The recent Swine Flu drama has illustrated exactly what the future would be for many animal species that are currently raised for human consumption, if extremist vegetarians had their way.
There is apparently only one pig in the whole of Afghanistan, and it is in a zoo, as curiosity. Pork products are illegal in Afghanistan. If sheep and cattle products were illegal there would also be no sheep and cattle apart from a handful in zoos (they are not the sort of animals that can be kept as a pet in suburbia – in most places it isn’t legal, anyway; nor would sheep or cattle have much of a life cooped up in town). If it was not legal to ride horses, there would be few, if any – so we’d be off to the zoo to see them as well. If it was not legal to keep dogs as pets, there goes the world’s canine population, except for a very small handful of wild species such as dingoes and wolves. Etcetera.
The very best way to ensure the survival of a species is to find a human use for it, and farm it – in a humane and environmentally sustainable way.
Most farmers can’t get their head around the vast difference between food production on the land and food that comes from the sea, and the fact that many vegetarians choose not to eat humanely raised animals such as sheep and cattle, yet they eat fish, prawns and other life dragged out of the sea. Food production on land is highly regulated, monitored and scrutinised for signs of unsustainability, yet fish and other sea life is relatively rarely farmed – it is just harvested, with only guesstimates of numbers remaining and future sustainability, relatively little scrutiny and often hugely wasteful by-catch. Trawlers and ships continue to increase in size, speed and efficiency. Commercial fishing technology is now incredibly sophisticated – it’s not just fish-finders locating fish in the immediate vicinity below the boats – increasingly accurate weather-related information, largely thanks to satellite technology – such as detailed data on current ocean temperatures – makes it possible to head directly towards where schools are certain to be found, many miles away.
Commercial fishing is a completely one-sided contest these days. This harvesting, without farming, is surely bound to come under increasing pressure as the world population grows (and fish stocks vanish). Someone with decades of fishing experience told me how they were on a trawler not long ago, when the boat came across a good haul of banana prawns. Though their storage was full of boxes of prawns already, these were a less valuable species, so every single box was dumped and they refilled the store with the more valuable banana prawns. I can only imagine the outcry if producers of lamb, beef, wheat and other crops behaved in such a manner. Much of the rubbish that washes up on the far northern coastline of Australia (eg on Cape York Peninsula) is clearly from trawlers. This is not to suggest that all commercial fishermen treat the sea like a tip – but many do. Land-based food producers would never get away with similar behaviour. I don’t mind the odd feed of prawns, but I don’t feel good about supporting an industry that just harvests instead of growing then harvesting.
Tags: Australian meat industry, Conservation and the environment