THE GREAT DIVIDE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 268

any need for the farmer to ever get down from the seat of his John Deere or his Dominator
and touch the earth. But our meat is still farmed by men and women who handle their an-
imals, who know how to straddle sheep and hoist cows on their feet when they are down,
who trim their hooves and give them drenches and injections, who pull lambs in breach out
of their mothers wombs' and give them their first breath, and who are used to coming home
with their overalls covered in muck.
Moreover, in the pastoral west it is more likely to be women. K D M Snell has studied
how in the 19th century, as arable farming in the east started to become increasingly dif-
ferentiated from pastoral farming in the west, demand for male farm workers increased in
the arable areas as demand for female farm workers declined. But in the pastoral west the
situation was exactly the reverse: there was a rise in women's employment and a decline in
men's employment. 19 The distinction is evident today. How often do you see a woman driv-
ing a 120 horse power tractor? Yet women stockkeepers are almost as common as men, and
in the horse industry there is probably a female predominance. Women have traditionally
been associated with dairy work and poultry production, and have a natural advantage in
lambing, not only because they make better midwives, but also because they have smaller
hands more adept at manipulating badly presented lambs. The work traditionally assigned
to women in arable production - reaping, stooking corn, teddying, weeding, picking and
gleaning - has either been mechanized or abandoned. Snell also remarks that 'a tight har-
vest time schedule' makes arable work less suited to women childminders, in comparison
with the regular but interspersed demands of animal husbandry. 20
A mixed farming system provides a more natural landscape than pure arable farming,
is less mechanized, and gives humans greater contact with nature. Why should this be so?
The answer is that mixed farming, like nature, is complex, whereas pure arable farming
(whether it be for animals in feedlots or for vegans in cities) removes an entire order of
creation from the system. Moreover it is the order which is closest to humanity, which gal-
lops and gives birth and suckles, which feels pain and anger and joy. Farmers talk to their
animals and give names to them, perhaps not to all of them but almost always to some of
them. What vegetable farmer ever gave a name to a cabbage? 21
The wheel of Nature turns through the action of different species consuming each other.
'The whole of Nature' said Dean Inge, 'is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and
passive.' Every animal consumes living things, and in turn must be consumed, either by
another living being, or by fire. Nature is cruel. By rejecting cruelty, by choosing not to eat
nor to kill fauna, the vegan forces the greater part of the animal kingdom into exile from
the human world, on the other side of the fence. Not only the prey must go, but also the
bulk of the pests must somehow be persuaded to stay there. Within the vegan reconstruc-
tion of nature there is space only for pets, 'companion animals' who are compliant with the
vegan norm. Less extreme vegans might include within that group well-behaved predators,