POULTNEY, Vt. – Lou munched grass on a farm at Green Mountain College, his legs unsteady and his days numbered. For a decade, the beloved ox and his teammate, Bill, worked the fields at the school, becoming the symbol of its farm program, until Lou aggravated a recurring leg injury this past summer.
Soon the pair will be on their way to a slaughterhouse. The college has decided, after exhaustive discussion that included input from students, to kill the oxen and serve them as hamburger in the campus dining hall.
Comments
When I was growing up in a rural community it was very common for people to eat animals that they raised and we thought nothing of it. I lived in my grandparents' house for a few years after my father returned from WWII until my parents were able to buy a house. My grandparents had chickens. We had fresh eggs, and we also ate a lot of chicken. That's the idea of small-scale farming. You raise your own food. I still raise most of the produce I eat. It's fresh and I don't use any pesticides. I buy eggs from a local egg farmer who has a couple dozen free-range chickens. When I want to eat chicken, I have to buy it in the supermarket. The fact that I am eating a chicken that I didn't raise and that I don't "know" does not make it any less a chicken that was once a living animal. The difference is that the chickens I buy at Stop & Shop or Trader Joe's probably weren't raised as humanely as my grandfather's chickens.
By slaughtering and eating the oxen, the students will learn about the cycle of our food. If you raise an animal humanely the animal will have lived a "good" live of reasonable comfort. If you slaughter the animal humanely you are closing the cycle.
If you choose not to eat meat, that is a value that others should respect. We should all eat less meat. It would benefit our health. However, the reason to avoid meat has nothing to do with the immorality of raising animals for food. Use of animals for food is a neutral value. We can do it humanely on small-scale farms, or we can do it less than humanely on factory farms. That makes all the difference.
It's nice to have the luxury of choice here. Bear in mind that if man had not begun to eaten animals, we likely would never have survived long enough to evolve to our current level of intelligence (and empathy). A similar argument can be made for many of man's more reprehensible tendencies.
In any event - however popular these animals might be, their care and feeding comes with significant costs (especially as they become aged), which have to be borne by someone. If the pro-animal folks want to take up that burden, then perhaps the subject changes. Otherwise, if the animals can't be retired gracefully, or placed in reasonable custodial care, then an unpopular decision has to be made and carried out. It's called responsibility.