Colorado professor enters Meat Is Ethical competition
10/05/2012
In spite of the international renown for expertise in the subject that the professor of animal welfare at Colorado State University enjoys, the newspaper excluded her from its six finalists. So Dr Grandin, who has used expertise in autism to interpret animals’ reaction to stress, has made her submission to the competition available to a wider audience on the blog on the website of meat industry research organisation, the AMI Foundation (Dr Temple Grandin’s essay).
In her submission, Dr Grandin concluded that it is ethical to eat meat, although there are practices that must change for the human race to be “true stewards of animals and the environment”. She argued that the relationship between humans and the animals we eat is symbiotic, or in other words beneficial to both. She has been asked many times how she can teach and write about animal welfare and also work as a consultant helping packer firms to design their abattoirs.
“I answered this question in 1990,” she wrote in her essay, “after I had just completed installation of a new piece of equipment for handling cattle at slaughter plants. I was standing on a catwalk, as hundreds of cattle passed below to enter my system. In a moment of insight, I thought, none of the cattle going into my system would have existed unless people had bred and raised them.”
Much of the agricultural land on the face of the earth is unsuitable for growing crops and, therefore, allowing cattle, sheep and goats (the mainstays of the leather industry) to graze there is the best way of using that land to grow food, she said.
Furthermore, she insisted that a correctly used rotational grazing system is an effective way of encouraging plant growth on land unsuited to growing crops, which in turn helps capture more carbon from the atmosphere. “Ruminant animals that eat grass are not the environmental wreckers that some people say they are,” the Colorado-based academic said. She suggested good cattle farming may compare favourably with rice production. Although it is a hugely important food source in many parts of the world, Dr Grandin said rice paddies, with their warm, waterlogged soil, are likely to account, along with coal-fired power stations and landfills, for 80% of methane emissions.
A final point in her short essay was that eating meat helps people to have healthy balanced diets. She said she herself becomes lightheaded and lacking in concentration if she follows a diet without animal protein.
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