘sentient’ means in this context.
We all know that animals can suffer. We know they feel pain. We know they want to protect their babies. We know they enjoy their freedom. I was (almost) moved to tears the first time my cows were let out into the field after spending the winter months in a shed. I watched them — even the oldtimers with udders lolloping — as they gambolled around the field. Let no one tell me they weren’t enjoying themselves.
so how will the new ‘animal sentience Committee’ discharge its duties once it has formally recognised that animals are capable of suffering?
It’s relatively straightforward where pets are concerned. Mistreat your dog or cat and the rsPCa has the power to haul you into court. Quite right, too. Farm animals are a different matter altogether.
Obviously there would have to be an end to the practice of cows being separated from their calves within days of birth. an end to beef being reared on industrial feedlots. an end to chickens being crammed together for the miserable few weeks of their lives, many unable even to stand let alone move around.
all of that is possible. But there’s a catch: we would have to pay for it.
It’s fine for people like me. I can afford to spend a tenner on a truly free-range chicken. the mother in the tower block who relies on an intensively reared three-quid chicken for her permanently hungry teenagers can’t.
there’s another catch, too. the chickens and all the other animals have to be killed if we’re to eat them. I’ve seen what happens in a slaughter house. don’t tell me the animals don’t suffer.
Of course, that’s no problem for supporters of Peta, the world’s biggest animal rights organisation which will almost certainly be represented on the new sentience Committee. they will simply tell us to stop eating meat.
Last year in Britain we killed roughly 2.6 million cattle, ten million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs, and almost a billion birds. so that would wipe out an ancient industry on which vast swathes of rural Britain relies. happy with that, are we?
If you are already vegetarian, you may very well be. We don’t have to eat meat or fish. and vegans like my daughter prove every day we don’t have to eat milk or cheese or eggs, either.
But there’s a more profound question behind this great cultural change the nation seems to be going through. have we humans got our relationship with other animals right? Over the centuries, we have wiped out whole species by thinking we can control nature to our own advantage.
Indeed, we may well be in the process of wiping ourselves out as we destroy our own habitat. Our cruelty and selfishness is on a global scale, and most of the time we’ve no idea of the effect we’re having.
you might say we are doing only what other animals do — exploiting the world for our own advantage and not being too squeamish about harming other sentient beings. the heron I watched in my local pond seemed untroubled by his conscience when he gobbled up a sweet little gosling.
But let’s go back to that hellish airport in afghanistan and the rescue of the pets. there was one question that was not directly addressed because the very assumption behind it would have been morally repugnant.
how many pets are worth the life of one single child?
you know the answer to that and so do I. that’s why the animal sentience Committee has an impossible task.