Sunday 28 August 2011

A New Hugh

I don't know whether to feel annoyed or vindicated. Presumably prompted entirely by my cartoon of him looking like a pig when eating pigs, then looking like a fish when eating fish, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall appeared in  yesterday's Guardian dressed as a cabbage, to announce that these days he is almost completely vegetarian.

Since you are obviously reading this, Hugh, congratulations. Your article finally acknowledges that  "we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm." He (I think I can drop the vocative now) still believes in "being a selective omnivore", which seems to me pointless dallying when he's already admitted that meat eating is cruel  and environmentally damaging, but I'm ready to call a truce. I'm just glad that I didn't completely miss the opportunity to roundly insult him before he went public with his "small revolution."

It looks like my years of passionately loathing this particular man are over, but nevertheless I am pretty glad. His unexpected conversion from the church of bacon is a single step in a slow but inexorable movement away from meat. It may be that his aubergine and green bean curry looks like dog-sick with grass in it, but I am the last person to discourage anyone from eating it.

Saturday 20 August 2011

The Badger as Geezer

When AC Grayling invites me to become a fellow of his private university, New College of Humanities, I intend to accept, though, like Richard Dawkins, I will only be in it for the money. I see a future for myself as a professor of Badger Studies. In the absence of a job, conventional hobby or social life, I would like to relate my findings on the portrayal of badgers in various media, and the impact of this woodland critter on the popular consciousness.

Unit 1. The Badger as Geezer.



Anyone who was a child in the early 90s has to be against the badger cull. To us, the idea that badgers live in the countryside at all is strange and unnatural, since our young minds were formulated under the influence of a badger who is far from rural in his lifestyle. Badger is a perennial child, mischievous innocent and lovable cockney. For us, to kill the badger is psychologically unhealthy. To kill the badger is to kill yourself.


Unit 2. The Badger as Gentleman.


Kenneth Grahame's Badger, in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is more of an establishment figure, treated with deference and senior to his companions both in age and wisdom. His outlook is conservative. It surprises me that any patriot or traditionalist can be in favour of culls, when surely Badger is the embodiment of a nostalgic ideal. It suggests to me that conservatives who favour the culls were not read to enough in their childhoods, and this parental neglect expresses itself in an attitude to authority which both espouses old-fashioned values and vents their subconscious desire to kill their fathers, who wounded them with emotional detachment.


3. The Badger as Fear.



 Now we have it. This is the badger as chaos, as enigma, as a threat in teddy-bear's clothing. Notice how the badger multiplies uncontrollably, and is associated with poisonous elements of nature. The twenty-first century badger combines the menace of wildness with the alienation of highly developed technology. It is a subversion of the friendly and humanised badger of the twentieth century. It may even be in some sort of gang. It's starting a riot.

Unit 4. The Badger as Badger.


That's better.

I feel a bit sick after this mammal-themed wallow and I think I know why. It's because pictures of animals have little to do with animals. It's because we grow up lavishing affection on Peter Rabbit, or a pet rabbit, but also with the gradual absorption of the idea that it's ok and more adult to enjoy the same creature in the form of rabbit pie. It goes back to what I said about Nim Chimpsky: we enjoy animals when we give them aspects of the human, but take away those fictionalised attributes and leave them as they actually are - real, sentient creatures - and it's ok to treat them with complete callousness. Saying this, as we do implicitly, is saying that we only care for ourselves. Or, that we can admire something cute or beautiful, but the enjoyment we get out of it does not extend to respecting it, or valuing things that are outside of our enjoyment.

I expect anyone who looks at this will have grown out of cartoon animals. It would be nice if adulthood necessarily meant growing into caring about the real thing.













Sunday 14 August 2011

Lions and Tigers and BRICS

While Britain discusses the benefits of taking its poorest and angriest people and throwing them - and their families - out on the streets, international news suggests that our housing problems are going to be upstaged by the end of the century, by which time we will need 'at least another two planets' to 'sustain consumption patterns.'

Two items in the news that have caught my attention this week have been:
  1. Reports of the growth of illegal trading in ivory and rhino horns, fuelled by China's economic boom.
  2. The Environment Investigation Agency's press release on the 11th of August, accusing China of opening a loophole in its ban on trading tiger pelts.
In case anyone's wondering, this isn't my annual bash-China weekend (I align mine with Morrissey's): these stories relate to the failure of laws protecting endangered animals, and in both cases the market is straining against regulations. As a booming country, it would not be surprising if China had bowed to pressure from commercial tiger-breeders to relax the trading ban, although it has not admitted to doing so. This lack of transparency and discomfort with the world's reception of its environmental and wildlife-related policies is, again, unsurprising.

Both stories fit in nicely with my general sense of helplessness about the future. Summits trying to safeguard the world from the environmental consequences of the development of a new economic A-team (the big players of which will be Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa: BRICS) have shown a tendency to flop. The worst example is the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, a watered-down, ineffectual agreement drafted by the US, China, India, Brazil and SA that is not legally binding but merely to be 'taken note of'. The next big thing on the agenda is the Rio Earth Summit, 2012, but it's hard to be optimistic about its success in forcing developed and developing countries to behave themselves in a big way. The Earth Summit website says 'The current paradigm cannot continue,' but nobody's found a good way to put the brakes on: if a country wants to shirk on or break its promises, we just cannot stop them. I'm blaming capitalism for all this. You can blame something else if you want to.

Today's cheerful message (by the way, it's my birthday) seems to be that tigers are going extinct, and so are rhinos, and so is the earth. C'est la vie. At least we have two new planets to think about. How about keeping things peaceful by giving one to the rich and one to the poor, so that the second ends up like a big teeming council house but the first one is comfortable? And another planet, perhaps, for people who refuse to believe that any of this is happening at all.

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Fish Fight: a bit of a cop-out.


Hugh's Fish Fight: The Battle Continues surprised me with Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's transformation from foodie Etonian pig-in-a-wig to smiley-but-slightly-drawn campaigner for marine conservation.

In a nutshell, Hugh is succesfully drumming up interest in reforming the EU's Common Fisheries Policy. As it stands, the CFP's quota-based system of controlling how many and what kind of fish a fisher can legally bring in to land results in a lot of fish, dead or half-dead, being chucked back into the sea after having been caught. A hideous waste of life, or, as Hugh puts it, of 'lovely edible fish.'

My impression throughout the programme was that Mr F-W is less concerned by the serious ecological consequences of over-fishing (which is destroying habitats, destabilizing and contaminating eco-systems and endangering species) than by the idea that some of the plundered sea-creatures will fail to end up on his plate. Hugh's attitude to most living creatures is a meal-minded form of compassion which is alright in its way, but falls short of a real respect for life (eating a pig is not respecting it, Hugh) and of realistic sustainability: you cannot feed the world from a high-minded smallholding, nor does Fish Fight strike at the heart of the overfishing problem.

Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki has expressed support for Hugh's anti-wasting campaign; she has also said, 'We are not going to fish less because of this ban on discarding.' That is good news for fishermen but does not acknowledge the fact that we're going to have to fish less - a lot less - given that the world is predicted to run out of wild-caught seafood by 2048.

Fish Fight highlights an important issue and has achieved some good things: it was a driving force behind the reformation of the CFP, the new version of which should be put into action from 2013. Nevertheless, it never properly acknowledged the importance of not eating fish, and it has been shown that while it has boosted the sales of 'unpopular' fish it has not dented the overconsumption of endangered ones.

Besides, anything touched by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is bound to carry the taint of food-snobbery: that smug whinging over having to be seen holding a Tesco bag; that cringing conversation with fellow organic-fetishist Prince Charles where Charles was appalled to learn that cod is still the public's favourite fish: "They can't get off it!" Shame on you, you nation of plebby cod-heads! Haven't you heard of Hugh's Mackerel Mission?

The fact is that producing meat  and fish ethically, sustainably, cheaply and plentifully isn't an option. Not until they start selling stem-cell meat, that is. But I can guarantee that the organic brigade will be out waving their pitchforks at the first mention of that.




Saturday 6 August 2011

AgriCullture

Very good article in the Guardian today, which describes the badger vaccination programme being deployed in Gloucester over the next five years. As well as starting with a thrilling mini-adventure about a badger called 007 (lured into a cage with peanuts, hence the cartoon) the  article discusses the pros and cons of using vaccination to deal with bovine TB, instead  of culling. On the one hand, it is humane and doesn't cause perturbation, which is a major drawback with the culling method. On the other, vaccination will not result in immediately dramatic improvements in TB hotspots (it's a vaccination, not a cure: there will still be infected badgers) and it is prohibitively expensive.

The coalition government is characteristically uninterested in planning for long-term solutions when it can butcher budgets: five vaccination schemes were cancelled in 2010 on cost grounds, though one potential contractor claimed that estimated costs were inflated by 'red tape and bureaucracy.'

The thing to remember is that bTB is a disease that badgers caught from cows, and cows (or rather, the farming industry) are the reason that we all have to fuss about badgers being poorly in the wilderness. The obvious solution, and one that is much more practicable than taking potshots at a protected, wild, nocturnal animal, is to vaccinate the cows.

Bureaucracy really is the villain here: cows that have been vaccinated against TB may have a positive reaction to the tuberculin skin test, which the EU uses to identify infected livestock. I can identify with this experience - when I was at school I wasn't given the BCG vaccine because when they gave me the skin test I  came up with a rash like a plate of salami. It meant that I was already immune. Because they get these reactions, immunised cows cannot be declared TB-free, according to EU law, and cannot be exported. It's all pretty stupid.

I am in favour of vaccination programmes like the one in Gloucester. I am even more in favour of developing an oral vaccine. But for the speedy easing of a crisis that can cost farmers up to £3.5 k a month, and has demanded hundreds of millions from the taxpayer over the last ten years, changing the EU testing method so that it can distinguish immunity from infection, thus enabling the vaccination of cows, is by a long way the most sensible solution.

Monday 1 August 2011

Theatre of Blood


Readers who, like me, keep a keen eye on those goofy animal stories halfway down the Daily Mail homepage (stoner chihuahuas, anyone? Chocoholic fish?) will have noticed that bullfighting in Spain is to be 'developed and protected' in the face of well-publicised movements to institute a ban.

A statement made by the Ministry of Culture, which described corrida de toros as 'an artistic discipline and cultural product' reinforces the bloodsport's status as a symbol of Spanish nationalism, and comes as a direct response to last year's banning of bullfights in Catalonia.

The Catalan campaign against bullfighting was itself interpreted as a defiant reaction to the striking down of Catalonia's statute of autonomy in July 2010. The campaign - to extend animal protection laws to include the bulls and horses that are (ab)used in bullfights - was called Prou! - 'Enough!' in Catalan. The language issue highlights the political tensions between Spain and its autonomous communities: public use of Catalan was repressed under Franco and although its usage has been restored and encouraged since 1975 it is still a language that asserts difference from the Spanish mainstream.

Historically bullfighting is no less Catalan than it is Spanish, but corrida in the twenty-first century is posited as a kind of blood-soaked national anthem, and marketed as a tourist industry. Despite its cultural status, it does not necessarily mean much to ordinary citizens: most spectators of bullfights in Madrid are tourists, while in 2010 more than 60,000 inhabitants of Madrid signed a petition calling for a vote on banning them. The regional government's response was to declare the corrida protected as a part of Madrid's cultural heritage.

As is often the case, what should be a question about fundamental animal rights has been overshadowed by different political and emotional issues, in this case disputes about regional autonomy and national identity. Ideally EU animal protection laws would be stringent and comprehensive enough to protect all animals under its jurisdiction; the right to life should not be subject to cultural relativism. It is disgraceful that a tradition that involves the torture and slaughter of goaded and frightened animals can still be defended and even praised as an 'artistic discipline and cultural product.'

A country can embrace its history of warfaring, imperialism, slavery or head-shrinking, as the case may be - the  past should not be forgotten or censored, good or bad. The continued development and protection of a practice that is clearly in breach of internationally accepted standards of animal welfare cannot be justified or, I hope, sustained.