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Cucknivores: will they ever learn?
Sometimes you wonder: are they for real? As you watch them lurch from inept stunt to dipshit fallacy and back you have to ask if they are being serious. When it becomes obvious they are and that this is indeed the exposed, plague rat infested hill they are willing to die on, you take the next logical step and ask: are they becoming desperate? Even though we know that complacency is the enemy of progress and that the extraordinary momentum of the vegan movement in recent years could quickly dissipate, we can’t help but say what we all see: they look rattled. The Sustainable Food Trust‘s recent claim[efn_note] Local alternatives to soya and palm meal will help save rainforests – Sustainable Food Trust [/efn_note] that vegans should replace soymilk with cow milk for the good of the planet was nothing if not eye-catching. And it really was nothing.
We know that cucknivore advocates live in contradiction, fact check articles about as scrupulously as Sunday Sport subs and have levels of cognitive dissonance that could fell a charging rhino but you could generally rely on them to tilt the wrist to put a new spin on their propaganda. Yet increasingly, they are serving up microwaved chicken leftovers with salmonella visible to the naked eye.
Cucknivore advocates live in contradiction, fact check articles about as scrupulously as Sunday Sport subs and have levels of cognitive dissonance that could fell a charging rhino
Broken trust
Sustainable Food Trust sounds like something we could all get behind. But taking a food non-profit at face value is like saying to India Knight “yeah sure – have your borefriend come round to watch the kids while we pop to the shops” – a decision with potentially fatal consequences.
A quick look at the board members on their website reveals they may not be entirely unbiased. Chief executive Patrick Holden has 85 cows in Ayrshire producing a “cheddar-style cheese” (which makes me think of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart realises he’s been drinking plenty of Malk). Lady Jane Parker formerly of Thunderbirds, campaigns for local abattoirs and keeping the supply chain small on her 700-acre death pit Fir Farm. Then there’s policy director Richard Young, who is the commandant of an organic cow and sheep concentration camp up on the Cotswolds. Being farmers doesn’t make them wrong, of course, but it does make them partial and not just partial to cutting the throats of defenceless animals. I mean in the sense of favouring one side in an argument or dispute above the other. But mostly the murder thing, tbh.
Farmers with feelings
Don’t get me wrong, as farmers go these are enlightened animal killers. Richard Young has campaigned on the misuse of antibiotics, an issue on which both carnists and vegans may comfortably share common ground. Interestingly, his sister Rosamunde who owns the farm with him, published a book ‘The Secret Life of Cows‘ which, according to one review, Aims To Show Animals As Thinking, Feeling Beings.[efn_note] ‘The Secret Life of Cows’ Aims To Show Animals As Thinking, Feeling Beings – NPR [/efn_note] which seems like a capital idea even as it raises the too-obvious-to-mention question. Okay, maybe not too obvious. The review wonders
“What does she make of the argument that the term “humane slaughter” is an oxymoron because, even when it’s carried out as painlessly as possible, it nevertheless deprives an animal of a life he or she wanted to live via the very intelligence and depth of feeling Young painstakingly details? She doesn’t say, and that’s a loss.”
She doesn’t say because she can’t – not coherently at least. Incidentally, at the time of writing, the book is listed on Richard profile as The Secret Lie of Cows. I’m not a Freudian but, you know.
Too many cucks
So, leaving aside the tidal wave of blood that flows from their homes like opening the lift in The Shining, let’s get into the meat of The Trust’s argument. The claim, citing a Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition report[efn_note] Strategies to reduce reliance on soya bean meal and palm kernel meal in livestock nutrition – Wageningen Academic [/efn_note], is that vegans demand soymilk, then to meet demand, acres of the Amazon are blitzed to grow soybean crops so British soy boys can sate their disgusting addiction. Checkmate, vogons! If this is true, it is indeed a disturbing state of affairs.
It is, of course, not true. Yale University’s Global Forest Atlas estimates 80% of Amazon deforestation[efn_note] Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region – Global Forest Atlas [/efn_note] comes as a result of grazing land for cattle or crops grown to feed the cattle. That’s clearing land to graze but also land to grow feed which will be given to livestock. As for the soy itself, “80 percent of Amazon soy is destined for animal feed; smaller percentages are used for oil or eaten directly.”[efn_note] Soy Agriculture in the Amazon Basin – Global Forest Atlas[/efn_note]
So, the consumption of soymilk is a tiny contributor deforestation compared to the diseased appetites of rapacious morbidly obese cucknivores. As apocalyptic cult leader and failed Hebrew Messiah Jesus of Nazareth once said “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
The big pitcher
Ideally, what we need is some kind of study that looked at the environmental impact of all milks. Well, Oxford University did just that in a 2018 paper[efn_note]Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers – Oxford University Research Archive[/efn_note] which took into account emissions, land use and water use etc. Might we expect cow’s milk to outdo soymilk, as per Sustainable Food Trust’s suggestion? Or perhaps a draw?
Not quite. On environmental points, soymilk delivers the kind of four-to-the-floor ass whipping Genghis Khan put on Nishapur.
| Dairy | Soy | Worse by | |
| EMISSIONS (KG) | 0.6 | 0.2 | 300% |
| WATER USE(L) | 125 | 5 | 2500% |
| LAND USE (M²) | 1.8 | 0.12 | 1500% |
That’s quite a result. Surely any ethical non-profit would be screaming from the hills “for the love of God – please don’t buy any of this cow milk we’re selling. It’s killing us all!” Strangely, this is where the Trust clam up all ‘new phone hu dis?’
Local concerns
An increasingly irate organic farmer will at this juncture raise the reasonable point about the effects of location on environmental impact. The figures above are based on global averages, after all and transport from further away leads to a greater carbon footprint. The Oxford study took care of that,
So as the image above shows, specifically European dairy milk will go from greenhouse emissions of 0.6 kg of CO2 to around 0.4 kg, still comfortably above the global average for soymilk. And the idea of grassfed cows as ecological magic bullet is a flush as busted as Frank Tufano‘s face. The cow milk lobby? They bottled it.
And so the Sustainable Food Trust die on the stinky shitpit of the hill they chose – bleeding from every orifice, twitching like an epileptic, gibbering “but-muh sustainable….! “ and sharting their drawers as the flimsy tower of false equivalence they constructed collapses around them, impaling their cherry-picking baskets to their bodies as it falls. Hey nice work, shitheads.
The idea of grassfed cows as ecological magic bullet is a flush as busted as Frank Tufano’s face.
Conclusion
What are we to make of this? The maxim that a lie goes round the world before the truth can get its boots on seems apposite here. Sustainable Food Trust put out their dicey dossier, get it in The Telegraph, get the Facebook shares, placing the notion firmly in the minds of those sympathetic to cow slaughter that all that stuff about meat and dairy destroying the planet is not true because science. By the time the excellent rebuttals from Mic the Vegan and Earthling Ed arrive, everyone has moved on.
But there is a real feeling that they are running out of material. The environmental argument for veganism is arguably the strongest of all. Sure, on paper animal welfare trumps it but harsh experience has shown us that the ability people have to compartmentalise when it comes to eating animals that have suffered horribly is unmatched anywhere else. For whatever reason, ecological arguments seem to cut through quicker. The health argument is fiercely contested and will always be a minor player to the ethical concerns. So it makes sense for them to go after the ecology data and twist it to fit a mould it was never meant to.
And it’s scary how easy it is to debunk. Most of the time, you can do this by rehashing something you have already written or already researched. It’s not like they bring something revolutionary or new to the table when they make their case. Cow’s milk is good for the planet? Yes, and smoking purifies the blood. Get the fricking frak out of here with your entry-level noxious drivel, you rasclaat bloodmouth skunks.