Risk Aversion in Ecosystems
Risk aversion leads to increased risk — we need to take risks actively if we are to navigate between possible harms. Odysseus’ perilous passage between Scylla and Charybdis is still our model.
Nowhere is this clearer than in whether we our immune systems are able to protect us and whether the immune systems of the animals that we depend on are resilient too. The big thing that connects all these questions together is what we call stress.
The petting farm
Children visiting animals on a farm to pet them can contract serious infections, typically E. coli. If they are unlucky, this infection can lead to organ failure and even death. This is a risk that the authorities take seriously: there are regulations about contact with animals, hand-washing facilities, and fierce notices. The extreme negative outcomes that are possible obscure the much more prevalent risks.
And yet… do famers’ children get these infections when they help with animals around the farm? No. Do children get infections from the family pets? Not these infections we are concerned about here. Why don’t these children contract infections? Simply because their immune systems have grown up to deal quite naturally and effectively with the bacteria in their environments.
Do children need animals in their environment? Absolutely they do, for many reasons, an important one being that they need bacteria (and other biota) from these animals to develop their gut and skin microbiomes. This is not specific like an immunisation, but the general protection afforded by these microbiomes is vital as a whole, as part of what it means to be a healthy human being. To mention one other vital thing, the multispecies emotional bonding that happens gets us out of our human exceptionalism in the right way.[1]
For the tragic risk outcomes to occur, two things to be true: a child has to have a poorly developed immune response, and the animal needs to be stressed and more than normally infected. Unless the child has some extreme condition, in order to be healthy their immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens: avoidance is the wrong response, kicking the can down the road and making the situation more intractable. And it is obvious from where I sit to write this that it is healthy, unstressed animals that are the ones to interact with.
Animals
Disease control done properly rests completely on biodiversity. Natural systems hold pathogens in control when the systems themselves are healthy. Biodiversity can only be systemic: there has to be a biosystem working properly to support the diversity. Remember that most of the organisms and most of the important pathways are not even described or understood yet. You can only have healthy unstressed animals in their environment and only in an environment that is functioning. Put a donkey in a stall or field and feed it manufactured food and it will be more likely to pass on diseases to children.
We can do better describing this. Animals can be happy, and they can be depressed. I have seen cattle being released from their winter quarters into a grass field — kicking their heels high in the air and joshing each other. I have seen piglets squealing with delight and galloping through deep grass. I see our chickens wallowing in cow manure and giving each other flying competitions. By contrast, the chickens kept in big sheds around here lose their feathers with the stress of their existence and biosecurity is the only way to keep them alive. There is a local scheme to only raise chickens from local eggs to keep diseases from elsewhere out of local flocks.
We can have animals in robust health and happiness, and it is a positive advantage to share bacteria and fungal organisms with them. And we can have dejected animals whose health is compromised by their mental state and their physical environment and food, contact with which should be guarded and fenced about with “hygiene”. We have come to a place where the overwhelming possibility is that animals that children come into contact with are stressed and likely to be a source of serious infection.
When we talk about actively taking risks the issues here are clear. We need children to mix with animals but not all animals are equal. We need to promote the health of our local biosystems so that our children can be part of something lifegiving. That is hardly surprising: we don’t take our kids to see people living in degraded or degrading conditions either.
What I like about this example is that we tend to think that infection is just infection and needs to be fought with handwashing and other hygiene rules. But those practices simply mask the underlying issue that we need our kids to be with happy animals. There is a direct parallel to our cultural practice of warehousing all our sickest people together in hospital, where we feed them food that will make them sicker and maximise the chances of cross infection. Sickle Cell patients, for instance, already have a compromised immune system but are forced into hospital for pain relief.
Animal welfare
There are a lot of squeamish people who want animals to be treated well because that is the kind thing to do. And some of them are of the vegetarian persuasion and think it is wrong to kill animals to eat them. All of which of course misses the point by a million miles and ends up making things much worse for animals.[2]
We need our kids to mix with animals because that it the state of ecosystem in which their biomes can flourish. We need kids to mix with animals because they need to understand how they fit in the ecosystem. We need our kids to eat meat and especially organ meat to thrive, and that meat comes from only one place. Somehow, we need kids growing up to understand the lack of contradiction between caring for and even loving an animal and also killing and eating it.[3] One of the many crimes of supermarkets is in helping to hide the vital connection.[4]
The bond between children and animals can be easy to see and to celebrate. We need not to project onto them any difficulty with death. And we need not to buy into propaganda about the importance of vegetables and tell them to eat their broccoli.
Animals that we will eat for meat (here maybe cows, sheep, pigs, hens, ducks, turkeys) have multiple roles in keeping the local ecosystem fully functioning. We don’t arbitrarily keep turkeys to kill and eat them, we rely on them to convert acorns and beechmast, pasture grubs and pests, into food we can eat. It is always a case of cleaning up/recycling, complementing other roles, dovetailing ecosystem functions. The question is rather, which animal fits with whatever else is going on, and whether their presence as animals and their meat production fit the overall needs.
Kids who are brought up to believe in vegetables need to see the devastation produced by their, usually monocultural, production. The destruction of insects and soil, the poisoning and mechanical destruction on small animals and birds. The wounding of broad ecosystems so that they no longer function. The entire illiteracy of both the education and the policy spheres is shown by the increasing adoption at all levels of “meatless Mondays” or beef free campuses. The level of ignorance is both vast and completely normalised. How is it not an educational and a policy problem to publicly endorse such ignorance?
The role of policy and economics
There is a direct correlation between stocking levels on pasture and stress and disease. Somewhat counterintuitively, the answer to stocking levels that are too high is to bunch the animals tightly together as they graze. And to move them on early (before a pasture is completely consumed) onto fresh ground. This leads to better growth of the pasture as it recovers more quickly and more and better-quality fodder for the animals, as they don’t graze out the tastiest and most nutritious plants.
Just for reference here in the largest herds of cows in the UK, 90% of them do not allow their animals to graze at all — the grass is cut and transported to the animals in their sheds. This should ring loud alarm bells, but it gets swept under the carpet of efficiency. Wendell Berry would say that any opportunity in farming can be separated into two problems — in this case transporting the food and disposing of the manure.
Animals will destroy the pasture that supports them, or they will infinitely improve it, depending on how they are managed. Economics cannot see this — it works with acreages and numbers of animals and prices. It cannot see health and it cannot see management of the health of pasture. It cannot tell the difference between exploitation and export of costs into the natural world and investment in future productivity of the soil.
Here is James Rebanks:
If your ethical diet idea doesn’t explain how we would fertilise crops, control weeds, build soil, increase farmland biodiversity, & get the nutrient dense foods we need — with a strong local economy — then it isn’t a viable answer.
This applies to almost all BBC food programmes.
This is the social dimension of the issue. If urban elites and national broadcasters do not understand how food works and what their place in the ecosystem is, then farming and indeed the animals themselves are compromised. Compromised animals can be shown to spread disease and contribute to global warming or anything else elites and PR people want to foist onto them. They need to look in the mirror.
Risk
If you just try to manage risk in the small you get more risk. In effect you are ignoring the elephant in the room, not in the particular but as a philosophical approach. The swiss cheese risk management model says that any slice of cheese will catch some of the risks but will have holes that allow other risks through. Logically in this model you add another slice of cheese that may have holes in a different place. But all the specific and additive risk control in the world won’t address the reasons why the risks exists.
Just imagine all the different classes of potentially catastrophic risk all the way up to civilisation collapse (which apparently has happened 28 times due to farming failures) that you can’t catch while you still think you need to persuade children to wash their hands after handling animals on a childrens’ farm. I have written about this elsewhere as iatrogenic risk: the risk introduced if you like by the risk manager. We have the wrong effect on the fundamentals by the way we approach the details. If fact disasters on the scale and impact of civilisation collapse can only happen when the result of management actions is to magnify the crisis in the medium term.
When you look at the sort of action recommended by the authority figures to help tackle climate change (eat less meat, recycle more, change your light bulbs) you can tell that they are a smokescreen for the destruction of the planet. They don’t join up. They focus on individual choice which is a seductive myth for us. They turn down the wick on problems as they present but they don’t begin to address the narrative that will take us to full collapse.
It is the old paradigm of leadership and determined action, not an engagement with the ecosystems that we lose sight of at our peril. Until we can read our cultural environment we will not cope with the elephants in the room.
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[1] We still suffer from mammalian exceptionalism, of course, but that’s a harder nut to crack. See our recent post about the wisdom of plants
[2] One of my friends used to be the chief executive of the Rare Breeds Survival trust, and his advice to stave off the extinction of disappearing breeds was to treat them well and to eat them. The eating is essential, because otherwise all your hope rests in a petting zoo.
[3] One celebrated London chef doesn’t eat rabbit (though he does cook it), following a traumatic event during his childhood. A visiting aunt decided that Fluffy was just the thing for dinner, without allowing for the connection between critter and child.
[4] Another friend eats meat but still can’t think of the animal it came from. She’s a converted vegetarian, having discovered that animal protein was essential to her having enough oomph for to act on stage.
