Bull power doesn’t cause climate change – Posted in: Uncategorized

The world is on the brink of runaway climate change. It is real, it is happening and the consequences of irreversible climate change will be catastrophic. As the earth warms up the polar ice caps will melt and no longer reflect the sun’s harmful rays back into space, instead they will absorb heat.  The frozen Siberian tundra will also melt releasing vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere.

Drought, hurricanes, floods, millions of refugees, wars and around 50 per cent species extinction will follow.

We still have a small window of opportunity to stop this, but our addiction to fossil fuels for energy needs to be broken. Already we have heard that big oil is likely to get 20 percent of the seats at the UN climate talks in Paris unless we can stop them: http://action.sumofus.org/a/big-polluters-out-of-cop/?sub=taf It is plain wrong that the polluters should have a say in ours and the planet’s future.

Cows are also blamed for methane production, but it does not make sense that nature has created an animal out of synch with the environment.

It is humans who have put themselves at odds with nature, believing that human culture is superior and this process has accelerated since the industrial revolution. But what sort of superiority is it that can jeopardise our very existence?

It is true that cattle reared intensively, fed unnatural diets and locked up indoors all year wrong do produce methane, but they are not living as nature intended. It is also unconscionable that an obsession with meat-eating as evidence of development leads to the mass clearance of land to graze animals for beef. Cows are tragic victims of this brutal regime, they shouldn’t be blamed for man’s greed and stupidity.

At the same time hundreds of thousands of bull calves are slaughtered every year as a by-product of the dairy industry. What a waste when working oxen have been key to agriculture for millennia and still are in some parts of the world.

For thousands of years they have been put to work productively ploughing and harrowing the land and helping to build some of the wonders of the ancient world through their toil.

Theirs is clean energy. They don’t use fossil fuels and work in harmony with the earth. Their manure feeds the soil with rich, organic fertiliser, not the harmful chemicals from agri-business that degrade the earth even killing worms.

Bulls don’t compress the soil like tractors, their tracks draw water down deep into earth, they don’t get stuck in the mud and there are many places they can reach, which would be impossible for a tractor. They are also much more amiable a companion than a machine run and built by fossil fuels.

Ghandi once said that the earth had enough for everyone’s need, not everyone’s greed. To be sure we can breed fewer cows, we can raise them kindly and non-intensively, we can reduce our demand for meat, and we can value milk more and use it more thoughtfully.

However, fundamentally we need to be thinking clean, green energy. We need to be creating climate jobs, whether that is people to work with bulls or harnessing the power of the waves and wind, otherwise all bets are off and the planet faces a bleak future.