We’re force-fed a diet of nonsense about meat
SEEING as it’s been a couple of days since I last felt the need to defend livestock farming from the spurious attacks and blind assumptions of the ‘plant-based’ morons... I think we’d better have another go. It really seems to be an article of faith nowadays that giving up meat will save the planet, and saying so signals your supposed virtue. Massively distorted figures – and downright lies, are peddled to justify it, although I note the emotional difficulty of eating slaughtered animal flesh is seldom mentioned.
Let’s kick off with the actual science, and its interface with reality. An oft talked about – and distorted – figure is the ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ of the livestock industry. The figures inevitably include cow burpy methane, and you can drill this down to one single point. Ask what methane is made of? Google will tell you ‘carbon and hydrogen’. Now ask where those wicked cows get these ingredients to make methane? They get it from grass and water. Given that grass sustainably sequesters this carbon from the atmosphere, giving off oxygen as it grows, comparing
cow burps with burning fossil fuels is hugely stupid.
As for quoted percentages of greenhouse gases which livestock are responsible for – and by golly there’s some pretty rich numbers out there – I’m not altogether sure how you obtain definitive numbers. You see, no-one asks me, nor to the best of my knowledge, my cow raising chums. So how would they know, beyond some wild guesses?
As it happened, just as Channel Four news presenter Krishnan GuruMurthy was waffling about it last week, idly stating the guesses as fact – my lovely little wife sensibly flipped channels before I could hear him whining on so – I’d just been fetching in some fat ewes for market. Now these ewes had been left geld – unbred and empty – all winter until a good trade had prompted me find them and cash them… and they were as fat as butter. They’d fattened on just about nothing but what unfertilised untilled grass they could find. The only carbon emitted was when I trucked them to market, and it’s a fair assumption that the ratio per calorie was rather better than your vegan avocado, almond milk, or soya delicacies.
Krishnan might well argue the merits of some systems, but his ignorant blanket statements were a wild misrepresentation, and downright offensive to me and mine. It hurts, to be continually falsely held up as a bad example. So how can he be allowed to be so dishonest and hurtful? It beats me.
Then there’s a Guardian columnist called Gaby Hinsliff. She’s lately run an article carping on about red meat this, red meat that, and how it’s all the work of the devil. She admits to slipping more chicken into her cooking when her loved ones aren’t looking – suggesting that it must be better for the environment than red meat.
Let’s look at the facts of that shall we? Now I’ve no axe to grind with chicken farmers, but what does she think chickens live on? A few insects they peck while they scratch around the farmyard? While my sheep and cows overwhelmingly live on the natural vegetation they find around them, pretty much all chicken – and pork – is primarily raised on trucked in feed.
It should surely be part of the mix, utilising things like cereals that don’t make the grade, but placing it above animals that are mainly raised on pasture? That’s evident stupidity. I suppose she’s seen the shock videos, that seek out the most extreme intensive finishing systems, to reinforce the blind prejudice… for illinformed prejudice is what it is.
Gaby goes on to suggest a plantbased menu for heads of state at this year’s Cop26 climate crisis summit in Glasgow, to show us all the way. Yeah, right. This’ll be where global leaders, and their colossal retinue of advisors, assistants and hangers on, along with the circus of the world’s press, an army of lobbyists, camp followers, and doubtless a load of protestors, will travel – mostly by air – to Scotland, burning fossil fuels as they go, to discuss climate change, rather ignoring the choking elephant in the room. Asserting that their entire diet should also be flown in suggests a fairly high level of ignorance – or does Gaby imagine the West coast of Scotland is famed for its lentil crops?
Her article, I noted when I found it online, features a photo of a few Angus cattle picturesquely grazing a weather-beaten untilled Scottish hilltop. She thinks us peasants will need help ‘to find new uses for our land’, when what we actually need is protection from such ill-informed garbage.
We need protection from the ill-informed attacks of the ‘plant-based’ morons