GuelphToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Jackson Steckle in response to a previously published letter about the dairy research centre at University in University of Guelph.
While reading this letter a certain line stood out to me as such an outrageous and disingenuous claim.
“You desire to put thousands of people out of work because you think that what they are doing is wrong”
The writer posits this ludicrous scenario. Because we can make money from it, cows should be forcibly impregnated, have their babies taken from them to be slaughtered, have as much milk sucked out of them as possible, repeat that process for 5 years, then slaughter them. All while using massive amounts of freshwater and land and absolutely destroying our planet.
If the ability to make money from something is a moral justification, I shudder to think what their views on other topics are.
But this also makes the assumption that a shift toward a plant-based agriculture system would not create jobs. Of course it would. We can’t just remove animal agriculture from our food system and not replace it with anything, that’s a ridiculous thought. These people wouldn’t all be losing their jobs, they could simply be retrained to work with plants instead of animals. (And we are seeing similar type programs in the oil and gas industry) Hardly the doom and gloom scenario the writer wants us to believe.
I do wonder if the writer mourned this hard for all the Blockbuster employees that lost their job when Netflix rose to prominence? Companies and industries rise and fall all the time. We shouldn’t be afraid of the future, but embrace it. Dairy farmers can be our biggest allies in a move towards a plant-based future. Many farmers have already made the switch to vegetable farms and/or animal sanctuaries. And we welcome every farmer to that future with open arms.
Jackson Steckle
