THE GREAT DIVIDE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 265

One option for a vegan farming system beset by pest problems would be to get rid of all
the pestiferous hedges which demand annual maintenance and which are no longer needed
for enclosing cows and sheep. That is what habitually happens in areas where farmers have
got rid of their livestock; or where livestock are kept indoors all year round, as they are in
many areas of Europe. England's miles of hedgerows are unusual - a historical anomaly
resulting from the fact that the countryside was enclosed before the invention of barbed
wire. Permaculturist vegans would argue that the hedges and other biodiverse vegetation
should be kept to provide a balance of predatory species - but that balance would be hard
to maintain if the species that has been chief predator for several thousand years of evol-
ution resigned from the position. The Campaign to Protect Rural England might protest at
the disappearance of hedgerows, but from an environmental point of view removal could
be justified if many more wildlife areas were created elsewhere on land formerly occupied
by domestic animals or the crops grown to feed them. Efficient mechanized vegan farmers,
supplying food for millions, would be less inclined to share land with nature and more dis-
posed to spare land elsewhere for it. 13
The other recourse traditionally taken by farmers is to fence off land that is under siege
from pests - in the UK, typically deer, badgers or rabbits. It can be an expensive option but
in our hypothetical vegan society the farmers have a potential ally. If the wilderness areas
are managed by conservationists who want to maintain a natural succession (rather than by
scientists who want to engineer an artificial one) then they too will be keen to demarcate
the zone between the wild and the human with as impermeable a fence as can be devised
and afforded.
Fencing has often been a tempting prospect for wilderness creators on the grand scale
(and true wilderness has to be on a grand scale). The palaeontologist Richard Leakey, when
head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, proposed fences around the Maasai Mara Reserve and
the Tsavo National Park, 'to keep animals away from people and people away from an-
imals', but had to abandon the plan because it would have interrupted some animals' mi-
gration patterns. 14 Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire managing director of Grumeti Eco-re-
serves, which has leased 340,000 acres to 'offer 54 guests 21st century service in a sump-
tuous bush-chic setting' wants to erect a fence along the Western edge of the Serengeti; and
there are fences around National Parks in Zimbabwe and Namibia, which again interfere
with animal migration routes. 15 In Botswana, where there are already thousands of miles of
'veterinary fences' designed to separate cattle from wild animals carrying tsetse and foot
and mouth disease, the 240 mile long Makgadikgadi fence is:
the first of a new breed of fence designed to reduce conflicts between people and wild-
life. Specifically, it was built to stop lions from attacking cattle, to stop villagers from re-
taliating against the lions, and to protect the grazing land of the wildlife in the park from
the cattle. 16