The Carnivores' Revenge

THE CARNIVORES’ REVENGE

By Dr. Michael W. Fox

America has been at war with the wolf and other wild carnivores since the time of the signing of the Constitution that was written to the exclusion of all else except man’s interests. Now after a short respite when the wolves were so few that they were declared an Endangered Species, the US government has declared open season again on the few remaining viable packs.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service there are little over 5,000 Western Gray wolves remaining in the entire United States. Some estimates put this figure closer to 1,500. But this is still far too many for some, especially the government subsidized cattle ranchers grazing their stock on public lands.

Some scientists contend that wolves made us human, since while we domesticated them and turned some wolves into dogs, they helped us become more like them---sociable, cooperative, herders of wild game, and clever pack/group hunters. Australian aboriginals support this scientific theory, contending that the dingo made them human. My evolutionary theory of existential interdependence and co-evolution is affirmed by these views and by the fact that the similarities between human, wolf, and dog DNA confirm our biological kinship. Now when we exterminate our great evolutionary teachers, former ecological allies and biological cousins, the wolves, are we then less than human? Are we turning on our creators?

More to the point, one thing that we did acquire from the wolf was a strong appetite for meat, a taste that goes against the grain of our more omnivorous biology when we eat it as a staple. Our dental anatomy and digestive system would seem to reflect a well evolved and more ancient vegetarian mode of sustenance. Genetically and physiologically we have changed little over the past 4-6,000 years, when we began to domesticate a limited variety of plants and animals for our own consumption, and broke the Covenant of the Wild*: And our health took a turn for the worst, along with the environment.

Catchy and thoughtful recent books like The Shameless Carnivore, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the Compassionate Carnivore, recognize the human proclivity of meat eating, and of regarding other animals as food. Learning to catch and to kill what we eat were lessons from the wolf. Wolves also helped us develop the art of herding as our primate ancestors observed them following the grazing and migrant herds of large herbivores and small, from the now extinct aurochs, progenitor of cattle, to the mountain goats of peak and dale, and sheep of grassy plains. Hunting the wild pigs in the forests was always risky, the protective instinct of nursing sows, combined with ferocious territoriality of the tusked boars, being deterrents to novice hunters and careless travelers.

As we evolved into herders and livestock keepers, we became livestock breeders and feeders. From then on we waged war with the wolf and other carnivores who dared come near our ‘stock’. The stock market evolved, animals became chattel, capital, and meat became increasingly scarce as our numbers multiplied. Unlike the wolves whose evolved social and reproductive systems, along with natural catastrophes from famine to winters that kill, kept their numbers in check, we humans began to double in number with every generation. So our herds and flocks, our capital and stock, had to be increased in numbers at the same pace. Otherwise there would be no meat for all. Inevitably we reached the point where, as Mahatma Gandhi observed ‘The cattle of the rich steal the bread of the poor.’

Expanding human populations and their livestock exterminated wolves across Europe and much of North America where the two great sub-species once freely roamed and lived in harmony with us for millennia. In the US today over 37 million cattle and calves, and 100 million pigs are slaughtered every year. More and more people are coming to realize that this huge killing and consuming of 26 billion lb of beef, 19 billion lb of pork, and 35 billion lb of poultry takes vast natural resources to sustain, from water and fields to grow animals’ feed. Such predictable consequences, along with more and more pollution from animal wastes, and loss of wildlife habitat and natural biodiversity, are being more widely realized. The US National Renderer’s Association estimates that around 1.56 billion pounds of dead stock---so called 4-D meat from animals who are dead, dying, debilitated or diseased, are rendered every year. The total annual production of 6.65 billion lb of meat meal and bone meal from rendering plants is recycled into livestock and poultry feed, and in to pet foods: Very efficient, but at what enormous cost to the environment and wildlife? Goodbye wolf.
Hello Designer Dog.

While agribusiness scientists are trying to genetically engineer pigs to be less environmentally polluting as their colleagues clone genetically engineered cattle and pigs in the hopes of turning them into profitable organ donors and providers of ‘biologics’---new pharmaceuticals for a sickening human populace,---- the bubble is beginning to burst. Not just the bubble of the cattle-ism, but the Earth’s natural resource ecological economy, (or biosphere), along with the biggest bubble of all---the atmosphere. The number one contributing factor to climate change/global warming is the world’s extensive and intensive livestock industry and economy. This crisis, coupled with over-fishing and ocean pollution, heralds a new era of extinctions. Gone the great forests and grasslands; almost gone the coral reefs and mangrove swamps. First to go, as we now know, are the carnivores of land and sea, the so called ‘apex’ predators; the great whales, dolphins, seals, polar bears; the wolf, lion, tiger and wild dogs like the African hunting dog, and the Asiatic dhole. Mass population and species extinctions are now well underway.

Can any of this be turned around? Can we change fate or destiny? Only if we become like wolves reproductively, and like caribou and deer gastronomically. Advocates of the ‘Paleolithic’ diet of our ancestors would have us revert to natural and organically grown foods, including meat. They fail to consider that our numbers have changed rather dramatically since the Stone Age, and while such a diet may be biologically appropriate, it is no longer ecologically sustainable. But war, famine and pestilence may turn us about first, as partial, and some would say natural, population correctives.

Such inevitable rectifiers of human excess could in large part be avoided if we bred like wolves and ate like deer, alternatives far more palatable in the long-term, but as yet unacceptable to a consumer society that ultimately consumes itself, and to religious and cultural traditions that have only served to worsen the human condition, generation after generation. Henry David Thoreau wrote over a century ago, “ I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual development to leave off the eating of animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized”.

Now the civilization and cult of meat eating cannot survive itself. The raising and killing of animals just for their meat must end. It is bad for them, bad for the environment, bad wildlife, and bad for our health and future wealth. The global environmental crises that we face today I see as the revenge of all the carnivores who could not survive without meat, while we could have; and we are pushing them into extinction. We could have chosen otherwise. Now being carnivorous is our nemesis.

It is ironic that millions of people keep carnivorous pets, especially cats, and they learn at great peril to their animals’ health that cereal-based pet foods are not good to feed. The carnivores can’t change---but we all can, and must if we care about anything more than meat.

*The Covenant of the Wild is to be true to our nature---be it through biologically innate wisdom and constraint, or acquired in the case of the deviant mutant ape Homo sapiens,--- that directs all species to contribute to the good of the whole, the life community and diversity of ecosystems. In biblical terms it means to dress and to keep, rather than to vanquish; a dominion of reverential care and respect rather than domination and exploitation. In legal terms it means obedience to natural law, and bioethically, living in accord with the Golden Rule.