Tuesday, July 3

DEATH BY NON-VEGANISM

Gas From Farm's Manure Pit Kills Five runs the headline on this sad story including the deaths of two children. If I were as venal, cynical and frankly idiotic as Nina Planck I would claim that this single incident is an indictment of the entire practice of meat-eating. As it stands, of course, this is just one out of many ways animal agriculture causes the deaths of children and adult humans in addition to its billions of animal victims. Note that what happened here was an outgrowth of the intrinsic components of animal agriculture - it wasn't some outside force or extraordinary occurrence. The tragic, disgusting details reinforce how "full of it" the industry is, by its very nature:

    Authorities say the accident began after Scott tried to transfer manure from one small pit to a larger one, measuring 20 by 20 feet and 8 feet deep. The pipe that was transferring the manure became clogged and Scott climbed in the pit to fix the blockage and immediately succumbed to the gas.

    Emergency workers believe Stoltzfus climbed in to the pit to rescue Scott and after hearing all the commotion Phyillis and her two daughters all went it to the pit and succumbed to the deadly methane gas.

    Methane gas is odorless and a colorless byproduct of liquefied manure. The Showalters milked 103 cows on their farm west of Harrisonburg. Farley says the Showalter farm was a modern dairy operation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It could have been human waste that created the methane gas in a septic system. Would that be an indication of the cost of raising humans?

soyjoy said...

Yes, exactly, it would be, by the logical standards of Nina Planck. Since the "Death by Veganism" had little to nothing to do with actual veganism and everything to do with a lack of any food (i.e. starvation), drawing such a conclusion from a septic tank disaster would be a good analogy for her reasoning.

But as I pointed out, I'm not using this one incident to indict the whole practice, only showing how it's part of an overall pattern of waste - the "waste" that gets into our food supply and kills children especially, the "waste" that gets into our freshwater and ruins it for our use or other animals', the "waste" that gets into the atmosphere and is a bigger contributor to greenhouse gases than all of human transportation, and the waste of sentient beings' lives. All of that and more adds up to an indictment of animal agriculture in my logical system, which, again, is rather different from that employed by Nina Planck.