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Re: Mad Cow disease, BSE; Justice is served.



In article <31850B19.3143@super.zippo.com>, drddrd <DrD@super.zippo.com> writes:
> Robert Blackburn wrote:
> 
> > STOP EATING BEEF!
> > Free our land for organic arrable farming / tree growing.
> 
> I really would like for you to visit the western half of the North American 
> continent, the mid-latitude steppes of Asia, Patagonia, and the bulk of 
> Australia.   
   [...]      
> ...politically naive plans for humanity.  Until then, I will regard you as an 
> extremist (read: idiotic fool) who has not the slightest idea of the role 
> of beef cattle and range management in helping feed a world gone slightly 
> mad.
> 
> Steve Denham

The original poster probably was referring to land used to 
grow grain for the cattle, while you're referring to grazing 
land. Of course you'll end up in a bitter argument.

I'd like to quote from a book that discusses these issues. It 
is "Food Crops for the Future" by Colin Tudge (1988). Tudge 
is a freelance scientific writer, and his general position is 
that "livestock production, sensibly orchestrated and 
controlled, must continue to play a large part in feeding 
people."

It's the "sensibly orchestrated and controlled" part that 
causes all the problems in these discussions, isn't it?

Tudge does admit: "Livestock production can be profligate, 
and often is. The production of very fat beasts to over-feed 
people who are already over-fed, is nonsense."

But in the best case: "Grazing and browsing animals -- cattle, 
sheep, goats, horses, camels -- can be kept on land on which 
it is too dry, too steep, too wet, too cold, too salty or too 
rocky to grow worthwhile amounts of food crops."

However: "Granted, over much of the world grazing is 
uncontrolled...There is much to be done to improve the 
world's permanent pastures, which cover a quarter of the land 
mass in the world -- two and a half times as much as is 
devoted to arable crops. Much of this land is severely 
degraded, and little is used to anything like its full 
capacity. Improvement is far from simple."

Often it is the vegetarians who are called the "idiotic" 
idealists, but might it not really be the ranchers who have it 
figured out in theory how useful animals can be, only that in 
practice hardly anyone seems to have come close to 
accomplishing the ideal situation.

It makes sense to me to opt out of the meat-eating process. 
Or to reduce consumption to something like 2 or 3 times a 
week, rather than 2 or 3 times a day. This should even be 
appreciated by the ranching theorists. The more people who do 
this, the less pressure there will be to produce such massive 
quantities of meat, which will make it easier to implement 
and showcase their utopian farming practices.

Ed Fieberg
edj@cruzio.com
-- 




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