Pointless hyperbole

One of my dear sons was with me in Jakarta this week while his mother was galavanting around Eastern Indonesia on a luxury yacht. While my wife is not prone to hyperbolic excess, most 26 year old sons are on occasion.

The thing that irritated me was his use of the vegetarian slogan 'meat is murder' - and then his attempt to defend his use of such a silly perjorative. He's not even a vegetarian himself - and he was dining on waygu beef at the time. It encouraged me to thing of my own equally stupid, but actually more accurate, slogan - 'vegetarianism is genocide'.

Murder is the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought. How this applies to eating meat I'm not quite sure. I have no objection to someone saying 'some (or even most) meat involves a level of mis-treatment of animals that I want no part of'. I don't mind (though I don't understand) someone deciding they are so uncomfortable with slaughtering any animal, that they will, themselves refrain from eating meat.

But I object to anyone seeking to make any version of vegetarianism obligatory or holding out that it is superior - morally or in any other way.

For those so tempted, I'd like to introduce you to a couple of my calves and their mothers and note that these beautiful animals would simply not exist if we did not eat meat.

They wouldn't exist because they are the result of centuries of human selection for human meat consumption.

The little Dun calf is a heifer and, provided she produces healthy calves without too much drama, she can look forward to as many as 15 years at Moora. Her mate, then a bull now a steer, will be grown to somewhere between 2 and 3 years of age, when he will be slaughtered for meat. We will give each of them the best life (and death for that matter) we can - not only because we respect all animals, but also because it's the sensible thing to do as a farmer.

If the veggie-nazis were to win the argument, these animals would lose their economic value and, eventually, would simply cease to exist. Were I given to hyperbole (which I'm not) I might accuse them (the veggie-nazis) of genocide!

Two things I would clearly note about my own world view: I don't think many factory farming systems are an acceptable way to produce meat - and the amount of meat in an average Australian diet is probably excessive. I think it's very important to dismantle the 'protection' that factory farming has built up for its way of doing things, but I am not so sure that specifying ideal diets has ever resulted in anything very positive.

A couple of years ago I leaned over a gate at Moora with one of my dairy farming uncles. We were watching a very young calf feeding for the first (or maybe the second) time. My uncle, who must have seen in excess of 10,000 similar little calves, clearly had not grown immune to the simple pleasure of quietly watching over a young animal and talking with me about how best to take care of them.

Farmers are murderers ?? You've got to be kidding!