Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs by Ted Kerasote

Author:Ted Kerasote [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Once, in an attempt to avoid inflicting such pain, I became a vegetarian and spent three years not eating meat. But the practice never sat easy with me. Physiologically, I did not feel well, oats and tofu leaving my stomach riled. Ethically, I was also troubled by my vegetarianism, since eating vegetables has its costs as does eating meat: the many small animals—rodents, snakes, and ground-nesting birds who are killed as vegetables, beans, and grains are harvested by machinery, not to mention the animals poisoned by pesticides. One can, of course, eat organic vegetables, but unless one is growing the crops oneself or buying them locally from people who are not using large farm machinery, some of the costs of conventional farming are also tied up in the production of organic crops: real animal lives lost. And such costs—“externalities,” “collateral damage,” call them what you will—make our attempts to reduce the suffering we cause by our eating, and our dogs’ eating, full of unforeseen ramifications.

For example, industrial-size organic farms use compost to maintain the soil’s fertility, trucking it in from long distances and using considerable amounts of fossil fuel to do so. The compost is also sometimes augmented with fish emulsion and pelleted chicken manure, which equates to animal lives going into our organic vegetables. Depending on the organic farm, it can also burn more diesel fuel than its conventional cousins because of the intensive weeding that goes on in a pesticide-free environment. And using more diesel fuel to weed and to irrigate equals more animal lives lost. Think of the Exxon Valdez and Gulf oil spills, which were just the big ones that attracted everyone’s notice. Before the Gulf oil spill in 2010, about two hundred other major spills around the world had occurred between 2000 and 2009—“major” being defined as greater than seven tons or a little over two thousand gallons. Two thousand gallons can kill a lot of shrimp, fish, and marine birds.

And then there are the deer—about 30 million of them in the United States alone. No one—not agribusiness, not industrial-size organic farms, not small-scale farmers, not even backyard gardeners— can grow vegetables where deer live without someone controlling their numbers or putting up a great deal of fencing. This is because deer love to eat some of the very same foods we do: salad greens, peas, chard, squash, fruits, grains, and soybeans. In the Midwest, 40 to 60 percent of a deer’s diet is cultivated plants, not wild ones. In Iowa, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa make up 80 percent of the food eaten by deer. A farmer can put up a fence to protect such crops, but that simply redirects the deer to unfenced farms, and few people will fence large farms; it’s too expensive, since it takes an eight-foot-high fence to keep deer out.

Controlling deer numbers thus falls to the lot of public hunters, who kill deer each fall and welcome the job since they like eating deer and so do their dogs. The

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