The animal killers' dilemma

Glenn Davis Stone, Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and pro-GMO blogger at fieldquestions.com, posted an essay on Nov. 26, 2012, "The Animal Lover's Dilemma", by Elizabeth Vandeventer of Davis Creek Farm, Nelson County, Virginia. She is another supposedly ex-vegetarian who describes her sense of missing out on the death action in the great cycle of life. So she attacks vegans, who she blames for palm oil plantations, among other evils of industrial agriculture and chemistry, for not being more informed than the general population about the same food that everyone else eats. And of course, unlike people who just buy their packaged meat in the grocery store, she "honors" animals by raising them and thanking them before killing them to sell as packaged meat at farmers' markets.

Vandeventer was inspired to write because of the international outrage about Green Mountain College's determination to kill their oxen Bill and Lou. (They went ahead and killed Lou, rather than give him adequate veterinary care, but did it medically so they could whine that his "meat" was wasted.) Bill, no longer working for his room and board, still languishes at the college in Limbo despite at least two offers of sanctuary.

While the college raised one of those sanctuaries, called VINE, for Veganism Is the Next Evolution, to arch-adversary, unable to separate VINE's specific concern for Bill and Lou from their antipathy to its larger outlook (animal rights, human rights), and then unwilling to hear any advocate for Bill and Lou except that of their imagined version of VINE — now an extremist, terrorist organization ready to firebomb the college — Vandeventer creates her straw man at the other end, conjuring mindless consumerist sentimentalist "animal lovers" who are singularly responsible for the destruction of rain forests for palm oil plantations.

The essay is the usual self-justifying drivel, which continues in the comments below it. I write about it today because host Glenn Davis Stone just added what I suppose he thinks should be a succinct wrap-up:

Meat eating causes more death but it causes more life as well. I have been to Elizabeth’s farm and seen the hundreds of chickens and cattle enjoying life on her pastures. All because of meat eaters.

How does one respond, after the laughter, to such madness? "Rucio" tries:

And then having that life cut violently short. For the enjoyment of meat eaters. Only increasing the animals' gratitude, no doubt.

Note: According to a profile of Charlottesville (Va.)–area farmers, Vandeventer's farm has 4,000 "meat" chickens. Each of them named, of course, and roaming free. And according to her own web site, both the chickens and the cows do not exist solely on the grass and grains of the farm. Although Vandeventer claims that grazing is the only agriculture possible for her land (the pictures showing lush grasses and fairly flat fields suggests otherwise, however), her business depends on other farmland growing crops not for people but for her "livestock", i.e., it is not at all a model of sustainability unless that means only sustaining a meat industry.

Update:  Davis Stone replied to Rucio's comment: "I’m not sure what “violent” means here — Elizabeth’s animals are killed instantly. Hard to imagine an animal being grateful to people for arguing they never be born just because they were going to die." To which Rucio replied: "What could be more violent than killing another being well before the time of its natural death?" and "It is even harder to imagine an animal being grateful to people for arguing that they must kill it to justify its life."

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Let’s cry for the oxen, not for Green Mountain College

To the Editor, Valley News:

Lisa Rathke's Associated Press story about Green Mountain College (GMC) representatives presenting their case to the Vermont House Committee on Agriculture (“College Pleas for Vt. Aid in Ox Crisis,” Jan. 17) shows how unwilling they still are to take any responsibility for the consequences of their decision to kill the hardworked and beloved oxen Bill and Lou.

It was the cold heartlessness of that decision that outraged first some of GMC’s own students and alumni, and then as the news got out, so many people around the world, especially as the college adamantly refused offers of sanctuary and even monetary compensation to let Bill and Lou live out their lives in peaceful retirement with attentive veterinary care.

In response, the college only invited more outrage: by smearing as “extremists” all those asking them to show mercy; by responding to the offer of sanctuary for these two special oxen as a threat to all animal agriculture; and by characterizing the resulting publicity as “terrorizing” them.

This was a crisis of their own making, in both the inhumane decision itself and the paranoid and misplaced sense of victimization that this latest “plea” exemplifies. GMC’s quest for absolution and vindication only reminds the world — and perhaps themselves — of their guilt.

One hopes that someone on the Committee kindly suggested that they might stop being so childishly stubborn and show some human kindness: and let Bill, who they have not killed yet, retire to a sanctuary.

Eric Rosenbloom and Joanna Lake

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont

Veganism & the Environment: By the Numbers

GREENHOUSE GASES

• 1 calorie from animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel as one calorie of plant protein.
• The diets of meat eaters create 7× the greenhouse emissions as the diets of vegans.

Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

• If one person exchanges a "regular" car for a hybrid, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1 ton per year.
• If one person exchanges eating meat for a vegan diet, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1.5 tons per year.
• If every American dropped one serving of chicken per week from their diet, it would save the same amount of CO₂ emissions as taking 500,000 cars of the road.

Methane (CH₄)

• Methane is 20× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
• Chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are collectively the largest producer of methane in the U.S.

Nitrous Oxide (N₂O)

• Nitrous oxide is 300× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
• The meat, egg, and dairy industries produce 65% of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.

WATER

• Nearly half of all water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.
• It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat vs. 25 gallons to produce 1 pound of wheat.
• You'd save more water by not eating 1 pound of meat than you would by not showering for 6 months.
• A meat-eating diet requires 4,000 gallons per day vs. a vegan diet which requires 300 gallons of water per day.
• Animals raised for food create 89,000 pounds of excrement per second, none of which benefits from the waste-treatment facilities for human excrement. This creates massive amounts of groundwater pollution.
• Chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 American states.

LAND

• Raising animals for food uses 30% of the earth's land mass, or 17 million square miles. That's about the same size as Asia! The moon (at 14.6 million square miles) has less area than that.
• More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
• The equivalent of 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
• Livestock grazing is the number one cause of plant species becoming threatened or going
• extinct in the U.S.

FOOD

• Animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn; however, they only produce a comparatively small amount of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return.
• It requires 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.
• It requires 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.

Source (with references):  http://www.culinaryschools.org/yum/vegetables/

environment, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism

Unnecessary Death on the Farm

Death and the Oxen

To the Editor, Valley News (Lebanon, N.H. & White River Junction, Vt.):

In offering his perspective on killing as part of animal farming (“Death Is Always on the Farm Schedule,” Dec. 23), Chuck Wooster retold the story of Green Mountain College and their oxen Bill and Lou.

Wooster neglected to mention the actual issue in the matter — namely, at least two sanctuaries offered to take Bill and Lou to live out the rest of their lives in peaceful retirement with veterinary care that was not compromised by considerations of future edibility.

The issue became Green Mountain College’s adamant refusal to let Bill and Lou, whom they claimed to love, thus retire to a sanctuary.

There was no necessity driving that decision — neither economic, medical, nor dietary. Given a choice between life and death, the college chose needless death.

Eric Rosenbloom

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont

A couple of book reviews

1. Review of "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith — Ginny Messina

2. The Omnivore’s Dilemma [by Michael Pollan]: My Review — Adam Merberg

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism

An ethical blind spot of the locavores

John Sanbonmatsu writes:

Kill Bill. And Lou, too.

That's what officials at Green Mountain College, in Poultney, Vt., decided to do to the two affectionate oxen on the college's working farm after one of the animals, Lou, sustained a minor leg injury over the summer. The college, whose reputation rests on its sustainable-agriculture program, announced that both oxen would be "processed" into hamburgers for the student cafeteria.

The case of Bill and Lou adds a new wrinkle to America's debate about the ethics of eating meat. For the first time, the public has been asked to consider whether the lives of farm animals matter, and not merely their quality of life. The story of the two oxen shows us why they do.

For decades, animal advocates struggled to bring public awareness to the horrific conditions on so-called "factory farms," where billions of sensitive animals languish in squalor and misery. While 99 percent of all meat consumed in the U.S. still comes from factory farms, consumers are increasingly uneasy with "farming" that treats animals viciously and is an ecological catastrophe.

Stepping into this growing breach between our stomachs and our moral sensibilities come the locavore and sustainability food movements. Such Bestsellers as Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" have reassured consumers that they can have their meat and their consciences, too, by choosing "humane" animal products "grown" on organic local farms. The crisis of animal agriculture, it is argued, can be solved through "organic beef," backyard chicken coops and do-it-yourself slaughter.

In reality, studies suggest that raising and killing billions of animals for human consumption is ecological bad news no matter how it's done, whether on small family farms or in concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs). Cows grazed on pasture, for example, produce more carbon emissions per capita than grain-fed animals in intensive confinement.

Confronted with such inconvenient facts, however, locavores maintain that we have but two choices -- to eat animals "locally" or to eat them industrially. As Green Mountain's provost, William Throop, was quoted as saying in an Oct. 29 New York Times article about the situation, the college must choose "either to eat the animals that we know have been cared for and lived good lives or serve the bodies of nameless animals we do not know."

But the omnivore's dilemma is a false one. We could simply choose not to eat meat at all. Why then do locavores pretend that we only have two choices?

Perhaps because they have no good arguments to justify the violence required to run even a small-scale, organic animal farm -- the use of whips, nose-rings, barbed wire, castration, brandings with hot irons, decapitation by ax or knife. The absence of good reasons for their views may explain why locavores eschew moral philosophy for poetical reveries on the "cycle of life." As Green Mountain's provost put it, "Bill and Lou are not pets but part of an intimate biotic community" based on "relationships of care and respect."

However, there is something Orwellian about depicting animals like Bill and Lou as members of an "intimate community" of "care and respect," while moving with great institutional dispatch to shoot them in the head, cut their throats, bleed them to death, and serve them as burgers. Lip-service to "care" aside, the lives of Bill and Lou have been viewed with such low regard by Green Mountain that when a local animal sanctuary offered to take the oxen so that they might live out the rest of their lives in peace, the college flatly refused, explaining that, were the oxen permitted to live, they "would continue to consume resources at a significant rate, and as a sustainable farm" the college couldn't let that happen.

Merely to let Bill and Lou exist, in other words, would be to violate the college's virtuous circle of sustainability. As "living tools" -- Aristotle's definition of a slave -- Bill and Lou have had no value beyond their perceived usefulness. Once their ecological outputs exceeded their inputs, they became as dispensable as rusty farm implements. And so they must die.

Left unexplored in this chilling logic is why the human animals living and working on Green Mountain's campus, each responsible for a far greater carbon footprint than Bill and Lou combined, do not deserve similarly ruthless treatment. The average American generates 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year, far more even than the average dairy cow. Are we therefore "unworthy" of life? Or do we not recognize something vital about consciousness, all consciousness, that lends it a value beyond reduction to abstract efficiency ratios?

Year after year, Bill and Lou, lovely, gentle, intelligent, feeling beings, were coerced by their human overseers to labor for the college. They ploughed its rain-laden fields and pulled its heavy equipment, in inclement weather and in all seasons. The college then decided to "repay" this debt by cutting their throats and dismembering them, so that in this way they might be exploited one last time, in death too.

It is this grotesque and unfeeling utilitarian logic that accounts for the public outcry against Green Mountain's treatment of the oxen. It offends our sense of justice when "even" farm animals are treated with such ingratitude and casual brutality.

Alas, protests and petitions could not save Lou. In November, Green Mountain announced that it had "euthanized" Lou and buried his body in secret, claiming that his injury was causing him "discomfort." Bill has been granted a temporary stay of execution. The college won't say what it plans to do with him.

If there is a moral to this story, it is that the locavores have failed to dissolve the troubling ethical questions at the heart of animal agriculture, organic or not. Locavore critics assure us that it is morally acceptable to raise and kill other animals for food, provided that the latter have had a "good enough" life before being sent to slaughter. But they have not told us why.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont

Self-sabotage at Green Mountain College

The people of Green Mountain College think it has been wrong for the public to protest their decision to kill their oxen instead of letting them retire at a sanctuary, because the people of GMC are against factory farms so the public should join them in protesting factory farms instead.

Some of them think that protesting GMC's decision to kill their beloved and hard-worked (if that's not too cognitively dissonant) oxen is serving the interests of industrial agriculture by attacking one group's efforts to challenge that hegemony.

Sorry, GMC folks, but that doesn't make any sense.

First, the people you are admonishing already protest factory farms. They care about animal welfare, and that is why they are protesting GMC's efforts regarding their oxen.

Second, killing two oxen after 11 years has nothing to do with moving away from factory farming. And the public outcry against the desire to kill them is not against your efforts to be independent from industrial ag.

The issue is not you or various elements of the public. It's Bill and Lou, and most people think Bill (Lou having already been dispatched) deserves a peaceful retirement. The more you try to rationalize the decision to kill them, the more unhinged and unlikeable you appear to be. And that, not the public's protest, is what reflects badly on, and thus most threatens, the mission we share.

Update, Dec. 22:  The most reactionary students at Green Mountain College continue to amuse with their self-righteous victimization narrative. After the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, they suggested that compared to that crime they ought to be absolved of murdering Lou and allowed to murder Bill. Now they have likened those trying to save Bill and Lou's lives to Fred Phelps and family’s Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, which blames all unnatural death on the tolerance of gays and travels around the country to disrupt funerals to celebrate those deaths as God's righteous punishment. The WBC, basically, hates everyone except themselves, which does not seem very different from what we've seen out of GMC.

But it gets more confused. The WBC post was a tongue-in-cheek letter of gratitude to the Phelps family for raising awareness of issues of intolerance and facilitating support drives. In their enthusiasm to embrace this new model of empowered victimization, the GMC students forget that elsewhere they and their professors (falsely) accuse animal rights and welfare activists of using GMC's intransigence (standing by their "values", as Fred Phelps would agree) for their own publicity. That is, they are now embracing a codependent tactic for which they had earlier attempted to condemn "ARAs". How must be logic twisted and mirror fogged to evade the truth!

Update, Dec. 24:  Another example brought to our attention of getting everything backwards (even their own defensive positions) is from GMC student Emily McCoy. On Dec. 14, she shared on Facebook a photo of President Obama wiping away a tear for the victims of Newtown, Conn., with the caption, "Pretends to cry about school shooting — while bombing innocent men, women, and children in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine." The first commenter (Jon) expressed disgust, which McCoy and others fended off, rightly noting the commander-in-chief's hypocrisy. But then she added, ‘Jon's reaction reminded me a lot of ARAs [animal rights activists] being all "everyone feels sorry for the billions of animals in CAFOs [concentrated animal feed operations], but you have a chance to spare the lives of THESE TWO OXEN. COMPASSION!"’

Her thinking almost defies analysis. Which it would have to, because it is animal rights and welfare activists who point out that killing Bill and Lou (and all the other animals on GMC's play-farm, since they insist on making that the issue) is the same result as on factory farms. She must see that, since she can see that we need to decry all of the deaths wrought in our name in other countries along with domestically. That is, killing in one's own backyard and killing in a distant place are both wrong. Killing in CAFOs is wrong, and so is killing in the "happy" farm. Of course, it's not the killing that bothers McCoy, and in that she is aligned with the President, who weeps for irrational carnage but has little problem with it when it is suitably rationalized. And so she believes that compassion means killing Bill and Lou, simply because they are not at a CAFO.

Just as McCoy challenges the President's compassion, we question hers.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Green Mountain College, Carnism, and the Embrace of Death

The echo chamber's not going to work if you allow dissenting opinions!
(Green Mountain College student Emily McCoy, who blocks Facebook users who engage her in public fora, on a GMC page that blocks dissenting opinions)
The people of Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont, remain defensive about the public outcry over their decision to kill for meat two oxen that they had worked for 10 years. A brief history: Lou was injured in the Spring such that he could no longer work; over the summer the GMC farm staff decided it was time to kill both him and his brother Bill and eat them (or, more likely, get some human-grade meat in exchange for their value as dog food). Some students and/or alumni, when classes resumed in the fall, were shocked by that decision and alerted Green Mountain Animal Defenders in Burlington, which led to an offer of veterinary care and sanctuary from VINE Sanctuary in Springfield. People’s shock at the decision to kill Bill and Lou was then compounded by GMC’s refusal of the offer to let them live out their lives in peaceful retirement. But the school became only more entrenched, lashing out at those asking for compassion and mercy as “extremists” and “abolitionists” “terrorizing” slaughterhouses and the college. Then they “euthanized” Lou (†Nov. 11, 2012), who had been seen happily grazing with Bill the day before his pre-dawn “sacrifice”, and perversely made themselves out to be the victim because he had to be composted instead of eaten. Two faculty members in particular, Steven Fesmire and Philip Ackerman-Leist, the latter a beef farmer himself, have been interviewing and writing all over the place to present this simple call for compassion toward two loved and hardworking oxen as a concerted and militant effort to end food choice and all animal agriculture.

It would be funny if it did not mean that Lou was killed and Bill remains in danger.

[[[[[ ]]]]]
The first reason given for killing Bill and Lou, and then for refusing sanctuary, was economic. In a cold calculus of utility, these aging oxen were deemed to be no longer paying for their upkeep, and a sanctuary would only perpetuate the “waste” of resources. This is the thinking of psychopaths. Bill and Lou are not machines to be junked for parts or materials, but living creatures as deserving and desiring to live as those calling for their deaths.

The defense developed, along with the paranoid exaggeration of “the enemy”, to a more complex idea of “sustainability”. At the basis of that “sustainability” ethic is the self-serving “happy meat” paradigm, by which human carnivores think they are being conscientious and environmentally mature by convincing themselves that their taste for meat is “love” for the animal itself and its place in nature (or rather the nature of agriculture that includes them), particularly when it is applied locally (eg, in the name of food sovereignty).

Let us look at that ethic, which has come to be called “carnism”.

To rationalize their inability or unwillingness to live without meat or dairy, they have constructed a system that is environmentally conscientious only within the terms of a perceived necessity for consumption of animals. There is no room in that vision for the rejection of animal agriculture. Ethical veganism is heretical, not just because it considers the interests, even rights, of the animals themselves (assuming that like all creatures they want to live full lives according to their own interests and social needs) apart from their usefulness to humans, but mostly because it recognizes that consuming animals is a choice, not a necessity.

With all ethical issues, each of us comes to a balance or accommodation that we are comfortable with, constantly weighing myriad factors of society, personality, culture, economy, etc. And that balance changes (or ought to) throughout our lives. Ethics isn’t about that balance, but about the choices we make when we are able to.

It is indeed good that some of those who won’t give up meat are trying to make that choice less cruel to the animals and less harmful to the environment. That is a step forward and does not obviate further steps. But the “carnist” trend of recent years has been to assert that it is actually better in every way (morally, environmentally, nutritionally) to continue to consume animals in this “balanced” way, which, first, is offensive to those whose decision not to is also shaped by efforts to be less cruel and harmful, and, second, only suggests that it most certainly is not.

It is obvious that loving animals can not include killing them unnecessarily just because we want to eat them. Animals are not things (”I love my teddy bear”). They are not meals (”I love squash soup”). Love, applied to any animal, is the same love we mean when we apply it to the human animal. That is a simple truth. The complex arguments to prove that animal agriculture is natural or necessary or beneficial serve to obscure that truth. They serve as a firewall between salving one’s conscience by treating animals marginally better and having to consequently recognize animals as having their own rights. They serve as an artificial boundary between granting animals a right to “welfare” and granting them the actual rights implied by concern for their welfare.

It is the same dynamic that has been seen in every battle for rights. Of course, the first principle of carnism is that animals aren’t people (not even noncivilized people, however sentient and social). Evolution of conscience is a slow process, and most vegans recognize that frustrating fact. Most of the time, they are biting their tongues about the world’s casual cruelty and disrespect. What vegans can not abide is carnists challenging or claiming superiority to veganism on any ground. It is frightening to see the lengths people go to rationalize needless killing. As they take their arguments farther and farther but go nowhere, stuck in their self-imposed carnism, their urge becomes to silence, if not destroy, those who remind them of that shortcoming. The vegan “no” is taken as an existential threat. Again, this is a fact of human history, which vegans must suffer through like anyone who has ever taken an ethical stand against entrenched cultural assumptions.

If carnists were truly comfortable about their choice, then they would not feel so threatened by the very existence of vegans. After all, everyone eats what vegans eat. Vegans just cut out the animal bits. And that small reduction of violence by our diet can only be for the good — of the planet, all animals, and humanity.

[[[[[ ]]]]]
As to Green Mountain College, they were given a choice: kill Bill and Lou or let them live out their lives at a sanctuary. While claiming to assert their rights and responsibilities, they revealed their sustainability ethic as one that embraces death, not love.

[See also:  Omnivores? ]

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

Request for Common Cause from Philip Ackerman-Leist, Director of Green Mountain College’s Farm & Food Project

“The challenge we are now facing is not one of a philosophical perspective that we find inappropriate but rather of an extreme activist agenda that is divisive and destructive. The end goal is the abolition of livestock agriculture, whereas our college is invested in the transformation of livestock agriculture.”

In fact, the letter below is a desperate plea for the preservation of “livestock” agriculture without the scrutiny of “outsiders”. It expresses an apparent persecution complex driving him to seek support for his Lord of the Flies project from the entire state (remember the “Take Back Vermont” movement to “preserve” marriage?). But the pleas to retire the working oxen Bill and Lou had nothing to do with the college’s animal farming. It is perfectly normal practice to retire working animals. One offer of sanctuary was from a rancher, another from a dairy farm. Many other animal farmers expressed disgust. Green Mountain College’s refusal to act in a normal (let alone humane) manner, to ignore all offers and insist that “processing” the oxen into dog food was essential to the college’s chest-thumping sense of “sustainability”, was the only reason for worldwide outrage from vegans and carnivores alike.

Ackerman-Leist’s delusional paranoia (“under the cover of darkness and with complex security plans in place, we had to euthanize Lou and bury him in an undisclosed location”) speaks more to unresolved issues of his own conscience (as a beef farmer himself, looking forward to a lucrative contract with the college, as orchestrated by himself?) than to reality.

Source:  https://www.facebook.com/notes/carl-b-russell/request-for-common-cause-from-philip-ackerman-leist-director-of-the-green-mounta/10151360898823804

November 11, 2012

Dear Colleague in Food and Agriculture,

I am writing to request both your attention to and support in an issue that impacts farms of all sizes, the ability of livestock-based businesses and educational farms to function without the threat of harassment or harm from outside special interests, and the possibility for communities to determine the future of their regional food systems.

As you may have heard or read, the Green Mountain College community followed a decade-long tradition of discussing the fate of livestock on the college’s Cerridwen Farm before deciding to send our two longstanding oxen to slaughter. Bill and Lou have been central elements of the college farm since their arrival ten years ago, but Lou injured his leg this past summer and is no longer able to work or even to walk any significant distance without experiencing obvious pain. Therefore, in an open community forum this fall, about eighty students decided to send the much admired pair to slaughter and processing, with the meat to be used in the college dining hall, as we have done with sheep, poultry, swine, and cattle in the past.

However, an extremist animal rights organization, VINE (Veganism is the Next Evolution) Sanctuary, turned our community-based decision into an international advocacy and fundraising effort. VINE recently set up its new sanctuary and education/advocacy center in Springfield, Vermont in order to take on everything from backyard poultry to small-scale livestock production to the iconic Vermont dairy industry. They allow for no distinction between any form of livestock agriculture. As a case in point, one of the founders of VINE states the following:

“Another issue we face is that Vermont is a big ‘happy meat’ place. The happy meat people are convinced the animals are treated well. It is just a myth, and regardless, any farmed animal on a factory farm or a ‘happy meat’ farm, can’t get away from ending up dead.”

Another VINE blog makes the point even more explicit:

“Despite the blather about respecting the bedrock of one of Vermont’s primary industries, and despite the inane lies pitched in almost hysterical fashion by ‘happy meat and milk’ farmers, cows are nothing more than potential money-making machines to people. That’s what they’re there for, after all.”

The Green Mountain College oxen case seemed to have been the perfect target for VINE’s efforts, quickly supported by Farm Sanctuary and PETA. Why focus on our college farm and not a “factory farm” or some other farm with questionable livestock management practices? Perhaps we find ourselves in this situation because the college has long been transparent about our community-based discussions regarding the fate of the livestock on our college farm—it is a vital part of our educational program here. It could also be that we have been targeted because we are not only teaching and advocating for sustainable livestock farming, but some of our graduates are seeding the local landscape with these kinds of farms.

Unfortunately, this issue is not just about the fate of Bill and Lou or the intense local and international pressures faced by a small but diverse college community that opted for transparency, truth, and accountability in its own food system. If the extremist elements in this activist agenda succeed in forcing our college to choose a course not of our own making in this issue, then they will have the power and the confidence to do it again—perhaps next time to a smaller and less resourceful community or farm or even to a bigger institution or initiative. Such an outcome would be inconvenient to some and perhaps tragic to others. And it flies directly in the face of Vermont’s innovative efforts to develop community-based food systems, envisioned on a grand and courageous scale through our nationally-acclaimed Farm to Plate Initiative, a strategic ten-year plan to build the vision of interlinked local and sustainable food systems that can build thriving communities even in the most rural reaches of our state.

Imagine the pressures our college has faced in recent weeks and consider how other communities placed under such pressure might fare:

• Numerous petition drives, with tens of thousands of signees from all over the world—people who know nothing of Bill and Lou’s conditions, much less the accountability and transparency we have built into our college food system
• Action alerts that have generated email assaults (at least one staff person received almost 1000 emails in a single day) and switchboard and voicemail overloads of our campus phone system
• One cyber-attack generated 3.9 million emails filtered in a period of several days—all from a single domain
• Harassment and threats of physical violence to students, faculty, staff, and administrators
• Constant surveillance of our college farm by stealthy intrusions, video cameras, and Facebook reports of our daily activities
• Driving a livestock trailer to the edge of campus and barging into our administrative offices demanding that Bill and Lou be turned over
• Dishonest and highly abusive postings on the college’s social media sites, requiring around-the-clock monitoring and editing
• Attempts at widespread defamation of character of faculty, staff, and administrators through letters, emails, websites, and social media channels
• Threats of continued negative publicity campaigns unless we turned Bill and Lou over to VINE Sanctuary
• Online discussion of whether to give Bill and Lou medications that would render their meat unsafe and inedible
• Slaughterhouses throughout Vermont and New York were threatened with protests, harassment, and potential violence if they agreed to work with the college, ultimately eliminating virtually all such possibilities for us, including our scheduled date at a local Animal Welfare Approved facility

Throughout it all, we have attempted to avoid a polarization among parties. After all, our student body is comprised of approximately 70% meat-eaters and 30% vegetarians and vegans. One of my colleagues in helping our students to think critically about these livestock decisions is Dr. Steven Fesmire, a philosopher and a vegetarian. For ten years, he and I have tried to model open and civil discourse about dietary choices and related animal issues through forums, joint classes, and guest lectures. We are unaccustomed to diatribe replacing dialogue, and our students tend to be open to a diversity of ideas and respectful of differences in opinion. Our community finds it odd that certain extremists have opted to try and make us out as villains when one of our stated goals is to become the first college or university in the United States with a major food service provider to eliminate all animal products that are not humanely raised and slaughtered.

Our college honors different dietary choices and encourages a diversity of philosophical perspectives related to agriculture and animal ethics. Were that not the case, we would not have a higher than average population of students who are vegetarians and vegans. We teach animal rights perspectives in our classes, as we believe that these philosophical ideas can help to illuminate the path toward more humane and sustainable livestock agriculture. The challenge we are now facing is not one of a philosophical perspective that we find inappropriate but rather of an extreme activist agenda that is divisive and destructive. The end goal is the abolition of livestock agriculture, whereas our college is invested in the transformation of livestock agriculture.

What happens next in this situation may have ramifications far beyond our campus community. If VINE, Farm Sanctuary, and PETA succeed in harassing and threatening not only us but also our regional livestock businesses to the point at which we succumb to their abolitionist desires, then they will march forward with their activist agenda and wreak havoc not only on the rebuilding of community-based food systems but also on the longstanding efforts in our region to create increasingly humane and ecologically appropriate livestock production and processing.

It is time for more organizations and individuals to come forward to denounce the intrusive and unethical bullying orchestrated by these organizations. Their tactics do not promote discourse, diversity, or democracy. Ultimately, they impede animal welfare reform by putting backyard poultry on the same level as a poorly managed “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation” (CAFO). You may or may not agree with our community’s decisions regarding Bill and Lou. We recognize that people can come to different conclusions in what is the best alternative for each of these animals, and these discussions can be civil and frank. Regardless of your opinion in this particular matter, it is important to recognize that the extreme bullying tactics employed by these groups need to be countered with the courage, reason, and civility of people and organizations that believe in the transformation of livestock agriculture, not its abolition.

During the early morning hours of November 11th, under the cover of darkness and with complex security plans in place, we had to euthanize Lou and bury him in an undisclosed location, as outlined in a statement to our community by President Paul Fonteyn. It was a difficult and complex decision. President Fonteyn offered these words regarding Bill: “Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals. We take responsibility for our animals on the farm--it is an obligation we will not ask others to bear.”

Please make your voice heard on this issue, whether it be through letters to the editor, calls and emails to your elected officials, or by appropriate direct action through your organization. Green Mountain College has decided to stand up against the bullying directed at us while also standing up for farmers, businesses, educational farms, local food systems, and burgeoning farm-to-institution programs—in Vermont and elsewhere in the country. It is our ardent hope that reason and civility will prevail and perhaps save some other farm or organization from the onslaught that our college has opted to engage, oppose, and defeat.

Sincerely,
~~~
Philip Ackerman-Leist
Director of the GMC Farm & Food Project
Director of the Masters in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS)
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

Let them eat meat

Speaking of Affiliation, a correspondent writes about yesterday's column in The Guardian by George Monbiot (click the title of this post):

I always felt that there was something quite peculiar about Monbiot and how he never quite "gets" things that should seem so obvious, as in his dogged touting of industrial wind and his dumb war on Agas etc etc -- in this case in his bizarre, chillingly analytical defense of meat-eating (undoubtedly this is very convenient to his own tastes), he seems almost as if he suffers from Asbergers or autism in his precise, desperate totting up of percentages, ratios, and economics of "efficient" corpse production. Talk about missing the point of veganism, all the while he ignores the elephant sitting in the corner of this very tiny windowless room -- the abject horror, routine abuse, suffering and medieval cruelty that these living sentient beings are subjected to, on factory "farms" and little "happy farms" alike, and the fact that all of this nightmarish cruelty is utterly unnecessary, and that we have no right to take another creature's life and even their sense of well being. Monbiot would have made a very good accountant for Hitler -- what a truly dreadful little man he is, a very useful idiot for one destructive industry after another. And this is why I have so little hope for this planet and any evolution to a higher way of thinking about our fellow creatures -- because people like Monbiot, draped in the lurid polyester green flag of what passes these days for "environmentalism" or "sustainable light footprint" living, are listened to by people who used to see this kind of thing as blatant corporate brainwashing of the masses. But alas, no more; now they have joined the rest of the brainwashed greedy conformists -- we live in a real life world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone really does increasingly seem like drooling idiot zombies.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

Vegetarianism (and veganism) for peace

Ecofeminists and many anarchists see vegetarianism as an essential response against exploitation of other beings. Many religious people see vegetarianism as consistent with a message of peace.

Unfortunately, most people who call themselves progressive (let alone liberal) do not see the defense of all animals as relevant to their concerns about human society.

Yet the way that humans treat other animals is one of the most indicators of how we treat the environment and each other. Eating, hunting, wearing, poisoning, abusing animals is one way everyone participates in a social organization based on exploitation and jealous protection of power.

Besides hunting and fishing and fur farming and beings tortured and killed in labs, in the U.S. one third of what is spent for raw materials and half of all our water are used just to produce food for the animals of the "meat" industry -- 26 billion individuals killed and eaten every year.

Like the reality of our invasion of Iraq, the reality of the meat and other animal-exploitation industries are hidden behind euphemistic doublespeak and outright lies. To speak the truth is considered treasonous, a threat to traditional values and the cohesion of society. People would rather not hear it. Yet the pursuit both of meat and of war is ridiculously wasteful, counterproductive, and self-destructive.

If there is to be an anti-war movement, vegetarians, those who understand the intersection of all violence against another, should join it openly as vegetarians.


categories:  animal rights, veganism, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecofeminism, peace