Animal Sacrifice

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What you're hearing right now is from a recent episode of This American Life. Now, I've had a love-hate relationship with this show for a long time. From the quality of the show, it's clear that they work hard on their stories. It's too bad most of them are either depressing or really creepy to listen to (alone in the house at night, at least). It seems the only good bits are in the old shows, or stolen from The Moth Radio Hour, because those people know how to tell stories.

You should listen to it. Did you? Good. If you didn't here's the long and short of it: An animal rights group stole a bunch of rabbits from a rabbit farm to save them from their slaughter for meat. The babies of those rabbits froze to death as a result of their parents' absence. The rights group donated the rabbits to a rabbit shelter, who had given them to new owners, and played legal keep away with them when the farm asked for them back.

Eventually, all of them were returned to the farmers, but not without lots of bad press and hate mail for every party involved. Camas Davis, the narrator and owner of an organization that teaches people to slaughter whole animals got it, the farmers who raised the rabbits got it, and the animal rights people got it. All of them believed they were acting humanely, but their actions engendered bile and hatred from the other side of the debate. What went wrong?

First, I would submit that hate mail and death threats are never justified in our society. I know it feels good. Self righteous anger is an addicting emotion because it releases a ton of dopamine into our brains. That shit is for monkeys, though, people. Seriously, the reason our brains make us feel so good to get mad at 'the other' is because that helped our ancestors survive in the jungle and the steppes. They raided our caravan? They invaded our encampment? Those apes stole fruit that we apes were gonna eat? Kill them!

And they did kill them. So much so that that attitude itself became a survival strategy. Everyone who was disinclined to it was killed off. In my opinion, it is one of the evolutionary shackles our past has wrapped around our ankles, and we need to cast it off if we ever hope to get beyond our present: moderate technological success that we can't sustain paid for by war.

We have to work hard to overcome it, because it is so hardwired into our chemistry. Telecommunications and the sheer size of Earth's population have allowed humans to give into that othering of people that feels so nice. Hop on the internet, pick up a phone, and suddenly we're anonymous, or at least hard enough to track down, and among so many people who don't know us that there's no societal consequence for our actions that affects us directly. So we keep doing it, because it feels good. Maybe we feel shame at it, hem and haw over the things we said, but eventually we shrug it off. They're the bad guys, anyway, we didn't do any real harm.

In most cases, like this one, no one's the "bad guy." The butcher and the farmers were trying to make a living, and treated the rabbits with respect from birth to death. The animal rights people wanted to save the rabbits' lives. The animal rights people demonstrated the possible consequences of demonizing the other side. It allowed them to steal the rabbits - that is, part of the farmers' livelihood - without remorse, and caused the painful death of other rabbits, something I'm sure they didn't intend. They attracted their fair share of negative attention for that, but that didn't stop the hate mail coming to the farmers.

Who were the people writing awful things to Camas or the rabbit farmers? You might think, "Oh they must have been crazy vegans or something," but then all you're doing is demonizing the other. Surely some of the writers do not eat meat, but I'm willing to bet that most of them do, or have by choice for a significant portion of their lives.

Which brings me to my point: Americans have totally lost touch with the sources of their food, especially their meat. The animal rights people probably don't eat meat, but I know from experience that the idea raising and slaughtering bunnies would make most people uncomfortable, even the guy down at Pizza Town getting a meat lovers'. Hell, I don't like to think about killing rabbits, but most people I meet, who I can reasonably assume are meat eaters, flinch when I tell them that I've killed a chicken before. I shudder to think what their reaction would be to how one goes about killing a cow.

It's a messy, smelly, morally difficult task to kill an animal for food. I like that Camas mentions how difficult it is to slaughter animals, which she does professionally to teach people how to do it. She says it never gets easier, and I believe it. When I slaughtered that chicken, I had a somber, spiritual sense, and I'm sure it will be there when I do it again. I think that sense is necessary, though. Why should we get to eat animals without thinking of their sacrifice? Shouldn't we understand the consequences of our diets, and be prepared to accept them or give up meat?

I think ignoring animal sacrifice for our food is what caused so much outrage at this case and at others around the country (like that of two working oxen at Green Mountain College in Vermont). Americans want to eat meat in blissful ignorance. When the media reminds us of the violent deaths that animals undergo for that lifestyle, it reminds us of the inner conflict we feel over eating another conscious organism.

It's time for us to stop ignoring the animals we eat. My good friend, and the first person who ever took time to teach me about farming, Douglas Jowett, once told me about the agreement that humans make with farm animals. We, as farmers, agree to take care of our beasts - to protect them from predators, pathogens, and bad weather - in exchange for the goods they can offer us, like meat, milk, and fiber. Perhaps that's why my old employer can slaughter 120 chickens before lunch without batting any eye, but the time a coyote got to one of the old hens, Princess, she broke down crying. Princess had done her duty on the farm, and was no good as a meat bird, but that agreement still weighed on the farmer. She couldn't euthanize her or abandon her to nature, so she kept her around, let her enjoy her life, and kept her fenced in at night. When something ate her, maybe that felt like she let Princess down.

I think that agreement runs deeper, between humankind and our livestock breeds going back thousands of years. Look at domestication from their point of view. The animals who were not very aggressive were the ones who would not survive long in the wild, but they were also the ones who could live among humans without getting spooked and killing everyone. Their docility gave them a survival advantage with us, because we had a use for their bodies, and thus had a stake in passing on their genes to a new generation. So we collaborated. We made sure they had babies, they gave us food, clothing, and transportation.

In passing on their genes, we selected the ones we liked, the ones that gave lots of meat or particularly soft fur. The animal rights activists would have them 'return to nature,' but that misses the point on several levels. Most cows wouldn't survive in nature today. Some could, and no doubt a few strains would regain their lost aggressiveness  but letting them all go would just risk losing their genes forever, and would represent a failing on our end of the bargain. That notion also ignores the fact that we are nature. We're just particularly successful apes that figured out how to get other animals to make us things we couldn't make ourselves. We're not the only species to do that, by far. Ants farm aphids the same way so they can drink the nectar they extract from plants. Ants are definitively part of nature, why aren't we?

I think what I'm trying to say is that we're on a team with all the cows, goats, chickens, sheep, rabbits, bees, ducks, and turkeys whose resources we use. We have to value them as partners in our collective fight for survival. We must also be careful not to subjugate them, true. Factory farms and the modern American diet are a huge failure on our end to uphold the agreement. It is not worth destroying our world with CO₂ and slaughtering masses of animals with no dignity so we can have chicken every night.

What is worthwhile is thinking on our relationship to meat. Cut down for your own health, our planet's health, and to stop demand for factory farmed meat. But don't swing too far the other way. We have been struggling alongside animals as long as our bones can remember. Let's reestablish a healthy partnership with them, one based on respect and mutual benefit.

Moo,
The Regular Farmer

Botany for Gardeners: Cells are Miracles that live Everywhere

I just finished reading my introduction to Botany, written by Brian Capon which I hope has prepared me to work through this behemoth of a textbook in the long, cold dark ahead. It's a fairly well-written book, and concisely describes the basic parts of a plant's anatomy their functions. After reading Michael Pollan's visceral, no-bullshit take on plants, which really gets you feeling and thinking like a plant might, this botany book tastes a bit sterile. The author also vacillates between glossing over subjects because the reader is not knowledgable enough and neglecting to mention important basics. Neither of these problems really detract from my overall opinion, however.

If there's one message I took away from this book, it's that plants are inconceivably complex, sublimely beautiful, and capable of feats of chemical engineering that humans will never match. They make and store their own food from sunlight, air, and water. Think about that for a second: with those ingredients, the average human would end up with sweat, urine, and a sunburn. Plants use that food along with minerals in the soil to reach deep underground, fan out over the earth, and reproduce. Reproduction isn't as easy as it is for us, either. Most plants either fill the air with enough pollen to choke a horse and hope it lands in the right place, or they produce delicate, colorful, fragrant structures that trick totally unrelated species into hand delivering the pollen where it needs to go. All with chemicals of their own making.

Sorry to bother you, ma'am. I'm here to clean out your
stamens and give your stigmas a once over.

If you have even the slightest interest in plants, you should read this book. It's a pretty easy read, and you'll start to appreciate grass, trees, and even your food in a whole new light. Before you go, though, I want to share two of the most striking subjects the book taught me about: seeds and stems.

Stems support the weight of the plant and its leaves, but might only be a few hundred cells across. The cells vary in type and size throughout the stem, each acting in concert with those around it to execute the functions of the plant. Let's look at the Lamium orvala (AKA Deadnettle) at right. The thin, light green stalk from which the leaves and flowers are growing, is the stem (I know, this is tough stuff to grasp). That stem has a relatively tough layer of cells around the outside to keep water and nutrients in and pathogens out. Within that there are bundles of cells that transport water up from the roots to the leaves and flowers, some that transport food down to the roots, and others that primarily divide to make the stem thicker as the plant grows up. Here's a beautifully prepared cross section of a deadnettle stem:

Before you go out and buy a microscope, understand that this stem was professionally sliced and dyed to look like that so it's easier to identify different structures. Every one of those globs is a plant cell, but they're all fulfilling lots of functions. Here are some of the tissues of a plant stem, as seen in deadnettle:

1. This row of small, tightly-packed cells is the epidermis, or skin, around the stalk. It prevents water loss to evaporation, and keeps out invaders like bateria and fungi that would infect the plant and destroy it.
2. The red cells here are xylem cells, which carry water absorbed by the roots up into the leaves and flowers of the plant. They are long, tubular cells that retain their sidewalls, but lose the top and bottom caps, allowing water to flow more quickly than it would through the cell walls. These vein-like structures are what spittlebugs, aphids, and other true bugs tap into when they feed on a plant.
3. The larger blue cells outside the xylem bundles are called phloem, and they carry the nutrients made by photosynthesis from the leaves to the roots, where they can be stored for use later. You can see the phloem forming a ring about 2 cells wide all the way around the stem. (remember PHloem = PHood)
4. This brown-looking group of cells, called the cambium, continues all the way around the cell between the large teal cells (see E) and the blue phloem cells. Its cells divide frequently and occupy space in one of three directions. Cells that end up inward become xylem or parenchymal (see E) cells, those that go outward become phloem cells, and some move sideways to make sure the cambium remains intact as it and the stem increase in circumference. In this way, the stem only grows in girth from within. A separate organ, an apical meristem* grows from the top of the plant, laying down new layers of cells to lengthen the stalk. The cambium inside the stalk can also be called a lateral meristem, since it grows sideways.
5. These big, blue beauties are called parenchymal cells, and they make up the bulk of plant tissues. They can store waste products, secrete healing resins, store fats and starches in roots, and perform lots of other functions depending on their location. A parenchyma you may have seen today is the pith in an orange.
6. This large space is just that. This stalk is hollow, probably allowing it to sway more in the wind than other plants. Many other green plants' stalks have a cortex made of parenchymal cells.
7. BONUS: I just learned about this kind of cell myself while reading about this microscope slide. The structures in the corners are made of collenchyma cells, which are a bit like xylem cells, in that they are long and tubular. They also grow thickened walls, creating fibrous masses running the length of the stalk. This gives the stalk a lot of structure and helps it stand up straight when it gets moved by wind or an animal. Plants kept in a completely windless place do not grow collenchymae as much as plants that get blown around. The fibers in a celery stalk are collenchymal structures.

And that's all in one species of one type of plant! Woody plants have all these structures too, but many of the cells "die" by building too many cell walls. They don't function as cells after that, but they provide much more structural support that living cells. There are also different types of cambia, xylem, phloem, and parenchymae, and some plants have other structures because of the way they grow. To learn about all of them, you'll have to read the book.

If you think all that's impressive, wait til you hear about seeds. They're indestructible escape pods that allow plants's genes to survive weather extremes and emerge when everything is safe for a new generation to grow. Seeds will be in an upcoming post, once I finish with some...experiments.

Mwahhahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,
The Regular Farmer

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*"apical" means 'at the apex or end', "meristem" comes from Greek meristos, meaning 'divisible', and German xylem, meaning 'wood.'

-Photo Bee and Flower: Author: John Sullivan Source: pdphoto.org. Public Domain.
-Photo Lamium Plant: Author: Kurt Stüber. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
-Photo Lamium Cells: Author: Micropix. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. I added the letters and arrows.