The Animal Lover's Dilemma: A Quest for Sustainable Farming Techniques

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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Reposted with permission from Elizabeth Van Deventer and Glenn Davis Stone: Originally published in FieldQuestions.

When Green Mountain College, a sustainable farming school in Vermont, recently decided to slaughter their two aging oxen and serve the meat in the dining hall, the decision unleashed a flood of angry emails, Facebook posts, and protests from animal rights activists around the world.  From the point of view of the college, consuming beef produced from animals raised humanely on their own farm, rather than from unknown origins elsewhere, fits squarely with their sustainable food production philosophy.

However, to animal rights advocates, killing the oxen was simply wrong—regardless of the fact that one of the animals would have to be euthanized for leg injuries anyway. Activists threatened local slaughterhouses, leaving the college nowhere to take the cattle, so in the end, they decided to kill the injured ox without eating it, while sparing the life of the other.

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