It seems the World is short of compassion...

Imagine travelling in a vehicle crammed so full with other passengers that you have no space to sit down – OK, underground transit systems in rush hour tick that box. 

But then imagine that the journey is 18 hours long, over hundreds of miles, perhaps involving a sea crossing which could be bumpy and uncomfortable. It is stifling hot outside and within the vehicle and you are given no comfort stops, for loos and refreshments.

Then imagine that we are talking about sheep, or cattle. The stench within the soiled truck can be overwhelming, the pitiful bleating heartrending. By the end of the journey there are up to a hundred or more sickly, exhausted, and stressed animals, that may even on arrival at their destination be unloaded into overcrowded “fattening barns”, devoid of sunlight and green pastures, perhaps for up to a month or so before being taken for slaughter.

What a fate. No animal should be allowed to suffer like this.

Farm animals can experience pain and distress just like us, and they can also know contentment and well-being.

According to the website of Compassion in World Farming, over 40 billion animals worldwide are confined in factory farming systems which prevent them from doing what animals do naturally. How cruel is that?

If we insist on eating animals we really do owe it to them that they do not have to suffer so much in their lives. 

But this is what happens all the time when animals are forced to travel may miles before slaughter. In the UK live exports are a particular horror that is currently being addressed by Compassion in World Farming.  

It may seem almost irrelevant to be worried about animal suffering when we cannot even deal adequately with the immense suffering of fellow human beings, innocent children in Syria for example.

But both matter. A truly compassionate heart doesn’t differentiate – a compassionate heart must hold a deep concern for all sentient beings, human or otherwise.

It seems we are very short of compassion in our world.

For more information you can go to the websites of Compassion in World Farming and The Humane Society of the United States.

Please care about our animals. Please consider supporting organic farming if you must eat meat. Please consider eating less meat, even going vegetarian. Please find compassion in your heart for these creatures that do not have a voice, other than a pitiful bleat or bellow when life is not treating them well.

Eating Animals

There has to be a huge amount that is good about a book that is not only right up there in the top selling Amazon.com ranks but also has 169 5* reviews out of a total 245, or 202 combined 4 and 5* reviews out of 245. (The UK version has a little catching up to do in the "number of reviews" stakes).

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, so says the blurb, "is the most original book on the subject of food written this century."

I have been a vegetarian now for many years. I simply could no longer accept that we can justify our factory farming methods, the huge amount of unnecessary cruelty involved in much of our animal husbandry, and even in our fishing industry - yes fish DO suffer pain! I've written so much on this in my blog before. Now I have an ally in Jonathan Safran Foer.  



Do please read this book - As the blurb says, "It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat.
For good."

And that can only be a good thing.

This also takes me back to Jean Hardy's book A Wiser Politics, that I have been blogging about recently.

Here is another proposal from the 14 listed truths that Hardy says we must live out if we are to survive the twenty first century. A bit draconian? In the light of Foer's research and enlightened book, I don’t think Hardy goes any way near far enough.

Proposal 3 Question modern farming practices, working towards the

minimum eating of meat and fish. No more cattle and sheep

kept for human consumption: we should not raise millions

of cows and pigs for the sole purpose of slaughtering them

to provide meat for our table.

Hear Hear!

compassion and empathy and irrational behaviors

On 28th January I wrote of our Irrational Behaviors, following the theme of the essay by Ervin Laszlo on “The World’s Health Problem: an Integral Diagnosis” in A New Renaissance – Transforming Science, Spirit and Society. Our Irrational Behavior Number One is that "Millions are suffering from overeating and obesity and a thousand million go hungry."Where, I asked, was our compassion for our fellow humankind? Where is our empathy? Then on 30 January I moved on to Laszlo's Irrational Behavior number 2, triggered by Davos: why do we remain preoccupied with making money and holding on to privileges when our wellbeing and possibly our survival hangs in the balance? Again, where is our compassion? Where is our empathy?

Here is another of Laszlo's irrational behaviors - Number 3 - and this is at rock bottom in the compassionate stakes:

"Vast herds of livestock, consisting in part of intelligent and sensitive animals, are brought into the world for the sole purpose of slaughtering them, a procedure that, apart from its questionable ethical and health implications, is wasting an enormous amount of resources (it takes 5,124 gallons of water and 16 pounds of grain and soy to produce one pound of beef, and not much less to produce a pound of pork)."
Now I know the precise figures are open to debate, but the principle is unaltered. Vegetarians tread more lightly in this world.
Add to this the awful cruelty still involved in so much of our animal husbandry, fish farming and fishing from boats, and I am incredibly surprised that there are not many more vegetarians.

Here is some information taken from the Compassion in World Farming site. "...established in 1967 by British dairy farmer Peter Roberts. Peter and his wife Anna had become increasingly concerned with the animal welfare issues connected to the new systems of intensive farming that began to take hold in the 1960s.

Unfortunately, at the time, Peter couldn't convince any of the major animal welfare societies to campaign against factory farming, so he decided to do it himself and Compassion in World Farming was born.

Originally run from the Roberts' family house, Compassion in World Farming has grown into an organisation with offices in Ireland, France and Holland and representatives in seven more countries, including South Africa and Oceania."

And there is an equivalent in the United States,The Humane Society, which has on its website videos of animal cruelty in factory farming that I found too shocking to watch. It is shameful if we have built a society with so little compassion that these videos do not persuade people to change their eating habits and campaign for better conditions for all farm animals.

So give some vegetarian dishes a try. You may be pleasantly surprised just how easy it is to avoid meat or fish in a few meals each week. And restaurants, be more imaginative in your dishes for vegetarians. There is a lot more to our diet than pastas and risottos. I don't like either!

Fish feel pain!

There is plenty of reason to believe that fish feel pain - see for example the recent report by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. There was a study back in 2003 that was widely covered in the media at that time, but not much seems to have happened since - the media attention fizzled out very quickly, perhaps because the journalists found it hard to reconcile their conscience with the facts and preferred to let the story drop? In any case, the debates at that time revolved mainly around the ethics of angling, without seeming to think very much about the ethics of commercial fishing. But PETA also report that scientists estimate that fish endure up to 15 minutes of excruciating pain before they lose consciousness and this is the fate of hundreds of billions of fish caught for the commercial market each year. And lobsters and crabs also suffer. How can any right minded person with any compassion for sentient beings eat with any conscience something that has suffered so much on its way to the table?
That is why I do not eat fish.
Before dismissing this as fanciful, or imagined, or not proven, please take time to read the PETA reports through the links provided.

I also do not eat meat of any kind. In North America 3.2% of the population or 7.3 million are vegetarian and avoid eating meat, and/or fish, and/or dairy products. (There are various permutations and combinations of what constitute a vegetarian diet.)
In the UK 3 million are vegetarian, representing more than 5% of the population and this number has increased rapidly in the last 15 years and is still rising. More than 10% avoid red meat even though not vegetarian as such.
In Israel a whopping 8.5% are vegetarians.
Reasons for becoming a vegetarian can be ethical, cultural, religious or for health benefits. In India there are more vegetarians than in the rest of the world combined, at 40% of the population, and this of course is related to the strong influence of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism in that country.

What prompted this post? Today I received an invitation to attend a celebratory dinner. A menu was supplied and I am being asked to select my choice of meal. There are 3 different options of main course for those with no dietary restrictions. But as some sort of concession to those like me, I can tick the box called "vegetarian option - pot luck"!! What a choice.

There are any number of exciting dishes you could produce for the likes of me. I have several cookery books devoted to vegetarian cooking - and it doesn't all have to be pasta or pizza either! So come on all you chefs out there.

The photos are of the fish market in Funchal, Madeira.

Sentient beings and vegetarians

Yesterday I wrote of no news being good news. If we change the order of this maxim that served my mother so well for so long, we could say “Good news is no news” and that makes me think about the media business generally, where it is certainly true to say that papers and other news media tend to sell to our voyeuristic tendencies and emphasize the bad news before the good! This then tends to portray a pessimistic view of the world and its problems, whereas we all know that there is plenty that is good about human nature and life generally.

In the animal kingdom, the same thing seems to be happening. The films of predators chasing and catching their prey are full of excitement, and make better television than endless shots of prides of lions or herds of elephants just lazing around enjoying the company of the group. This fact, says animal behaviourist Jonathan Balcombe, gives us a false impression of the natural world of prey versus predator. It is not all "nature red in tooth and claw," the expression of the day used by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850:

"Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

In Balcombe's recent book Second Nature: the Inner Lives of Animals, packed with anecdotal and experimental evidence, he shows us why he believes that animals can feel emotion, have a memory and a sense of their own lives, and even feel mental as well as physical pain. In fact the animal kingdom is much more sentient than many would like to believe. This of course has enormous ethical implications for us as humans and for our relationship with animals.

Animal cognitive science is a rapidly growing field and there is even a journal, the Animal Cognition Journal. Balcombe points out that our treatment of animals lags far behind our knowledge of them and this is an ethical issue that we all need to take on board. Balcombe has been a vegan for 30 or so years. I have been a vegetarian for several years now. Something in the order of 75 billion animals are killed to feed us each year. As I have written that sentence apparently 10,000 chickens have been killed to satisfy our appetite for meat. Quite apart from the feeling that I do not want animals killed to feed me, the world simply cannot sustain us any more at the top of the food chain. Meat is an extremely inefficient source of our food and energy when one considers the plants that have to be used to fatten the meat that we then eat.

I turned to a vegetarian diet after seeing the most beautiful large tuna being unloaded with winches from the fishing boats in Playa Santiago in La Gomera. What right have we, I thought, to allow these lovely creatures suffer to satisfy our diet when there is no need. Then I watched the lads fishing at the same port, and I watched with dismay as they threw their catches on the pavement and left them to thrash around until dead.

There is increasing evidence around that fish suffer, that they feel pain. See for example First Science.com Just because we have always done something does not allow us to continue to behave the same way unquestioningly. We do have choice and with the fish supplies dwindling in the oceans perhaps we should think more about making these choices to prevent unnecessary suffering and to increase sustainability, ultimately for the good of us all.