Rlet us first call a fact: for millions of peasants and peasants in the world, the breeding is essential to the subsistence. Animals are very often not only a food resource (meat, milk, eggs), but also, and for the majority, labor force, for transport or field work.
To think of a world without farm animals therefore seems to us to be anti-humanism. If suffering is an ethical priority, under no circumstances can feeding on animals be governed by morality. How, on this subject, to have such a Manichean posture, by stigmatizing domestication, breeding and meat eating?
To imagine the revegetation of the world as the only horizon is a major historical and political error of interpretation. Animal exploitation does not originate from the centuries-old ties that we have with our animals, but it is the consequence of its instrumentalization to satisfy productivist and capitalist interests.
A necessity to protect biodiversity
Researchers, you are in the wrong fight (“The call of four hundred philosophers: “We declare that animal exploitation is unjust and morally indefensible”, The world of October 4)! Worse, you call for a deadly, dogmatic project that goes against the trail traced by the most illustrious thinkers of the Enlightenment. Let us recall, like Montaigne (1533-1592) that “everyone calls barbarism what is not his custom” (Attempts).
The revegetation of food will not prevent the industrialization of life, the destruction of biodiversity, the monopolization and privatization of resources. The predation of wealth, responsible for the suffering caused to humans and animals, is also expressed by the emergence of fake meats and substitute foods.
The existence of herbivores and grasslands is a necessity to protect and nourish the soil, water and biodiversity. From an agronomic and energy point of view, losing two or three points of humus as in the cereal plains or in the vegetable production basins only accentuates our dependence on fossil energy.
A necessary condition for life
Farmers have always considered animals and recognized their intelligence. The sensitive relationship that we have with them, which zootechnics, the weapon of productivism, has forced some to repress, does not prevent us from apprehending death as a necessary condition for life.
You have 26.75% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.