Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: Should we slaughter cows? Defending "beef"

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Should we slaughter cows? Defending "beef"

Earthlings; Monty Python ("Architect Sketch"); Nicolette Hahn Niman (Defending Beef, 2nd Edition); Dan Piraro (bizarro.com); Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

#33 Me and cute baby cow Marley Rose. Kill her to eat? (boredpanda.com)

Earthlings shows how animals are treated as "food"

Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for [Killing and Eating] Meat

Attorney: It's "beef" not "cow."

Attorney and former vegetarian “Nicolette Hahn Niman sets out to debunk just about everything you think you know...She’s not trying to change your mind; she’s trying to save your world” (Los Angeles Times).

“Elegant, strongly argued,” says The Atlantic (named a "best food book" that argues against the horrific practices of factory farming).

“A Cattle Rancher wrote a book about how free range, grass fed beef is better than factory farmed. Slow clap,” commented @FoodNetworkVeg.

No one asked Buddhists about the killing of cows or the euphemism “beef.” If they had, the review might go something like this.

As the dead-meat or animal killing industry — from butchers and small-scale ranchers to sprawling slaughterhouse operators — responds to the pandemic, the climate threat, and the rise of compassionate plant-based substitute “meats,” Defending Beef delivers a virulent argument for animal killing (“meat production”) and consumption.

For decades it has been dogma among ecologists and environmentalists that the responsible killing of many forms of livestock (animals raised to be slaughtered) — goats, sheep, and others, but especially cattle — is Public Enemy Number 1.

Adorable cows that might uplift your Moo-d (bored panda.com)

Salmonella on slaughtered flesh

Farming-and-slaughtering erodes soil, pollutes air, contaminates water, damages riparian (riverside) areas, and decimates native wildlife, but that's mainly the industrial form of doing so.

As recently as 2019, a widely circulated Green New Deal factsheet even highlighted the problem of “farting cows,” methane overproduction due to an unnatural industrial diet of [~~Monsanto~~ Bayer pesticide-laden] GMO grains, cement, cannibalized cancerous animal corpses, and other filler material in livestock feed.

But is the matter really so clear-cut? Hardly, says attorney Nicole Hahn Niman. In Defending Beef, the environmental lawyer turned animal rancher argues we should kill cows because cattle are not inherently bad for the earth.

[If we let them roam around in place of the slaughtered and nearly extinct buffalos, they would even be good for the earth or at least the Midwest prairie lands.]

Never mind karma or Mother Nature.

The impact of managed grazing can be either negative or positive, depending on how animals are treated. In fact, with proper oversight, cows and other ruminant [grass and cud chewing] animals can play an essential role in maintaining grassland ecosystems by performing the same functions as the natural herbivores like the bison that once roamed and grazed this land.

With more public discussions and media being paid to connections between health and diet, food and climate, and climate and industrial scale farming — especially cattle farming, Defending Beef has never been more timely.

Could cowboys be Buddhists? Would they kill?

This newly revised and updated edition tries to fill in the argument, as the attorney-author attempts to address the surging popularity of “plant-based meat” (both highly processed “plant-based foods” and meat grown from cells in a lab, rather than on the hoof and slaughtered by butchers in factory abattoirs as shown in the documentary Earthlings).

Defending Beef tries to be a book about big issues and the personal journey of a lawyer, the author, who continues to argue for killing animals and saying it's for their welfare and for science.

Hahn Niman shows how grass-based, dispersed, smaller-scale farms [rather than big industrial operations run like parking lots and open sewers, as most cattle raising is currently done] can and should become the basis of American food production.

We love our companionate "pet" dogs but not our pet cows who love them? (boredpanda.com)

Cows think and feel ("sentience"). They weren't born to be killed (lovethispic.com).

Remember the Pico Rivera 41! We all cheered as cows broke out of the slaughterhouse. Run!

Please let us live and roam instead of eating us.

[Let's kill the old-fashioned way like our grandpas and grandmas killed cows and chickens and anything else consumers will buy wrapped in cellophane and plastic?

To really be in line with the author's principal argument, let's restore some of the land and bring back the American bison. We can even import some Tibetan bison or find them on California's Catalina Island.

Not realizing it, Hahn Nimana's argument is not for killing cows, or any grazing animal, but for letting them live, be safe, and graze. If she's a Republican now, MAGA: "Make America Graze Again." Raise them. Let them live. Maybe steal their milk, but don't kill them.]