Eating Meat | Environmental Impact of Eating Meat

Eating meat - Environmental Impact

Meat eaters must be licensed to consume meat.

Most people know that eating meat has huge environmental effects. Animals that provide meat consume massive amounts of resources – water, grain and land. Indirectly the footprint of animals bred for human consumption is even larger, with huge amounts of tropical forest being lost both for cattle ranching and for growing soya and other crops to feed to beef, pigs and cows. Land is rapidly degraded by animal farming as can clearly be seen in South Africa and elsewhere.

Then there is the matter of overfishing – of which more later. This can be laid directly at the door of the animal feed industry, when in the 1970s and 80s industrial fishing fleets were used to reduce massive pelagic stocks to a shadow of their former selves to supply the animal feed industry. So we know that meat eating has humungous implications to further upset our ecological balance, which it has already seriously disrupted.

The problem is that people are so divorced from the source of their food and from their environmental footprint. Even fifty years ago the killing of livestock was far more a part of day to day life than it now is. Today any carnivore wishing for a meat fix simply has to pop down to their supermarket and pick up a cling-wrapped package of meat – that bears no resemblance whatsoever to a living animal - to cook up that day. There is also no record of the impacts of what went into producing and bringing this meat to market.

In order to deal with this situation I have a solution – licence all meat eaters.

In order to get a licence to eat meat every individual who wishes to consume meat must fulfil certain criteria. These should include at least the following steps:

The meat eater must rear any animal or fowl they wish to eat from young until it is ready to eat. So if you want to eat chicken, then you have to bring up baby chickens until they are big enough to eat. If you want to eat steak, bring up a cow from youth to being slaughter ready. Same for pigs, mutton, lamb, veal, etc.
They must then kill the animal themselves, in a humane manner while offering thanks for the life of the animal and the resources which have gone into bringing the animal to its present state of existence.
They must then skin and dress the animal, saving all the useful parts such as the pelt/skin and other offal.
They must then butcher and dress the animal, to prepare it for eating.

Of course all of this should be done under supervision of a trained butcher or someone who has the know-how of how to carry out the work. In other words it would be like getting a drivers licence.

Different licences would be applicable to eat different animals. You could get a chicken licence, a lamb licence, a mutton licence, a piglet licence, a bull licence and so forth.

No licence, no meat.

By following this simple plan we would halve or even quarter meat consumption globally. Most people would be completely unable to eat meat that they had raised and killed. Of course a few would be able to and best of luck to them. However due to the respect they would have for life there is a good chance they would eat less of it.

The sooner we bring our meat into the glare of our daily lives the sooner the cruel and environmentally damaging practice of meat eating will be curbed. Even if meat licences did not get people eating a lot less meat, they would at least get people to examine an issue that receives far too little attention.

The one difficulty with this proposal is the matter of fish and seafood. Many would be unable to be near the source of the seafood to obtain it to catch, kill and eat themselves. My thinking on this aspect goes like this – if you cannot raise it, catch it and process it yourself you should not have it. End of story. This would in turn cut down on the rape of our oceans and of overexploitation of the marine ecosystem. It would reduce food miles – the impact that transporting food around the world has on climate change.

Fish are becoming increasingly seriously overexploited and many are now at less than 10% of the level of original fish stocks. We see sharks becoming ever more endangered simply because of the increase of wealth of Chinese people. The Chinese deem it an important status symbol to partake, in a conspicuous manner, of shark fin soup. That the shark fin adds little or nothing to the soup besides its exclusivity is little matter. Shark fin soup is about status.

If all our seafoods become more and more rare they will become more and more expensive. This is what I call the ‘extinction pays hypothesis’. The more rare the resource becomes, the greater the demand, especially amongst the nouveau riche and those with little wit as far as their environmental footprint is concerned. So with seafood, if you cannot catch and process it yourself, you cannot have it. That would be that.

Of course these two proposals – licensing of meat eaters and limitation of marine organism consumption, run directly counter to the way the market works.

Well folks, given the mess that we are in, which can be laid directly at the door of the dominant global economic system, the more urgent becomes the need to change the very system itself.

And this is just one suggestion to make a start on it.

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