“The
Northern Rockies have become an unsupervised playpen for reactionaries
to act out warrior fantasies against demonic wolves, coastal elites, and
idiotic environmentalists.” - James William Gibson, writing in The Earth Island Journal
I work on an alpaca farm part-time. I generally enjoy myself and love working with the alpacas, but animal exploitation alarms go off in my head on a regular basis anyway. The farm is owned by a born-rich person who does it as a hobby but pretends like it's real-life, "dog-eat-dog," cutthroat sell-or-die work. Long story short, I disagree with many of my boss' assertions about the moral correctness of how the business is practiced. My boss happens to also own a huge cattle ranch in another state.
What really gets me, time and again, is my interactions with farm owners and ranchers that consider themselves "environmentalists" because of the way they run their ranches. They think they're doing a great job providing necessary, "sustainable" meat to the world and they don't "get" the distress of people like me when they talk about slaughtering cattle. In their world, it's all ok, because they decided cattle are "just food." Obviously I disagree strongly with letting ourselves believe the convenient illusion that if you call a living creature a new name, it means it isn't a living creature anymore and you don't have to worry about how wrong it is to kill a living creature for pleasure or convenience (eating meat is not "necessary" btw). They're not alive, they're "just cattle."
They blather on and on about how "environmentally conscious" they are, creating "sustainable" organic beef for people to eat. It's the hardest thing in the world for me to sit there listening to this bullshit and not freak out, because I'm just a peon and there's no way my words could penetrate the self-congratulating fog they've created around themselves. So, the fact that cattle ranching is responsible for most of the devastating environmental degradation affecting our continent (as well as South America), creates 30% or more of the global-warming-causing greenhouse gases, and encourages our government to favor ranchers' financial concerns over other wildlife that are largely on the brink of extinction, as well as public health, doesn't make them question the "environmentalism" of running a cattle ranch? Troubling at the very least.
Apparently ranchers in my state have been driving wolves to nearby states where it is now totally legal to murder any wolves you see, anyplace, anytime, any reason/lack of reason, and shooting them there. The complete governmental failure that was the de-listing of wolves from the Protected list is already shooting them straight back to the "almost extinct" status they were when the U.S. government funded their extermination in the early 20th century. But here's the problem, see, I just don't understand the woes of the hard-working ranchers who "have" to kill wolves to save their livelihoods, and yes, their families. Pro-wolf-murdering ranchers have created a magical story about child-eating, destructive, mindless predators who want nothing else than to finally exterminate humankind. Handily, this story covers their true reasons for wanting to kill wolves, which is that they can be inconvenient to making money off of exploiting and killing other animals. Being told that they aren't allowed to kill this inconvenience by Big Daddy Gubment also irks them to no end, since Gubment has been getting on their cases already for ignoring tons of environmental protection laws about what lands they can let their cattle destroy and what pollutants can be dumped into nearby waterways.
Seriously, I could go on and on and on about how completely ranching has fucked up our natural environment, in some ways erasing it beyond the chance of ever getting it back again. I get that ranchers don't know or care about the history of their profession and are just trying to make a living. Unfortunately, this is also the reason given by many large corporations that destroy things or people just to keep their stockholders happy. No matter what profession we're in, if we are "good, hard-working" people, at some point we have to acknowledge if we are responsible for very bad things happening. This includes environmental degradation (of public lands) and the killing of living creatures for money or convenience. Ranchers need to call themselves on their shit (not gonna happen) and admit that their anti-wolf murder spree is not a righteous act of Goddamn American Freedom, but a shitty little grab at power that only shows their smallness and ignorance. "Environmentalist" ranchers need to acknowledge that, at best, they are reducing some of their heinous environmental degradation, and their pitiful changes to how they use up the land that they have access to is not the same as "preserving the environment."
Rant done.
