Scottish Daily Mail

Preaching until the cows come home won’t make us meat-free

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Liz BONNIN hoped that she didn’t sound like a naive Western tourist, as she flew tearfully over the Amazon and looked down on miles of bare cattle pasture that was once rainforest.

Sadly, naive and over-privileged is exactly how she came across on Meat: A Threat To Our Planet? (BBC1). She’s made some great documentar­ies about conservati­on and ecology, but this was not one of them.

The most cringewort­hy moment came when Liz rolled up to a Texas hoedown, packed with guys and gals in heavy metal T-shirts chomping on burgers as big as tengallon hats, and started preaching about the importance of cutting back our meat consumptio­n.

She might as well have stood on a chair and made a speech about banning handguns, for all the sympathy she got. Liz was aghast — didn’t these people care that she was a scientist?

This was a cluttered hour of trips to pig farms, cattle ranches, penguin colonies (yes, me neither) and Welsh smallholdi­ngs, all minced up and flame-grilled. One main argument emerged — the 65 billion animals we rear and kill for meat each year are damaging the planet.

Liz hammered us with apocalypti­c commentary: ‘it makes me sick to my stomach . . . This is as serious as it can possibly get . . . This is nothing short of catastroph­ic... i have been shell-shocked by what i’ve seen.’

And her radical response to everything she learned? She was going to eat a bit less meat, and she encouraged us to think about maybe doing the same, if we felt like it.

if the presenter herself can’t be bothered to make dramatic changes to her life, why should we feel inspired? She might as well have finished with: ‘Ah, never mind, forget i mentioned anything.’

Though it was crammed with statistics about the global warming gases created by meat production, the documentar­y said next to nothing about animal welfare. in one especially disturbing sequence, Liz met a biologist who kept a cow called Daffodil on campus at the University of California.

He was experiment­ing with Daffodil’s diet, to see what foods produced the least excess gases. Seaweed is effective, apparently.

it wasn’t the thought of snorkellin­g cows that shocked me, but the large plastic window in the cow’s side. Liz was able to open it and quite literally rummage around in Daffodil’s innards, elbow deep. What an atrocious experiment to inflict on a living animal.

A short report from an idyllic chicken farm in Pembrokesh­ire rubbed me up the wrong way, too. The back-to-nature lifestyle of former vet Matthew and his young family was held up as an example of how to farm meat sustainabl­y.

Good for them. it looked heavenly. But there isn’t enough land in Wales, or the whole world, for all of us to live this way. That’s why most of us stay in cities.

Liz wasn’t offering a solution, just making pious noises.

After panning it last week, i wanted to give Vienna Blood (BBC2) a second chance — but the second episode was no better.

it’s still too long, too slow and too hard to like, with an arrogant doctor and a heavy-fisted policeman for its heroes.

The pre-World War i evocation of Austria’s capital is sumptuous, but that’s not enough to hold the interest for 90 minutes.

Dr Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard) is a disciple of Sigmund Freud, and engaged to a buxom, flirtatiou­s blonde who bores him. He’s much more interested in lady scientist Amelia (Jessica de Gouw) who has short hair and a bow-tie.

What would Freud deduce from that, i wonder?

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