Let us do a small thought experiment.
Let’s imagine that the meat and dairy industries are cancelled, that everyone is convinced of the vegan arguments. Which of the following scenarios is then more likely?
a) the fields where the pastures for cattle were are allowed to continue as pastures full of natural biodiversity, with cover for birds and butterflies and wild flowers of all sorts have their haven there, grazed by cattle who now live until they are 22 years old, and die natral deaths, unbothered by humans. The original aurochs gradually reappears because the races of cattle interbreed and these majestic buffalo like beasts are viewed in huge herds at a distance by our great grandchildren. Occasionally we grow a field of crops on a field naturally fertilised by their natural grazing activities.
or
b) since we cannot use the cattle we don’t keep them and cattle as well as other farm animals with the possible exception of ducks and geese are threatened with extinction. We use the pasture land which has no sense without animals on it for crops (food or energy) and since these are monocultures it stresses to extinction several species of bird, many plants and insects which only survived till now because we had pasture for meat and dairy industries. Organic farming has no sense as there are no animals to provide the dung, so we keep on using agrochemicals and reach peak phosphorus and peak potassium faster. There is then a massive famine during which two to three billions simply starve to death, and a further several million from diseases aggravated by malnutrition, or food wars.
I you answered A, I may say you’re a dreamer, and by far and away not the only one. And that, for now, is a very big problem.
Certainly Bible prophecy shows a vegan or at least vegetarian heaven – Jesus ate fish after the resurrection so probably that is still going to take place – but we are not equipped for that now any more than we can run and not be weary, or walk through locked doors, or fly up into the sky by our own mere volition. These things go hand in hand and we need to wait for them, if we are looking for them as believing Christians.
For now the task is to use the animals but to treat them as well as we can, to increase the standard of care for each species, to take te reforms made in this direction over the last 25 years as a good start, and build on them.
We are also going to have to address the population issue, as there is not any answer to the issue of agriculture and the limit on yields other than the control of population.
The “solution” of taking animals out is not a solution when they are on land not classed as arable. We cannot eat wild grasses or scrub. A goat eats the scrub, we milk the goat. That’s how we do it.
The nineteenth century was all about obtaining more and more farmed land. In the twentieth century we had to slow that process right down as a limit was reached on how much forest we can take and still have a future.
The twentieth century was all about mechanisation, innovation, agrochemicals, management methods, new varities like Borlaug’s dwarf wheat or cattle with hyperplasia.
Welcome to the C21st, where we are now relatively out of ideas, out of somewhere to go to keep food production ahead of the curve in population. So the only thing left to do is to work on the popuation. And with that comes a lot of Government intervention, probably very unwelcome Government intervention.
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Taking into consideration your last paragraph “Welcome to the C21st, where we are now relatively out of ideas, out of somewhere to go to keep food production ahead of the curve in population. So the only thing left to do is to work on the popuation. And with that comes a lot of Government intervention, probably very unwelcome Government intervention.”
I think that your article begs further elucidation no matter how acrimonious the outcome of Government intervention. Let us bounce around a few scenarious regarding ” working on the population”These are matters of huge importance in the context of the three pillars od sustainability. Namely Economic-Environmental-Social.
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There are various ways of working on a population, and of course the immediate danger is that they do tend to base on eugenics ideas. Eugenics is a very ugly idea which places some human traints above others. Howver, keeping random traits in the human family going forward could result in a wasted opportunity to make the human of th future cleverer, healthier, more positive in outlook and with an improved work ethic.
This is a very difficult question and for Christians something approaching the unanswerable question, especially given the express commandment to go forth and multiply and fill the earth.
Unlike most other commandments of God, the “pru ve rvu” imperative has been admirably fulfilled by the human race, so that the seeds of those around at the time of Abraham have indeed become as the sand on the beach or stars in the sky for multitude.
Quantity of people without a quality of education and behaviour can be self-defeating though. In Europe we have a situation where education and the urban life coupled with old-age welfare and other aspects of modern living have led to a lowering of the native population, and the means by which this is achieved often include the murder of foetuses which I am totally against. The spaces made are inevitably filled by immigration, and the immigrant populations often have a very different culture so that they have a tendency to increase their population, but teu have outlooks contrary to those of the societies that now host them.
They are thus encouraged to make up a bigger proportion of mankind, but they are not necessarily the ones with answers in terms of how to make the future more sustainable. So by having these open doors, we cannot ever achieve a turning point and we hurtle on to the point where there will be a famine, and the social unrest which will come then will result in a lot of surprises, very unpleasant surprises.
If someone comes as an economic migrant to a richer country, then part of the contract ought to be that future citizenship is not automatic, and also the right to reproduce while in the care of that other country ought to be conditional. This is the kind of government intervention which would be regarded as a n outrage against human rights, but it might be offered to those who are taking a lifestyle choice in their economic migrations, and not in cases where someone has been a genuine refugee with no real choices, and especially those who obeyed internatioanl law to the extent they could in their escape vectors and application to the first safe country.
As an overriding principle I believe in being very uncritical and unjudgmental to those who did not have any real choice. If someone does have a choice and should have exercised it with care, then it is much fairer to scrutinize the actions and situations of those who act out of choice, and to be more selective in how such people are accommodated when every resource is only getting scarcer.
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