Letter to Alberta Views Magazine: Rodeos

One of the best things about Alberta Views magazine is the monthly “Dialogue” feature they run, in which two people on opposing sides of an issue air their views, and then have a chance to rebut the other’s initial statement. For July/August the issue was “Should We Ban Rodeo?”, with Camille Labchuk from Animal Justice arguing yes, and Aritha van Herk arguing no. I would have liked the question to be “Should We Support Rodeo or Not?”—banning anything rubs so many people the wrong way—but it was nevertheless a good debate. The feature can be found online here: https://albertaviews.ca/should-we-ban-rodeo/ . There were many responses from readers published in the September and October issues, most siding against rodeos. The letter below was published in the October issue.

Re “Should We Ban Rodeo?” (July/August) Aritha van Herk does as good a job of defending rodeos as anyone could; her argument that banning them would further polarize our society is worth taking seriously.

But what of her assertion that rodeo is a positive good? Her claim is that rodeos help people “learn about animals, agriculture, and food,” and help “everyone better understand the interaction between people and livestock”? But van Herk appears herself to badly misunderstand the basics of that interaction. She tells us that “no one, least of all working ranch hands, wants to inflict pain or damage on the animals that shape their livelihood.” But the fact is that cattle, who have a natural lifespan of roughly twenty years, are killed before they reach the age of two (having spent much of their short lives in feedlots). Doesn’t killing and eating a creature entail pain or damage?

Van Herk lambastes those who ignore the “environmental toll exacted by soybeans” and those who know so little about animal agriculture that they “think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.” “Let’s face facts,” she urges. But the fact is that most soybeans are grown not to be consumed by humans directly but rather to feed animals raised in order to provide food for humans. If we humans all adopted a whole foods, plant-based diet, we would need far less land to be devoted to growing soybeans than we do now. It’s animal agriculture that requires vast amounts of land to be devoted to raising crops such as soybeans; the far more efficient ecological approach is for humans to obtain the nutrients we need directly from plants. And yes, Prof. van Herk, humans often don’t realize where the milk they drink (chocolate or otherwise) comes from. When we humans drink cows’ milk, we do it by taking the babies away from their mothers so that we can drink the milk that otherwise would have gone to the babies. And then, when they are quite young, we slaughter the male babies, so we can eat them as veal. As van Herk says, “let’s fact facts.”