THE HOMININ Australopithecus was reportedly common ancestor to our Homo sapiens lineage and to the genus Paranthropus. We Homos survived and flourished on meat, leaves and fruit. Paranthropus became extinct about a million years ago, no doubt due to their “inflexible diet” and boredom – they were vegetarians.
Pity poor Paranty coming home to his cave. The delicious aroma from a nearby Homo family’s barbecued sirloin titillates his palate; he envies their rousing song: “Oh long let me hunt, where wild piggies grunt, where there’s deer and antelope meat. Beef steaks and ducks for the Master instructs, we should all “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!”
“What’s for dinner?” he asks his wife. “Pond grass pie”. “Nooo!” (Extincts himself.)
I am a meat-eater by choice and necessity. Dare I eat beans, muesli or cereal, my poor family and I reap the world of wind. I feel uncomfortable, get headaches, zonk out. My system was designed for handling meat.
It concerns me greatly therefore when misguided “animal rights activists” pontificate that mankind has no “right” to use animals for meat. Lions apparently do, but not us. May God grant that such Paranthropusses never control our destiny.
More on that later. Today’s world is replete with examples of jack-aces who thought they knew better, thought they could improve on methods honed by centuries of trial and error. They sowed the wind. We’re reaping the whirlwind.
Take Bush and Blair. The invasion of Iraq, murder of Saddam Hussein and later Gaddafi opened a Pandora’s box of problems for an entire region. Let every violent death in Syria, every victim of ISIS, every refugee drowned in the Mediterranean be credited to their account.
They saw a system that worked, figured they knew better.
“Father, forgive them”, Jesus would say. History won’t be so kind.
We had a justice system that worked. Imprisonment involved hard labour. Violent assaults and rape earned offenders the birch or cat. Murderers were routinely hanged, not that there were many.
Then the wusses took over. They knew better. Prisoners no longer do hard labour. A lawyer brought a case, a judge gave a ruling and we lost our most effective crime-deterring tool: the cat; few, if any, ever risked getting it twice. A robber killing you in your home might get charged with manslaughter. Not that any murderer needs fear hanging anymore.
Let the changers take credit for every university student raped, every child traumatised, every senior citizen now trembling at home and fearing the night.
Prison is now the only “punishment”. It holds no terror for today’s youth. Indeed, newspapers routinely feature full-page articles on ex-convicts. They have hero status. Young murder accused are now pictured smiling more broadly than scholarship winners.
Some say harsh economic conditions and unemployment are driving youths to crime. I disagree. The youths on the block had access to free education. They rejected that. They don’t want work. Not when gangsta rap tells them to “**** the police!” Get into drugs and guns, handle big money, chicks a-plenty.
What poverty drove Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford to steal billions? Or the numerous crooked lawyers and corrupt politicians being exposed worldwide?
No, my friends, crime takes over whenever there is ineffective punishment. And until we get back to punishments that criminals fear, there will be no peace in the valley.
But back to the meat of the matter. Nowadays most fruit and vegetables require spraying with toxic chemicals. Nature provides a better way. My goats eat grass planted before 1977, clammycherry, sea-grape, mile tree, you name it, none of which ever need spraying. They convert these to meat and milk. Other domestic animals convert inedible scraps, skins, grain by-products and such like into first class protein. Think of the wastage without them.
Imagine a vegetarian Barbados. The few remaining pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, cows would be seen only in zoos. We would eat only sprayed food.
But what about the monkeys? They would take everything as they do with all our fruit. Surely the animal rights activists wouldn’t kill them? They have rights, right?
I can suggest but one solution. Put speakers in all the trees. Broadcast Radio programmes telling them homosexuality is okay. Maybe they’ll go that way and stop breeding.
Maybe not. I suspect monkeys have more sense.
Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator. Email porkhoad@gmail.com.