Tim May wrote:
>
> At 5:20 PM -0700 4/24/01, David Honig wrote:
> >At 11:02 AM 4/24/01 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> > and burn a million cows on pyres of
> >>used tyres and railway sleepers (they are thinking of using napalm to
> >>save money)
> >
> >The chemicals in the materials you're using for your pyres are
> >poisoning the locals with dioxins... napalm is a lot cleaner and faster than
> >dioxin-generating old tires and railroad ties, supposedly.
> >
> >We have the Burning Man festival; y'all have your Burning Cow
> >festival. Whatever melts your cheese.
>
> I saw an estimate yesterday that millions of hectares of farmland are
> now contaminated with enough dioxins from The Burnings that the U.S.
> government will likely not let their output into the U.S.
When was the last time anyone bought cow-meat from the UK anyway? Even
supermarkets over here sell food with "Contains no British meat
products" in big friendly letters. Actually the total dioxin release
from the cow pyres is probably a small fraction of the annual release
anyway. This might affect the sheep-meat export (which is a much bigger
business) but most of that is from upland areas which aren't said to be
contaminated. The US government, as you know, will use any excuse to
resist agricultural imports.
> European nations, ever eager to poke a stick in England's eye, are
> reportedly considering the same ban.
>
> If true, this is going to nuke the U.K. big time.
Er, the whole of UK agriculture is about 2% of GNP. And mass-produced
meat is maybe a quarter of that at the most. It exists on subsidies
anyway. Like all those East German factories, it is a money sink. If all
large-scale lowland meat producers went out of business tomorrow the
country as a whole would be better off the day after. That's been true
for at least 40 years. There are so few people involved in the business
that it wouldn't even make a big dent in the unemployment figures.
> From our perspective, it will show the foolishness of government
> overreaction (ordering a million animals to be slaughtered and burned
> with tires and old pressure-treated lumber railroad ties).
The government has been trying to persuade farmers to vaccinate. So far,
except for a few specialist producers who need to keep their breeding
stock, no-one bites. The sheep farmers want "disease free" status so
they can carry on exporting to France (not that many people eat sheep in
Britain, but they are the only thing that can take the climate - some of
these farms are on the latitude of the Yukon). The cow farmers? I think
they are having Wagnerian fantasies about going down in a blaze of
glory. Or perhaps atavistic desires for sacrifices to appease the angry
gods. The whole affair is like nothing so much as the Xhosa cattle
slaughter in the 19th century, where a whole society collapsed under
external cultural assault - in theis case the society that is collapsing
is what little is left of traditional English rural life, and the alien
culture is modern, urban, Britain.
> I wonder if the starving Brits will also be burned in piles?
No, we will buy our food from abroad, as we did from the 1840s to the
1940s. Mass agriculture was reintroduced to Britain by government fiat
in WW2 and has been kept going as a welfare programme ever since.
Ken Brown
