Oh, and World Vision… I’m more suspicious of the evangelistic talk but in the field they want to be taken as impartially as the secular NGOs. But I can’t fault their implementation. They’re pretty average as far as that goes.
The problem with bunnies that in general unless it is a specific breed [angora] which is bred for the fur to be used in spinning there is no nonfood use of a bunny other than to sit there wrinkling its nose and posing for LOL pictures. The scat is not really shat out in large enough amounts to be good for fertilizer. They are quite excellent at turning veggie trimmings and grasses into meat and other bunnies however. [To get the good fur, an angora bunny need to have cold temperatures, much like an angora goat]
PETA is a first world problem group. If you need to have a food source that can susbsist on nonagricultural land, you need something that can process cellulose for the nutritional content, which translates to bunnies, guinea pigs, goats, sheep, camelids, bovines and equines. If you live in a very remote area with minimal horizontal surface, you need small critters that can live on trimmings and leftovers, that leaves bunnies and guinea pigs. As I pointed out, they do not have much use other than as a meat animal.
Heifer doesn’t work with individuals, they work with communities. They may go in and give fifteen or twenty animals to a village, along with several dozen flocks of chicks, etc. But they don’t do that at first. There is a long lead up to the day the animals arrive. During this time they train the recipients on animal husbandry, get them familiar with animal first aid, sustainable practices like zero grazing and things like bookkeeping to be able to bring their livestock to market eventually. It doesn’t accomplish program goals to have the families cheated out of their livestock or waste their income when it starts coming in because they don’t know how to handle money. Whenever possible they build joint programs with other organizations who are also doing development. Since Heifer doesn’t do things like build housing or drill wells, but both are likely to enable a family to sustain livestock, they try to coordinate with groups like Habitat for Humanity whenever possible. There are huge advantages to this kind of partnership, such as being able to share translators, supply lines, and communications. It may be easier to piggyback a shipment of educational materials on a shipment of building materials than to hire a truck to deliver just the educational materials to a remote village.
This is a very large part of the Heifer program. They have instructors teach people how to build grazing pens, how to manage and store fodder, etc. and then once they’ve demonstrated competency and, more importantly, invested sweat equity into building the pens and such, the animals are delivered. It does no one any good to give livestock away willy-nilly because the cow could wander off onto someone else’s lands and then be shot and eaten by the owner of those lands which would lead to not only a waste of the intended purpose of the gift, but also breed resentment in the community.
Heifer also engages with environmental and animal experts to ensure they don’t give animals which are inappropriate for the setting. Maybe a cow is a bad choice for a particular village because they don’t have adequate grazing or water supplies. Maybe a more drought tolerant animal, like a camel, would be a better choice. Then the have to select among the varieties of camels, find a good supplier who isn’t going to sell them a diseased camel with behavioral issues, and arrange for safe delivery. The previous Heifer projects are a gold mine for this sort of stuff because not only can they have confidence in the quality of the livestock, but the money is going to a community they’ve worked with and know they’ll put it to good use. Then they tailor the educational program to the animal they’ll be giving the recipients. Making cheese from camel milk is different than from cow milk. How long does it keep? How can you keep it safe from insects? How do you treat camel dung to turn it into fertilizer? How to turn manure into fuel, how to build a harness and have a camel pull a plow. How to handle breeding, caring for baby camels, etc.
Most other development organizations have similar depth to their programs. You may think “Habitat for Humanity” = “builds houses” “Doctors Without Borders” = “traveling clinics” or “Heifer International” = “gives away cows” but there’s a lot more to these organizations than meets the casual eye.
Heifer in particular has become a family project for my family. I’ve been to the ranch twice, once with each of my elder daughters. The year I skipped was when my wife went, also with my daughters. This year is the first year I’m taking my son. Next year he’ll probably go with his mom. We are applying some of the lessons at home too, with our raised bed gardening and composting at home as well as more simple things like using a clothesline instead of a dryer. It’s just how we roll.
Heifer classifies animals into the “7 M’s” Meat, milk, muscle, money, motivation, materials and manure. Rabbits are a five “M” creature. Meat, money, motivation, materials, and manure. It’s not the good quality manure like camel or cow, but it’s enough to help fertilize small gardens. It’s also not good quality fur/hide, like leather from a cow, but it has some value on the market if properly tanned.
But if you took slaughtering the rabbit out of the equation, they’d drop to a 2 “M” animal, which is not nearly as helpful. And once they’ve gotten out of the “bunny” stage and into the “rabbit” stage they’re really kind of mean and will claw and bite people. I can’t condone using them as makeup test subjects or treating them inhumanely if you’re raising them as food, but as assistance to a developing community, eating rabbit is completely justifiable IMHO. I’ve told the people at Heifer that I’d support bringing the rabbit back into the program.
Enjoy,
Steven
I keep getting info packets and catalogs for Heifer International…it actually sounds good. Finding out that PETA is opposed to them makes it even more likely that I will donate!
Thanks Steven for the explanation. I wasn’t sure how Heifer works, and I know that a lot of people feel deceived when they learn that their money is pooled towards community based projects rather than a specific photogenic family- a feeling of deception that might be justified, but ultimately overlooks the best way to make positive change.
Rabbits are delicious. Would PETA rather people be eating bush meat (which is often endangered)? That is often what the alternative is.
No shit … though I already did, I donated to a whole village package on behalf of my Mom for Christmas last year, I was way more flush with money than I am this year =(
I agree that bunny is tasty, I love it and am sad it is expensive when I can find it in the freezer section. I do not want to get into trying to add another critter to the farm at this point in time. Maybe when we move out to California and have worked the cows into the collection. We would have the room to add an adequate bunny romping area.
My argument against donating to the save the children type of charities is mainly because the parents in question really should not be having children if they can not support the children, and why should I support the resulting children when the leader of their country is hoarding all the money and not supporting his population. I will fully admit to being a neutral population growth person. If the small villages out in the country side could support the families instead of them heading off to live in a shanty town in the city it would benefit the whole country - they just need a legal agricultural product, a source of clean water and perhaps a methane producing digester that also provides processed fertilizer for the fields in addition to a small electrical generator to power communications and perhaps some refrigeration.
Just doing a little internet research and came across this thread. I could not let this comment get by without registering for this forum to say that it’s completely false.
Agriculture without the help of grazing animals’ fertilizer is one that is heavily dependent on fossil fuel. That does not sound happy to me.
Not to mention, your definition of animal involvement is limited to: cows, pigs, chicken, etc. Don’t forget that agriculture, harvesting plants, involves many thousands, if not millions of animals. First you have all of the natural species that are displaced by seizing the land, and their respective food chains. Then you have all of the insects and small mammals that feed off of the crops that have to be eradicated as to preserve the crops for us. Then you have all of the microorganisms that live in the top soil, which take a severe beating when you have grain production on such a large scale - say perhaps, a scale large enough to feed 7 billion people on the planet.
To suggest that we can eat without involving animals is to say that we can isolate ourselves in a bubble from nature, and the fundamental cycle of life and death that nature has set up for planet Earth. That’s completely absurd.
It was an offhand comment made over a year ago, so yeah, thanks for the not-timely important contribution. I do donate to Heifer now and then, by the way, and you totally cut out my very next statement which utterly invalidated what I said, so thanks for taking it out of its proper context.
Yeah, because all vegetarians are totally extremist Jainists. Or not. No really, everything we humans do cause other species to be affected?! Oh my god, stop the presses. You had a point with fossil fuels but then rode that point right into the ground.
Yes, my response was late. I acknowledge that. As for the rest of your post, yeah, you sound like a reasonable person and I think we’d agree on most things.
The whole point was not to call you or your opinions out personally, but the sentiment that I hear echoing throughout the vegetarian/vegan community is that eliminating farm animals from the agriculture equation is a great way to feed the entire world. It’s so, so wrong. I have a hard time seeing it and not saying something about it. It’s not an idea that should be supported or pushed any further.
I’m sorry you took my response as a personal jab. Don’t worry, I hold nothing against you. I know that vegetarians/vegans come from a good place and have their hearts pinned to good intentions. I, myself, was a vegetarian for 10 years!