Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Prominent Guardian Environment Reporter George Monbiot, who sometimes shows up at prominent climate events, no doubt after a long journey by sail, has decided to eat Vegan supplemented with Roadkill to “reduce his impact” on the global climate.
I’ve converted to veganism to reduce my impact on the living world
The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.
An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.
This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.
…
Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.
…
I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/09/vegan-corrupt-food-system-meat-dairy
I quite like Monbiot, or at least I find him more entertaining than most greens.
Sometimes he shows a flash of common sense, such as when he defended nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. Then he goes and blows it by saying something wild, such as telling everyone the corrupt media are keeping the end of the world a secret.
At least Monbiot is going to get enough protein, unlike some Vegans I know. The number of wild deer currently running around the British countryside, and all those impatient drivers trying to beat the rush, Monbiot is not going to starve – unless increasingly punitive British attempts to price driving out of reach of ordinary people finally succeed in clearing the roads of traffic.
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This jerk sees an instance of where a dairy farm is polluting and foolishly assumes they all do. Well, my uncle owned a dairy farm for years and never polluted anything. Monbiot is about as superficial a thinker as one can imagine. The bovine they picture is a milk cow – we don’t eat milk cows, we milk them, stupid. We eat herd cattle and we would not save them by not eating them, since they would cease to exist. So is it better to want those cattle never to live or to live and exist live until slaughter? Hmmm.. a question far beyond Monbiot’s primitive thought processes.
I commented in a similar vein before reading this.
I agree with everything you said, Arthur.
I guess the main question is why this guy thinks using 3 acres for human grain versus 10 acres for feed grain is such a benefit to the planet?
Now hang on did I read that right – we use 11m Ha of which 4m is arable and yet if we take 7m Ha out of livestock farming this would also lead to a reduction in arable farming to 3m Ha. Eh, how does that work, would he care to explain?
Well I guess there is some arable used for livestock feed, maybe 1m Ha. But if we cut out eating meat then that 3m Ha will need to double to replace the meat we won’t be eating.
Short version of Georges ramblings; “Eat your Greens”.
Logically that is where he is going.
Gang Green,stupidity so pernicious you can not parody it.
Not in todays politically correct idiosphere.
“Eat your Greens”.
oh, nice.
he’s just a major vein of dark humor now, right?
we can reboot all those jeffrey dahmer jokes now, in honor of the wingless vulture
Okay, we all go vegan. So must our dogs and cats then. No more “Fancy Feast” unless it’s carrots in avocado sauce. No more “Prime cuts” for dogs unless it’s turnips in tomato sauce. I bought “vegan” dog treats for my dog to see how they work. She eats the treat only after exhausting all other possibilities and searching high and low for other treats she might have hidden. (She does love potatoes, though!) Anyway, cats don’t do well without meat according to what I’ve read. I suppose we are simply supposed to free the cats and dogs, which will take care of much of the wildlife in the area and make walking interesting as the dogs form packs and search for meat for dining.
Cats will die for sure without meat.
I read of some vegans tossed in jail for starving a “beloved pet” cat nearly to death by feeding it a vegan diet.
When the asinine reaches the stage of criminality, we are in a strange world indeed.
Or maybe such people are actually as stupid as they are sometimes accused of being.
Cats are obligate carnivores. They derive the bulk of their water from fresh meat, and don’t free drink all that much out in the wild. The kill for sport as well as dinner, not necessarily eating their kill (as do many carnivorous mammals). In the home, there is sufficient water mostly in good quality canned wet cat food, but it better be low in non-protein content. Dry meal must be accompanied by free water ad libitum. There is a reason why there are lots of cute cat videos showing puss slurping out of the ivory throne. Dogs are omnivores, not obligate carnivores.
Stupidity annoys me. In this case it is my own stupidity in not seeing that Monbiot’s “road kill” is a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from the victims of the Greenie windmill religion. With the help of government subsidies they sacrifice millions of birds and bats every year to please their great God of Glonal Warming that rules by its Greenhouse Effect.
Completely mentally unbalanced. I doubt the authenticity of the “guardian’ relative to the human race.
No one in their right mind would read anything published by this publication. Says it all.
Well actually giving it a lot of thought I’ve come to the conclusion George is really onto something big for the planet here. Imagine a chain of butcher shops where we can drop off our sundry road kill for lots of folk like George to feast on and naturally being the freedom loving folk we are, there’s no need for any tax-eating health officials and the like as this is all organic foodstuff. No restrictive opening hours either, as they’d need to be open weekends as many of us work and say we picked up some juicy road kill on the way to work Monday, they need to be open weekends when we’re free to drop it off and empty the boot.Yep, all things considered, George is really onto something here.
And something will soon be onto him, like a collection of fleas and other parasites.
We will all need a hermetically sealed box in our car if we wish to avoid a similar fate.
George is only doing this to get dates. Chicks dig guys who eat road kill.
Now THAT was funny!
Didn’t I read somewhere that Italy has,or is going to,make it a criminal offence for vegans to feed their children a vegan diet?
“The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat.”
Willis dealt with this particular myth here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/11/animal-vegetable-or-e-o-wilson/
He’s certainly no vegan if he eats roadkill, no matter what his rationale is. It’s like saying “I’m a vegan, supplemented with McD’s hamburgers.” If he’s so interested in “reducing his impact”, I’m suprised he doesn’t eat out of dumpsters.
Moonbat is following in the footsteps of our ancestors. Long before our forebears could actually hunt and kill large animals, we fed our fat-hungry brains with marrow from the long bones of megaherbivores, accessed by using that Paleolithic multitool, the hand axe, and from eating the brains of smaller game, like bushbabies and monkeys, and each others.
Hence H. habilis, at most 600cc brain capacity, became H. erectus at 800 or more and H. sapiens at 1200 to 1600.
Versus chimps and our hominid australopithecine ancestors around 300cc.
Famous eccentric Victorian paleontologist and geologist William Buckland, who died insane, after eating his way through the animal kingdom, a practice followed by his also well-known son:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland#Known_eccentricities
That said, my friends in Northern Idaho regularly eat road-killed elk and deer, just cutting away the rotten parts.
And Oregon prisons used to feed inmates large road kills collected by state cops. Might still do, for all I know.
Does anyone have his address? There is a dead bloated skunk outside of town along the road I can send him. A bonus: lots of protein from all the maggots.
“Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.” Poor thing – maybe just a pest is sufficient?
So the change of diet is the reason why Moonbat is talking even more out of his arse than usual?! wow, I didn’t think that was even a possibility seeing as the bar is set so high.
I would call him lots of things, pestitarian would probably not be first on the list. Or on the list.
I recommend the roadkill from outside the Akubra Hat factory, South Kempsey industrial estate. The hares have their accidents on the change of light, so it’s service twice a day. (The theory that animals avoid factories reeking of dead animal pelts was probably promulgated by an academic who has since gone on to a stellar career as a climate scientist or Keynesian economist.)
“climate scientist = Keynesian economist.” brilliant!!!! They play on the same team as described below:
climate scientist = Keynesian economist= enemy of of freedom
Why is it of the slightest importance what George Monbiot says or does?
The man is a self-righteous metropolitan luvvie who owns property in the country.
If he were a real green, he wouldn’t be guzzling all that fuel to get down to his country pad from London all the time.
Would he??
I’m not impressed. Monbiot is sissy. I like Bear Grylls. He eats bugs for high protein diet
The obvious next stop for this train of thought is cannibalism.
😀
This is a great book. I looked for it in a bookstore in the Humor section. I found it in the Nature section.
Its inset drawing for scale is a section of highway stripe (4 inches).
https://www.amazon.com/Original-Road-Kill-Cookbook/dp/0898152003/
In the second half of the book you’ll get the idea that the author is a bit more serious than you first thought. That’s where he talks about reinforcing and enlarging the front bumper of your pickup so you can make your own fresh roadkill cheaply.
This might have promise too.
hmm eating roadkill. 17 kinds of meat from red green show