[usr 2]
There is an entire young male comedy genre centered around making fun of Vegans, and maybe cyclists, in the style of Newcastle’s Isaac Butterfield. There is an entire tranche of society that secretly can’t stand PETA, Lynda Stoner (no matter how stunning she was in Cop Shop in 1981), and animal activists generally, and they’re not just young males.
But, Victoria has a message here that needs to be considered.
My home city has an abattoir that “processes” up to thirty thousand sheep per week. Process is a euphemism for stunned by electrocution to the head, hung up on a hook head down, throat cut, skinned, gutted, and band sawed (remember that screaming butcher shop band saw sound?) into pieces and packaged for local distribution and export, to a vast number of people keen to pay top dollar for the meat. An Imam even says some appropriate words to ensure it’s halal goodness to enable it to be sold to Muslim customers.
Cattle get the same treatment, and personally, cows are cute. Such beautiful animals (such tasty animals some of you will say). It’s true.
Most of us would turn vegan in a moment if we had to kill, butcher, skin. That’s the way we like it- totally isolated from the reality of how our food arrives on our plate. It comes in lovely plastic trays, and celebrity TV chefs will show you how to cook it in a thousand ways, and even to select the correct wine to go with it.
You have to realise I’m writing this from a position of sympathy with her views. I have bouts of vegetarianism in my life and currently am a vego (with milk and eggs), following my Buddhist values. Well, following a love for Indian vego food that I can do ok making as well. The current bout started after a disturbing dream involving people and animals being killed.
Now as far as the book goes, it’s not a ripping read. Ever been to see one of those Marvel action flicks in the past 5 years? All explosions, jerky camera running following the action, very short shots, making you wonder if there’s something wrong with you. I always fall asleep through those. The book is roughly aligned into 3 main hunks, “The Connection” “The Cruel Countries” and “To a kinder world”, but inside each are staccato paragraphs, each with its own heading, machine gun ideas, not really coherent, and its all pretty predictable. Spoiler alert- in the true spirit of national self hatred, Australia is apparently the cruelest of all countries, with the biggest sub section demonstrating exactly how bad.
There’s not a lot of balance in this or any work like it, it’s just prepare to be berated for how bad you and I and especially your Mum and her generation were. The nuance of paradox is totally ignored. An example- “the circle of compassion-cats and dogs.” She tells us how most Australians love their cats and dogs. I have 4 dogs and my sister is a crazy cat lady. And the paradox… cats are carnivores, so are dogs largely. If you don’t feed them meat that’s cruelty, to get the meat you’re slaughtering animals.
Another paradox- plant based diets. Say if you killed a cow (with its cute black eyes full of fear) you’d feed your family for a year if you didn’t waste parts that our smug society would never touch (tongues, intestines, organs). But I dig my vegetable patch to get 50 kgs of salad veg and I’d have killed 200 worms with the hoe. Run a tractor with a plough through a field and the number of dead insects and worms would be in their hundreds of thousands, in fact there are always attendant (carnivore) pied larks riding every tractor to pick up a free feed of mashed worms and beetle larvae in its wake. Indeed some schools of buddhist monastics avoid a lot of “plant based” foods for this idea – the sheer carnage of soil organisms in order to grow them.
Call Japan a pariah state for killing an 80 tonne whale (for scientific study- such as how good it tastes as a sashimi or lightly grilled), and ignore the calculation that a whale’s food is tiny prawns called krill that weigh a tenth of a gram each. How many krill lives does it take to grow and nourish an 80 tonne marine mammal?
My particular dislikes are a couple of partisan political dabbling in the book. She mentions as fact in “other issues” on page 88 that the Great Barrier Reef is dying because of Climate Change. That’s actually wrong- yes there is some climate change, and yes the reef gets periodic bleaching, cyclone, and crown of thorns starfish events, but Dr Peter Ridd (Marine Biologist formerly of James Cook University, a renowned authority on the reef) has said the reef is in excellent condition. These “facts” rolled off the cuff that are not scientific facts deserve to be pointed out. You’re probably going to argue with me here, because you have been convinced the Great Barrier Reef is dead or dying – but believe me, or Dr Ridd more to the point, it’s very much alive and healthy. The problem is failure of journalistic integrity, and the spreading of misinformation in the form of scientific fact. It’s almost like we need to revisit what scientific and journalistic rigour actually are – it’s not emotion, it’s not what we heard from someone else, it’s not what we’d like it to be.
The other area of annoyance is tacked onto the end of the lengthy “chapter” about how despicable Australia is, is a really hateful diatribe about Scomo and that previous government. But then she notes Labor was elected in May 2022 and she only gives them a sentence, that she looks to them for hope. Of course anyone who has ever lived knows that the colour of t-shirts changed but nothing at all else has and no changes to animal welfare have been rolled out. Woohoo.
She mentions Buddha as an animal rights advocate, quoting him on page 22. “All beings tremble before violence, all fear death, all love life. See yourself in others.” Wise words and I certainly try to live by them. However, he also discovered the first of the Four Noble Truths “All Life is Suffering”, and the second “Suffering is caused by desire and grasping.” Simple truths to life. The whale gulps half a tonne of tiny prawns in one mouthful. The wheel of birth, life, death, rebirth turns, the clinging to life and self sparks another birth so it can happen all over again. Only half a context here. Again, no matter what we do, my dog is a carnivore, the whale keeps eating, the farmers keep ploughing the worms to produce all our lovely plant-based products, there is no escape to this (other than realising complete enlightenment and leaving the cycle of birth and rebirth, not an easy ask).
Aaaanyway, “the way forward” has her converting everyone to almond milk and free range eggs. As I remember going outside one morning to greet my home chooks, a mouse ran out startled from under the step and my chook grabbed it, screaming its little mousy death cries, as she (giant TREX in action) pecked it to death and ate it in one gulp like those lizard aliens in that old series V. Yep the chooks are omnivores too and I’ve seen them cannibalise one of their own fallen number in a friend’s chook run years back. They’re cute, but slightly dinosaur like. I eat my own free range eggs from those girls daily.
From the perspective of form, this book presents itself as non-fiction, whereas it is entirely an opinion piece. It is not in essay form with arguments backed up by academic reference. There is not a lot of journalistic skill in it, and the way 275 pages of non-sequitur ideas hit the paper posing as facts when at the most cursory probing reveal themselves as opinions – that’s what’s most infuriating. It’s not a thing that presents a clear set of ideas, and uses normal essay writing style to convince the reader of that position and its balanced truth.
In summary- tedious staccato read, odd style, lacking journalistic or scientific rigour, impractical, failure to note the paradoxes I’ve touched on, and a lack of a wise approach to make a difference where it could. It’s also an all-or-nothing position. Setup robust animal welfare systems to minimise suffering and cruelty in animal production, and your country is still the worst of the worst for allowing the eating of meat. It’s also so last year, even now, more the stuff of a blog or current affairs related YouTube channel than a classic to grace your grandchild’s bookshelf.
