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Feb. 8, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: Raising, killing and eating certain domesticated animals is the world’s second oldest profession, one dating back at least 8,400 years. Unlike the world’s oldest profession, Animal Agriculture has been assessed by peer-reviewed science as the cause of some 43 to 46 percent of the planet’s nine worst environmental harms. Remediation of these harms are more easily within our reach than all of our other efforts to tame our runaway population growth, energy use, depletion of irreplaceable resources and pandemics.
But, the economic institution of Animal Agriculture affects the income of more than two billion humans supported by global government aid and subsidies. These persons are consuming the efforts and wealth otherwise needed to alter the future. Those whom are not deriving an income from Animal Agriculture (most of the rest of us) are providing the market demand for this industry’s products, without which this ancient behavior would collapse as surely as the buggy whip factory in Goshen which disappeared as a result of the invention of the automobile.
Just in the United States alone, Animal Ag subsidies, direct and indirect, consume $160 billion a year in real money, contribute another $55 billion a year in damages to human heath and foster numerous collateral injuries to nature.
It is not difficult to see, as the world’s second oldest profession, Animal Agriculture is well past its utility as a proper human endeavor ... that is, if humanity wishes to escape extinction. The central question we should be asking ourselves: “do we really have the will to avoid our own collapse as a species on this Earth, or not?”
Twenty-three years ago, science began to turn its attention to Animal Agriculture which had been flying under the radar of scrutiny since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The evidence is now in. The evidence should be transformed into public policy and personal behavior. When may we start?
DON HENKE Goshen
