Hurry--Kill & Eat Animals Before They Go Extinct!

So . . . I have a really bad habit of starting a draft and then never finishing it or of nearly finishing it but then never publishing it. This bad habit is a cousin to my bad habit of saying in one post or comment thread that I'm very soon going to post on another topic and then never keeping that promise (despite honest intentions to do so); I'm sure some of you have noticed this latter habit--call me on it sometimes, would you? If I've promised to write something and haven't, and you've noticed, give me hell. Anyway, I wrote the following post at the end of November, so its commentary on the articles referenced isn't exactly timely, but the topic is still relevant.

From TreeHugger:

Ten things to eat before they die: not you but they--as in endangered foods from speciality and artisanal producers who are trying hard to stay in business. From Africa to the UK there are gourmet products made by local people whose production is threatened because of globalisation and and the homogeneous, supermarket dominated world that we live in. Organisers of a gala dinner event chose 18 ingredients from a list of hundreds of vanishing delicacies and narrowed it down to ten starring foods. The menu was devised in association with the Slow Food movement . . .

OK, mention of the Slow Food movement--grand romanticizer of "humane" meat-eating, a la Michael Pollan--was enough to make me certain that an animal was going to appear somewhere in this article. And sure enough, sheep are among the "endangered foods" mentioned: "Herdwick mutton, from hardy, slow-growing sheep in the Lake District, UK, come from the breed belonging to the late author Beatrix Potter. It was almost wiped out because of foot and mouth disease."

First of all, I'm more than a little disappointed that the writer's worry is that "it"--that is, the cooked flesh of sheep--"was almost wiped out because of foot and mouth disease." Could we perhaps be a little more concerned that the sheep themselves suffered terribly from, and were almost wiped out by, the disease? Dead flesh wasn't almost made extinct by disease; sentient animals were the ones afflicted and killed by it. And why am I assuming that "it" refers to "Herdwick mutton" rather than perhaps "the breed"? First, there's the way the sentences are constructed to consider, and then there's the fact that the author just referred to the sheep as "endangered food," which gives a pretty clear indication of what we're worried about losing.

From the original article:

Herdwick Mutton, UK
Unique to the Lake District, these sheep are slow-growing and hardy. The breed’s staunchest defender was author Beatrix Potter who bequeathed much of her land to the National Trust, on the condition that Herdwicks be grazed on it. By the late 20th Century, however, the breed had become rare outside the Lake District.

However admirable Beatrix Potter may have been for various reasons, and however kindly she may have treated her sheep until she had them slaughtered (I get the impression that they lived fairly natural lives, though I really just don't know, and I also don't know how they were slaughtered), calling someone who raises animals, however "humanely," for the purpose of ultimately killing them, selling their carcasses, and eating them their "staunchest defender" seems a stretch. I'd say their staunchest defenders are alive right now--caring for them in sanctuaries and educating people on alternatives to killing and eating them.

Finally, and this is a point that will come up again (and again and again, I imagine) on this blog, I am struck by the absurdity of the notion that we should hurry up and eat an animal before the species, or the "food," goes extinct. The only reason anyone can get away with saying something this obviously ridiculous is that these sheep, like cattle, pigs, chickens, and others, are domesticated animals whose worth we see only in what we can take from them, how we can use them.

If gray wolves were inching closer and closer to extinction, and a few hunters were supplying wolf meat as a "delicacy," we would not dare say something as inane as this: "Hurry up and try wolf meat before the wolves are extinct! You better get the hunters to kill one for you now before there aren't any left to kill!"

But the argument that we need to continue eating domesticated animals because if we didn't raise them to be eaten, their species would go extinct is a common argument, though a rather self-serving one. We speak and write as if they are lucky that we wish to kill and eat them because otherwise we never would have allowed them to exist at all. They should be grateful to be food! Odd.