Comment:
This blog is part of a series on animals in agriculture. It is written in response to political activities by dogmatic vegans, who are denying ANY role for animals in modern agriculture. It will be updated as I am learning. Please also read other of my blogs that provide broader context. IMPORTANT: I am not defending mainstream animal farming practices at industrial scale. I am also not arguing against plant-based diet or veganism in general, but specifically against a dogmatic vegan sub movement that denies any role for animals in agriculture, especially in ecological farming.
Humans live because we eat. Whether we eat plants or animals, somewhere in the food system living beings are killed – mammals, birds, insects, worms, bacterial communities, trees, perennial and annual plants. Many of these beings are considered sentient. Trees preferably support their kins, and I find it difficult – and maybe arbitrary – to draw a firm line based on “sentience”.
Some people directly are involved with the killing of living beings, others depend on farmers and food processors to do this killing. Some people kill animals themselves, some pay others to kill on their behalf. Most humans eat plants; plant growers must protect these plants from the animals that want to eat them. Some people eat plants and believe that this does not cause death of animals. Anyone who has gardened and lost their lettuce to bunnies or slugs knows that gardening entails the management of “pests”! And any farmer who grows plants certainly makes sure that animals won’t eat their crops – whether these animals are insects and other arthropods, birds or mammals. Plant farmers have a range of tools to manage pests: they can spray chemicals that kill pests or render them infertile, they can shoot or trap larger animals. Or they can foster predatory animals that keep pest populations in check – the ecological option.
- In modern agriculture farmers transform entire landscapes, such that hardly any living beings can survive. California strawberry fields are disinfected with poisonous gases, which kill everything down several feet into the ground. Farmers design landscapes as never-ending monocultures without hiding spots for living beings. Seeds of corn, soy and most other field crops are coated in “systemic pesticides” that render the entire crop plant toxic to insects. Neonicotinoids are an example of these systemic pesticide; they are used on over 80% of all Ontario field crops today and threaten insects, spiders and mites, and the birds that live on these. Scientists point at modern animal agriculture as the biggest threat to the living biosphere (e.g. Campbell et al., 2015).
- There are a few growing strategies where no animals are killed during the growing season. Here, growing takes place in fully controlled environments (green houses, indoor electric growing). These strategies have eliminated natural life entirely during the construction process, and now produce food under quasi-sterile conditions.
- Ecological farms attempt the opposite and orchestrate growing conditions that are teeming with life: microbes, insects, wildlife, and farm animals. This ecological strategy fosters the abundance of life in the production environment where living beings take many ecological functions. But ecological farming also necessarily disturbs (and kills) this life regularly – farmers act conscientiously but nevertheless must kill.
Eaters can only navigate these production strategies and make explicit (intentional) or implicit (unintentional or willfully ignorant) decisions.
- Buddhist monks chose a lifestyle that minimizes the suffering they cause. During an Aikido seminar, I once shared accommodation with a high-ranking Thai monk. His high rank prohibited him from doing any physical labour – farming, cooking, or any physical activity could harm animals, which may hide in the broccoli that is prepared for him. This monk depended on others doing all labour that sustained him for food, building structures, and transport. He explained that the activity that causes least suffering is indeed meditation practice and teaching others. He was grateful to those others took the negative karma upon them in support of his religious practice. He accepted this help in full awareness that others caused suffering. This way, the Buddhist concept of “dana” ties even the highest-level monks into a strong system of reciprocity: they receive ‘dana’ in order to protect their own karma from the suffering that food production brings with it. In return, these monks practice awareness and gratitude towards those who sacrifice their karma as food producers.
- Before colonization, many of Canada’s indigenous cultures practiced controlled burning. Controlled burns are carried out with high awareness for local ecosystems with respect to timing, location, and scale. According to Amy Christianson, the purpose of these burns is to remove dry biomass from grazing meadows during early spring. The ashes darken the ground that now warms up earlier, leading to a flush of new grasses while suppressing shrubs and regrowth of dense forests. This practice attracts ruminants that communities can hunt, and it also prevents the large wildfires from accumulated biomass. The practice creates landscape mosaics and prevents large continuous forests that are prone to heavy wildfires. The indigenous practice was disrupted by white colonizers, who decimated the ruminant herds that sustained open meadows, and who prohibited cultural burning to establish European monoculture forestry practices and closed-canopy forests. In summary, indigenous cultures inflicted targeted harm/disturbances to landscapes in order to prevent larger damages, and to promote ruminant herds as food source.
- Owning an ecological market garden, we ourselves are also ensuring that most pests on our farm die before they can harm our crop plants. We do this with a combination of strategies: we cover plants with fine netting, such that new hatchlings starve. We foster a vivid natural ecosystem in and around our plants, by creating habitat for predators and attracting them to our fields. Predatory insects eat plant-eating bugs; birds eat the tomato horn worms and other bugs; frogs and toads eat bugs. Owls and snakes keep our rodent population at bay (and sometimes eat a frog). When a hawk recently killed the long-eared owl that has nested along our field, we were sad: now rodents will increase and damage our crops until new predators make our field their home! As ecological farmers, we attempt to regenerate a balanced ecosystem on and around our fields – we mimic nature. However, we are not fooling ourselves that this avoids the cruelty of death that is such an essential part of nature – we just recreate the natural cycle of life and death, natural predator-prey relationships. We orchestrate nature such that all killing is natural, we regenerate the cycle of life & death in our field such that the death of one creature feeds another creature.
For me, avoiding “death on our plates” is a flawed goal of the vegan sub movement. The goal of “avoiding death” denies the reality of food production. Instead, we should reformulate our concern and instead ask: What type of death does the food generate that I put on my plate? Does the death that comes along with my food lead to the regeneration of the cycle of life & death, or is this death terminating the living biosphere? Some vegans foster a system of plant agriculture that actually terminates the living biosphere itself – while righteously attacking livestock farmers. As ecological farmer, I feel threatened by this ideology and defend our approach to mimicking nature, by invigorating the cycle of life and death.
Today, we use animals for ecosystem functions and can only be compensated financially by selling animal products. I would welcome other forms of financial compensation – Buddhist-type donations that pay for maintaining these animals without harvesting from them; or government programs that pay for landscaping services like they do in Switzerland and Austria. Until such programs are established here – maybe with support of politically engaged vegans? – animal harvest is the only realistic strategy for ecological farmers who provide ecological landscaping services.
Recent Comments