Chris Perley: Cruelty in farming a moral issue

Chris Perley

My father was a gentle stockman, and he cared for people the same. He taught us how to hunt up and how to use presence and eye when mustering, and how not to push cattle too hard. He had a way with dogs, and some would jump up on to a strainer post on quiet command. He loved stories, company, music, laughter and especially the land, continually pointing out things he was observing.

And he would be distressed by people thinking that some documented examples of cruelty toward dairy 'industry' bobby calves was how farming in general thought and operated. Most family-run farms do not make a practice of cruelty and undignified death. But there are operations where such things happen. And the first question to ask is why; identify that deeper cause, and deal with that. It is the changing values underpinning how we look at community, people, animals and land use that are the deeper roots to this debacle. And it is the systems that proclaim and reinforce the soulless and mechanical view: produce more, cheaper, never mind downstream, people are cogs, animals aren't even that.

Like the health and safety issues highlighted by Pike River mine disaster, these are moral concerns, not just technical and regulatory concerns. It highlights a way of thinking toward people and profit as much as lax regulation and monitoring. Our response ought to focus more on the moral level. The alternative is a straightjacket of compliance made necessary because farmers "cannot be trusted". Putting more regulatory layers on each operation may technically bind the corporate unethical industrial thinker - though they have the resources to manipulate the intent of any new law - but they can make the life of the smaller and ethical operator almost unmanageable. In trying to contain the monster, we may enslave our neighbour. Our target ought to be to remove the beast. And that monster is the pervasive industrial corporate thinking and their narrow and short-term money lens, which makes us less, not more, wealthy in the long-term.

Within the industrial root of cruelty, money is the unethical measure; life is reduced to a machine made up of 'resources' and things; some of them waste to be discarded without compassion.

Annie Proulx writes about the growing predominance of the industrial view in That Old Ace in the Hole about hog battery factories in the Texas Panhandle. The main character is lambasted by his corporate boss for referring to animals as hogs, "They are not hogs, they are pork units." And from this, the consequences arise, to which they are blind. The industrial mind is not connected to community or place, it resides far away and counts its money, plays with its spreadsheets heavily discounting the future, understands no broader way to see, certainly not feel, and oils the machine with political lobbying, PR and advertising. It does not care, it does not see, and it is not wise.

Communities, land, staff, people - all become 'things', and this reduction of meaning - as Terry Pratchett wrote - "is where evil begins". We lose our own loss of humanity when we act with cruelty toward land, animals and communities. We also lose our combined social, environmental and, yes, economic Common Wealth. The current government cannot apparently think in any other level than this. It creates mega-departments, and renames them 'Primary Industries', and 'Business, Innovation & Enterprise'. Our public service is being rebuilt before our eyes on the narrow corporate model. David Orr wrote that this industrial age, " ... spawned gargantuan organisations with simple goals, roughly analogous to the body/brain ratio of the dinosaur ... lack[ing] the ability to think much beyond business equivalents of ingestion and procreation. The monomania drove out thought of the morrow, warped lives, disfigured much of the world, and dominated the intellectual landscapes".

Our farms are not part of an 'industry', they are land and community. Rivers runs through them; they gift us life and recreation; our communities, plants and animals live within them; they have a history that tells a story with people as characters; and a deeper meaning than the factory thinkers will ever understand. Nor will they understand from within their pea-brain dinosaur models that harming this system and the stories attached will eventually harm themselves, or that there is real potential in raising all values by rejecting industrial commodities.

We will continue to hear stories of the abuse of land, community and animals until we change the roots. For that to happen, family farmers have to stand up against this rising tide of the commoditisation of life and land, and to all the associated advocacy of GMOs, intensification and pollution. There is another path: go value, not volume.

-Chris Perley has a background in strategy, policy, research and operational management in provincial economies and land use.

-Business and civic leaders, organisers, experts in their field and interest groups can contribute opinions. The views expressed here are the writer's personal opinion, and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz