Anyone who has ever eaten meat should know that an animal died to provide it. Anyone who has ever been on a farm should understand that squealing pigs, clucking chickens, and bleating sheep are not pets. Those simple facts have eluded some students at Vermont’s Green Mountain College. This weekend, they are protesting the planned slaughter of a 10-year-old pair of working oxen known as Bill and Lou and the serving of their meat in the school cafeteria. Now that Lou can no longer work on the campus farm because of a leg injury, the two oxen will meet the same fate as countless other farm animals.
The irony is that Green Mountain teaches sustainable farming, which places particular emphasis on where and how crops are grown and animals are raised. Many advocates say such procedures increase people’s respect for the animals they consume. That’s not the way the activist group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is leading the opposition to the slaughter, sees it. But Green Mountain College would only be upholding its own values by going through with its plan.
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Perhaps the Globe feels that sufficient ink has been spilled on this story in its own pages, but the purpose of an editorial is to expound a point of view, a position, and this one falls quite short of doing so. In the first place, a reader might reasonably assume, reading this editorial, that only “some” Green Mountain College students (who should be rightly offended by the condescending suggestion that “simple facts” have “eluded” them) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are protesting the college’s decision to slaughter the oxen. That is not so: the story has received extensive national attention, and many who are deeply disturbed by the college’s decision, myself very much among them, are neither naive about the difference between pets and farm animals nor hardcore members of animal rights organizations. Nor are we uninformed as to the tenets of sustainability--that idea has taken sufficient, and critical, root over time and in many arenas of business, economics, agriculture, energy, and conservation. Indeed it could almost be termed a growth industry on many college campuses. But there are values and there are values, and the ones that the Globe says Green Mountain is “upholding” look more than a little self-righteous, hidebound, and tone deaf. Bill and Lou, the two oxen, were not raised from the outset as part of a sustainable, humane program for livestock destined for slaughter. They have spent their lives as workers for Green Mountain College--workers in quite the same sense that the people who maintain the college’s campus, prepare food in its kitchens, ensure that its functioning parts all function are workers. When they are too old or ill to work, and/or have given long and honorable service, those workers are not condemned to some “sustainable” transformation in order to fuel other entities. In an imperfect society, still we do allow for the notion of retirement. It is not synonymous with death. Sustainable practices are a fine and important thing. But the value of honoring those--human and nonhuman--who have served us long and loyally should surely trump a textbook and ideological insistence of the letter of sustainability’s law. That is the kind of ethics I would like to see Green Mountain college teach--and live by.
Pencilpusher,
Such a wonderful post! I agree with it all! Thank you so much for expressing better, and seeing more clearly, what I sensed but did not see as well.
Dear Martha1, Thank you. If you want to read a truly remarkable response to the Green Mountain situation--and if I had my way, it would be required reading for everyone, such is its wisdom, understanding, and grace--here is a link to an eloquent plea to save Bill and Lou from Rebecca Kneale Gould, a professor of environmental studies at Middlebury College, and thus a near neighbor of GMC. This piece ran in the Burlington Free Press about a week ago. I think it is as cogent an argument as anyone could ever make. If only it were heeded. http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20121105/OPINION01/311050004/1006/OPINION/Bill-Lou-When-exceptions-truly-matter
First rule of farming: never let the kids give pet names to their food.
Dear Boston Globe:
It is not necessary to eat meat, so why eat it? I have not eaten it for over 40 years. Albert Einstein didn't eat it either.
Sincerely,
Eileen Dunne
why eat it? Um becase it is good.
Friends,
Has anyone considered starting a petition to save the oxen on change.org ? That has been a successful strategy in other situations.
There have been several petitions on various platforms -- I signed 'em. Don't know what their influence has been, though.
Donate the animals to the Romneys...I hear The Mittster needs a few more tax deductions for his 2012 1040s...later on Mitt can give the oxen to the poor folk on the Cayman Islands...after all, their government has been very good to the Romneys.
Come on -- Bill and Lou (RIP) are a lot more like pets than not. They have names, they are recognized by people, they have or had relationships with people. They are workers doing our bidding, do we as a society not owe them respect?