Survival in the countryside

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How can the people in rural areas be entirely blamed for making money out of animals? There’s not much else one can make money from, so animals are put to use, and the rest of the story we know.

The most immediate payback has shown up in health problems amongst exploited animals on farms and amongst the humans who eat them and their by-products. Down on the farms they feed the animals chemicals to increase their growth rate and fend off disease. But who can blame them? With so much fierce competition they’ve been economically backed into a corner over the animal welfare issue. On top of that are environmental problems associated with modern farming practices, again brought about mainly by economic pressures. What seemed, once upon a time, so ‘free-for-the-taking’ is now being seen to have hidden costs.

It’s the same with petrol or gas being so useful yet so polluting, or trees being so useful but in the taking of them so catastrophic for the environment. We humans don’t learn from one bad experience. We have to learn over and over, in many different ways, until we realise how there must be a withholding. Up to now we haven’t been able to stop fouling our own nest.