Recently I drew attention to a school in southeast England that has been criticised for sending a sheep to market as part of childrens education. Whilst it may seem cruel at first sight, those kids are learning where food actually comes from and learning that emotional attachment comes at a price.

Here's the problem though. The human race is multiplying at an increasing rate. David Attenborough tells us that in the last fifty years, the human population of the world has tripled. Vastly improved health care and the containment of large scale warfare have of course contributed. There is however a more basic reason. Remember all those rabbit and fox graphs you used to get in biology class at school? With food readily productive and available in the modern world there are no shortages to limit human expansion.

Of course there are areas suffering famine or obstructions in the food supply. The point though is that if people aren't starving to death they're reproducing. Sex isn't entirely onerous, is it? So like the foxes, when times are good we increase in numbers. The sad truth is that good times cannot last forever. Climatic change, natural disasters, or perhaps even a significant meteorite strike might tip the balance, and human beings will starve in huge numbers. It's almost inevitable.

So as people multiply food production must keep pace to feed the happy majority. This is why our food supply has become so mechanistic in the modern age, and with it, a somewhat crueller detachment than hunting in the wild. As far as I'm concerned, hunting, skinning, and butchering are extensions of the natural world. There does come a point when this realism crosses a border into a much deeper cruelty, and I'd like to thank Roger Moore for doing more than raising his eyebrows dramatically. The former 'James Bond' star has pointed at the production of foie gras which to my horror is done by force feeding geese with corn mash via a metal pipe stuffed down their throat, purely to cause a swelling of the liver from which the delicacy is made.

There's an honesty about fresh meat on your plate (even if the reality isn't always what we'd like to see) but to cause an animal harm and distress purely for the pleasure of the wealthy isn't something I can agree with. Can you?

Restoration of the Week

I was woken this morning by the whining sound of power tools. It wasn't coming from the garage across the yard, which has been quieter this year than previously, nor was it coming from next door, which is being renovated after it's last tenants left. It was the alleyway beside the terrace, whose bushes have reduced the car park access to single file pedestrian only, and no shortage of discarded waste such as cardboard boxes and broken furniture. I doubt however that the council will upgrade the surface. Every so often they fill in the potholes with gravel which promptly vanishes after the first heavy rain. The alleyway is now three inches below the asphalt car park and eroding nicely. In another year, trimming the hedge will be pointless because you'll not be able to get a car onto the car park without damaging it.