The Cow in the Living Room

A few months ago while I was surfing for events to post, I came across the CT Audubon Society's Annual Fundrasier. Dramatic images of soaring birds promoted this year's theme: Birds of Prey.

I glanced at the menu for the event: Chicken cacciatore.

I picked up the phone and did a quick survey of meat-eating friends and family. Did this strike them as odd?

I held back from posting about it: until I read the latest issue of E Magazine and saw the publisher of this Connecticut-based magazine may agree.

The Cow in the Living Room

By Doug Moss, Publisher E Magazine, Norwalk, CT

"I politely passed on the offer of a bison burger at a recent Ted Turner-hosted fundraising event I attended in New York City (no, I’m not a donor—we were invited as press). But I couldn’t resist a wisecrack and a wink to the server that it was only because I was full, having had a dog burger on the way over.

It is funny, though, how social and environmental change work. The bad news about meat has been plain as day and out in print for decades (the only new news is that we have now discovered that the industry is also warming the globe). Jim Mason’s Animal Factories (Three Rivers Press), written with Peter Singer and published in 1980, could be re-released today without a heckuva lot of updating. Mason traveled some 10,000 miles around North America with a photographer friend, documenting the horrific conditions on factory farms and what the industry meant for our health, the environment, world hunger challenges and animal welfare.

When the book came out, though, the press didn’t want to know about it. Neither did most of the environmental groups or, for that matter, many of the animal welfare groups that were content to focus on their puppies and kitties and charismatic wildlife, which raised a lot of money and sold a lot of wall calendars. Peter Singer’s seminal solo effort, Animal Liberation (Harper Perennial), published five years earlier in 1975, also fleshed out the topic, as have numerous books since—but it’s still steak and chicken for dinner 33 years later at many an environmental fundraiser.

Environmental leaders and advocates who resist change in this area need to realize that this is exactly how the world at large reacts when we come at them with our demands to properly recycle, eschew bottled water for tap, opt for the hybrid vehicle (or the bus or the bicycle), replace those incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents or use both sides of a sheet of (recycled) paper. It’s sometimes not easy to make changes to lifestyle habits that are so ingrained. But if those of us in the trenches are hammering the world at large to do so, we need to look at the poor choices we still make ourselves and do what we’re always telling others to do: change." Visit E Magazine to read more...

Comments

[Natalie]

Slow down. The US meat industry is mostly a gross greenhouse gas emitter and water polluter; however, you picked one of the few exceptions. There are responsible ways to eat meat. Ted grazes his bison in a sustainable manner. I invite you to check out his bison range and argue it is anything but an in-tact ecosystem. Free range grazing is sometimes the best land-use for semi-arid areas. Think about land that naturally only supports drought-tolerant grasses. Agriculture would be the less responsible option here because you have to irrigate and fertilize.....huge water quality and carbon impact. Grazing animals convert energy from grass into energy that we can use as a protien source. Free-range grazing can actually increase plant biomass and increase carbon storage.
In certain regions there are responsible options if you want to eat meat (hunting and free-range grazing). Granted we don't all have those options, but recognize the exception. Why scoff when it is offered to you? Hope that burger didn't get tossed.