Disagreeing with you is not the same thing as personally attacking you. The figure I can find for the percentage of the world's grain that is fed to livestock is 40% in 1997. Not sure what the current statistic is or what it is for other types of food fed to livestock, but at that time those who ate grain were more responsible for the deaths of the millions of mice that die from poisoning at grain storage facilities than those who ate meat. Again, facts are not personal attacks.
As a vegan, I’ve often heard the refrain that animals are killed when plant food is harvested – effectively, animal consumers indicate that vegans eat food whose production involves wholesale slaughter of small wildlife that lives on farms. And, as they argue, since harvesting grain kills a lot of rats, fawns and nestlings, and slaughtering a cow kills only one animal, vegans are responsible for more animal cruelty than meat eaters are.
This, of course, is easy to refute, because most of the world’s grain is fed to livestock, which means that the process of producing meat kills more mice, birds and insects, plus one cow or pig or chicken. But then meat eaters argue that they consume only “grass-fed beef” – cows raised on pastures, not fed on grain. “Grass-fed” beef is all the rage now. The fact of the matter is that the “grass-fed” label is nothing more than a vague, feel-good word for scamming consumers – right up there with “farm-fresh”, “pure”, “humane” and other make-believe nonsense. I’d love to talk about how “grass-fed” cows are actually raised (hint: it’s not all that different from “grain-fed” cows), and the impact this has on our environment. But that’s something for another time.
In this little post, I'd like to have a chat with you about harvesting deaths. Is it true that producing grain kills lots of wildlife? And how much is “lots”? A few million? Thousands? Dozens? And where does this silly myth come from anyway?
In terms of marketing tactics, the meat industry today is not all that different from the tobacco industry was in the 1950’s. One of their Standard Operating Procedures is to commission ‘scientific’ studies that paint a favorable picture of their industry, or to dig up independent studies that even vaguely support their business. They then use their financial resources to use media and advertising to promote them widely. Repeat a lie a few hundred times and it becomes a valid point of view. Repeat it a million times and you’ll have yourself an irrefutable fact.
In 2003, a guy named Steven Davis, who’s an animal science professor at the Oregon State University, published a paper about the number of animals killed in producing crops, versus beef production. He didn’t actually go out into the field and measure anything, oh no, no, no! He reviewed older, existing field studies, then performed some calculations using that data. To be specific, he used studies about the drop in the numbers of mice and other animals before and after a harvest. He then proceeded to declare that producing grain causes the deaths of lots and lots of critters, eating a diet of “large herbivores” (I think he meant cows, not rhinos) kills fewer animals than cultivating crops [Davis, 2003]. Predictably, the meat industry gobbled up that study faster than actors in their TV commercials hog down bacon strips. And they promoted it wherever they could, as often as they could. Soon, media as diverse as Time, NYT Magazine and Australian Broadcasting Corporation were writing about it. Why, they asked, is the life of a cow more important than the life of a harvest mouse?
Well, scientists being scientists, decided to examine these claims more keenly. And ............ they found that the research is correct. There are a lot fewer wild animals on farms after a harvest, than before. Ouch!
But wait a minute – how do we know that all those mice and voles and birds are dead? What if they are not? Did the scientists who did this research – the very same data that Davis used to announce that beef involves less cruelty than bread – try to find out what happened to those animals? The answer is, yes, they did. Let’s have a round of applause for them.
For one, Davis used a 1993 study by Tew and Macdonald. In 1992, T & M had a fun time fitting tiny little radio collars to cute little, furry, brown, wood mice, whom they called Apodemus Sylvaticus, because that’s their sciencey name. Not one or two, but 33 of them. That almost makes me want to quit my boring desk job and become a public-funded field researcher – now where’s that shady back-alley shop that prints college diplomas?
