Waste

[Gary]

Reading.replying to the Pukka Pidgeon thread made me think (I know rare as it is) about how much our societies attitude to wild life has changed and I WAS WONDERING WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK.

Ok my thought was this, When we were hunter gatherers we lived off herds ten of thousands strong, animals stretching from horizon to horizon, and yet we were wise enough to only take what we needed and only to take the old and the weak ect ect (and before you say it - that practise continued even after the native americans got guns so its not a ease of hunting thing) and nothing was wasted, the spirit of the dead beast was respected and the whole thing utilised.

Now when animals are so few and far between that even seeing one is classed as lucky we will kill them and take only the choicest cuts, dumping the rest, road kills arent even given a second though. We have charities set up to protect endangered species and people happily give to these and yet blindly still dont give a second though to the causes of the endangerment (their new mahogany furniture for example).

So my question is what changed us and why? We still know its wrong, we still know the wisdom of the ancient ones so why do we ignore it?

Your thoughts please.

 

[tomtom]

i think it is largly two do with two things.. one is people becoming completely detached from the process for killing/preparing the animal.. "in general conversation with a friend the other day i mentioned i had been trout fishing the previous weekend.. the person asked do i kill the trout i said of course i did i would not fish if it wasn't going to take my catch home and eat it.. how do you do that they asked.. i replayed that i did it as quickly as i could with a priest.. yuck they said thats horrible i asked why and they couldn't come back with much.. i then asked if they ate meat and they said they did.. i left it at this point.. but would have liked to have asked if they thought their beef stake or roast chicken was killed in a "nice" or "horrible" way or if killing the trout was only horrible because i had been present when it happened..
Two this "instant" society where the choice cuts are readily available displayed in a refrigorated in a cabinet and most people have little or no knowledge of butchering technique they don't see or understand the amount which goes to waste..

i am sure i have only touched on a little of what Gary is getting at here, he has a way oh brining up these grate discussions.. but heres my 2p

 

[Tantalus]

personally am quite happy to "source" my own supper

and as for waste i am a great fan of haggis and blackpudding

spent last sunday cutting up a lamb for the freezer

admitted it was killed skinned and cleaned by professionals but those are the regs these days

and all the scraps were boiled up for the dog too

i guess in days gone by when every other house had a pig for the table and health inspectors were unheard of ...........it was a fairly normal thing to do

Tant

 

[zen]

Excellent question Gary,

In my humble opinion, and if you'll allow me to rant a bit.... this is one of those "onion" questions. In other words there are layer after layer of answers that start very close to the immediate question and end, at the core, with humankind's fundamental problem.

So, you could start by saying that people today have (and use) too much choice. In the case of the carcass this would mean, through an over-use of the intellect, mentally dividing / subdividing everything into good and bad and only taking what is perceived to be 'good', in other words the 'best' bits.

Further into the 'onion' it may become apparent that the root of this is the dualistic thought and choice making that insists on dividing the world into two. What I want, and what I don't want. In other words it's attraction and aversion gone rampant. This neurosis can and does manifest in lots of ways, to the point that some people nowadays get genuinely stressed / depressed about what to wear to tonight's party!

Further still into the core, you could say that the root of this so called "I" making all these choices is "Self Interest", after all most of us perceive ourselves as the most important person in the universe, so we should ensure "I" get what "I" need. Even in a room with a thousand people, or a stadium with ten thousand, "I" am the most important one !!!

Finally, at the core, is the delusion that "I" am separate from everything else. This is clearly not the case, after all we are completely interdependant and inter-related with everything else, but still it's a problem nearly all of us have.

I think the hunters of old had more than just self interest at heart. I reckon they had the interest of the whole environment in their minds because they felt they were part of it, not separate from it.


I'll get off the soap box now.......
:rolmao:

 

[Gary]

Good answers so far - but it still doesnt come close to the why we changed?
What changed us from hunting for the tribe to hunting for me and me alone. What changed us from wise(ish) creatures who were part of nature to selfish greedy creatures who abuse and waste nature.

What I can not fathom is the fact when we had more game we were good husbands of it - as we grew in numbers and had less and less game we seem to lose that ability.

 

[Squidders]

Ok, the hunting bit... I think partly comes down to storage... sure they got guns everywhere but they didn't have freezers to it wasn't worth killing everything in sight and letting it rot.

As for us lot being wasteful... I think it's a matter of some prestige, like a pride of lions or tribe of people. The head of the group will always have the more choice meat or food and what remains would go to the lower ranks. By only eating the finest parts of an animal we're elevating ourselves in our own minds to higher ranks.

I don't think it's a human problem as such, I think that if lions had the ability to kill and store more than they could eat they would (unless they found a comfy spot) You can also see the effects of over eating when looking at owl and rodent populations, the two typically rise and fall due to their numbers but trust me, if the owls could wipe out the rodents, they would have by now... and would have had to find an alternate food source or died out.

What makes things worse is that we think too much... we create factories and we give ourselves the best possible chance to wipe things out. I don't think we're the only ones with the desire though.

 

[Rob]

I dont know why we changed, and I dont think that we ever will know for sure.

I think that it is inherent from from our nature. If you accept that our curiosity led on to all invention.

Our bodies, although evolving to suit the most suitable form, were "destined" to become "useful" (we had a bone locked away in our genes that would eventually form something useful in the form of a thumb etc - what evolutionary edge did that bump on some organisms have?)

We have been able to take steps that have eased our lives. And it is a modern privilage that we dont have to anymore.

Fire, some think, gave us the time to develop complex forms of language, philosophise and promoted use of time that would not normally be used for anything other than sleep. Experimentation with developing tools, crafts etc.

Agriculture or animal husbandry, in its earliest form, could have heralded a change in our relationships with the land. Although our success or failure was linked to the environemtn and the cycles of the earth, understanding from experience could have been a point where loss of "faith" became evident.

Religion. With the spread of some, if not all, of the major religions, people were encouraged to follow one god, a specific god, some bloke etc. This could have been one of the reasons that instead of respecting what we have, we respect something/someone who provided.

With the human race continuing to develop at such a high rate, people will continue to loose touch with nature. Be this in the form of distance from the origins of our food and "repulsion" towards those who kill, or not considering that you are draining natural resources without accepting that we probably only get to use them once during our time here.

With the distinction between conservation and integration that we have, you just have to do what you can.

 

[Tantalus]

oops i didnt realise you were looking for an answer

how about money being to blame?

i mean there are bits that are just not worth selling if you are butchering animals

and if you kill and sell more animals then you can have more money so obviously you want to sell the bits that people want

in a society without money everyone shares the meal dont they ?

Tant

 

[Andy]

i mean there are bits that are just not worth selling if you are butchering animals

Tant

We call this Mcdonalds

Mcdonalds does prove a point though. It uses bits of meat that anyone would turn their nose up at in other situations yet people seem to think they taste quite nice (I wouldn't know). this seems to be a way to use up all that meat that otherwise would be wasted. The trouble is they then waste a lot of it anyway. This is becasue it's a fastfood joint (sorry for the pun). The speed of the morden world demands that the food be quickly avaliable. it's cheaper to waste food then time.
Over the top hygene regulations don't help. If a chickin falls off the conveyor belt going to be turned into chicken breast onto a fall hich is cleaned everyday in a place where the workers have to wear plastic bags on their feet the chcken must be thrown away. Surely the floor isn't really any more "dirty" then any other surface and it's going to be cooked anyway. Whats the point

I went veggi after seing the way animals are put ina truck for hours on end to go to a clean place to die. When the foot and mouth thing kicked off I saw a guy walk upto the cows on a farm and shoot them in the head with a bolt gun. They never knew a thing. I wouldn't mind eating them so much.

 

[zen]

Good answers so far - but it still doesnt come close to the why we changed?
What changed us from hunting for the tribe to hunting for me and me alone. What changed us from wise(ish) creatures who were part of nature to selfish greedy creatures who abuse and waste nature.

What I can not fathom is the fact when we had more game we were good husbands of it - as we grew in numbers and had less and less game we seem to lose that ability.

Good point Gary,

(Note to self - must try to answer the question actually asked and not simply rant )

Firstly, I really don't know the answer, but could possibly guess at post 1800 education systems promoting self interest, or the fact that we (think we) can now afford to be wasteful. Incidently I like Squidders' comment of the prime cuts being "high status food". There's a lot of truth in that.

Also, I think many people in modern Western society are "in denial" as to the long term consequences of their lifestyle. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people have abdicated responsibility for their actions to the State.

However, IMHO the problem with the question "why" is that there is really no end to it. All things depend on previous causes and conditions, so even if we get the answer as to what were the immediate causes of this problem, we might well ask "why did those come about? what caused them?" and so on back in time to the big bang or even further (after all something caused the big bang!)

The way I was taught (and again this is only one opinion here, offered in the hope it might be of some benefit) was that this kind of "why" question is similar to the guy who was shot by an arrow asking who made it, and which bird's feathers were used. It may be more appropriate in his case to concentrate on removing the arrow and healing the wound.

On the other hand though, asking it does provoke thought and learning, so what do I know :?:

With regard to today's excessive wastage, one thing I say to myself regularly when I think the world's gone mad (and this may raise a few eyebrows) is this.....

"Nothing in the entire Universe is unnatural. All of it, every last bit"

 

[falcon]

I wonder if our inclination to use/waste has continually changed at various times due to the prevailing circumstances in which society has found itself. Current behaviour may well have its origins in the expansionism which developed following the end of rationing in the 1950's. My dad could never move on from the need to conserve and use whatever resources he had, even though he was able to live very comfortably in later years. People who have lived through the 1940's and 50's talked of "make do and mend....use it up and wear it out...". My grandfather (who had known hardship as a POW during WW1) was an inveterate hunter/gatherer and apparently used to send cooked game by post (!)to both my dad and his brother when they were serving during WW2. But that was before the Nanny state took over....public health laws wouldn't allow that now.

This ethos is reflected by a couple of my favourite country writers, John Humphreys and Fred J Taylor, whose stories of their own activities in the countryside often carry the need for respect which their quarry deserves.

I tend to think that current behaviour has developed because we have not had to live in the way people did in the first half of the 20th century where only the privilaged few had wealth and resources and everyone else appreciated the true value of all types of meat, offal included. Many people can afford to be fussy nowadays and don't bother to respect the fact that an animal has lost its life to feed them.

The other reason that I think attitudes may have continually changed is that whereas early 20thC Brits may have had a culture of make do and mend, the people who drove the native Americans onto the reservations up to 50 years earlier certainly had quite the opposite. I'm sure that there are many more examples of these changes in attitudes and behavoiur at different stages of our development.

 

[Stuart]

I'm far to tired to even start trying to think of an answer to this one...... but having just spent some time living with nomadic hunter gatherers I have some observations that may provoke thought.

the penan have a culture based around sharing all they have, if one penan puts down his parang and another needs a parang to cut something he will just pick it up and use it, when he is finished he will replace it back where the other put it down, he does of course treat it with the respect he would his own parang.

when food is caught or gathered it is divided amongst everyone.

when I arrived in their camp I did not need to ask if I could stay in their shelter, I was expected just enter and make myself a bed for the night

what is yours is theirs, it goes without question.

there are two types of penan in the jungle, those who have given up there nomadic lives and built semi permanent homes (usually those who's hunting ground and enviroment is irreparably changed by the logging companies)

And the those who live a nomadic life moving from sago crop to sago crop.

The nomadic penan make everything they own from the land, if something is irreparably damaged they thow it over there shoulder where it goes back from where it came and they make another.

both groups still hunt and both groups demonstrate the same culture of sharing.

however as you enter the permanent habitation of non nomadic penan you find it surrounded by old batteries and plastic bottles and wrappers.

now modern materials have been made available by the logging roads, and quickly made use of by the penan.

However they do not seem to have grasped the concept that it doesn't disappear when thrown out of the shelter the way stuff made from wood and rattan does.

it appears that the only difference between these two groups is that the settled penan now have the technology to pollute.

the nomadic groups are always on the move so they are not in one area long enough to over use it, and all there equipment is biodegradable.

but the minute they settle down and have access to plastic etc they begin to pollute the area and destroy there surroundings.

it is not the having the means to do so that makes the difference.

I hope this makes sense I really am to tired to explain it more eloquently.

 

[Stuart]

it was also apparent the care with which they treated their equipment.

you take care of things a lot more and are not so quick to throw them away if it means you personally will have to invest time and effort to make another one.

but if somthing is manufactured for you and cheap to obtain.........

 

[RovingArcher]

Interesting question Gary. Before I start into this, please allow me to apologize to those that I offend, because I am sure that I will offend some, if not many here.

When man puts himself above Nature, man puts himself into a position above the CREATOR. Of course, it's all just a bad dream, because Nature is the beginning and end of everything, including us.

To me, why we as a people (Western), have become gluttonous and without regard to others, including Nature and even our own children, can't be simply stated and my thoughts may be way off base to many here and are very controversial to be sure, but this is how I see it.

First let me say, that each and every culture, whether ancient or fully civilized, believe that there is an evil that leads men to do certain things by tricking them into believing that it is the right thing to do. It has also been acknowledged that this evil lives in the minds of man, hence, the serpent leading the first humans to eat of the fruit of knowledge in the Bible. The Lakota call this evil Ektomi (trickster) and believe that it comes in the form of a spider. It makes those that the trickster chooses, think and do crazy things and think that it is the right thing to do. Of course, there is always a bad ending to things.

When you take religious beliefs into account, we can't skip over the "dominion over the Earth" part of it all. Most take it that the Bible is saying take without asking, take without consideration or respect and take without care of what future generations will have. Well, my thought is that even in the writing of the religious works, the "trickster" was present and was an active participant.

With all that in mind, I think it all started with agriculture. Agriculture built civilization and with civilization, came greed and the hunger for power. If there is an evil outcome to anything, then the "trickster" is involved.

The larger civilization becomes, the further from Nature humankind becomes. The less we care for nature, the more we abuse her, which in the end, leads to the demise of humankind.

The people start taking on jobs that deal with the growing, harvesting and marketing of food. These people are the ones that still have some contact with a now manipulated nature. Now all the people have to do to gather food is to go to the market, where an abundance of food is awaiting them for the taking, but in order to be able to gather some of it, the people must have something to trade (money).

The need of money puts the people into the position of having to spend their time gathering money, by doing some useful job for civilization, benefiting the greed of others, which further developes the greed in the hearts of the people, because they know that the more money they can get, by whatever means, the better they and their families can live. The better they live, the more status they obtain, so they keep working at getting more money and more power. GREED!

It all eventually gets to the point that all people must do their part to support civilization and entire households start working long hours, to make more money, to afford the ever hungry greed of others and in the process, The people don't have time for lives, let alone nature and their children are left being raised during the day by strangers that don't hold the values of the parents and after school, they are raising themselves, but that's a horse of another color.

It will all just continue to fold in onto itself until man suffocates from all the weight.

 

[Tantalus]

of course stories like this

suggest that we are already suffocating

Tant

 

[RovingArcher]

Wow, thats something. There was an example of a similar sort 12 miles from our home, where a bear had walked to the beach in the early morning and on it's way back to it's hiding place (bears are few and far between here), a woman near the beach spotted it and called the authorities. They showed up, frightening the bear and driving it up a tree about 30'.

Soon it was a huge media circus, with crowds of onlookers, news people, camera people, police, sheriff and Fish and Game on site armed to the teeth over an old and very frightened bear. The now very brave woman who called, stood triumphantly with officials as they shot a dart into the bear that paralyzed it, making it fall from the tree, hitting a house and then the ground. By this time there was a group of us trying to get them all to just leave so the bear could calm down and leave on it's own, but their fear based blood lust prevailed and the bear paid the price with it's life.

The only good thing that came out of it is that the local Indian people were allowed to take the bear to a secret place and hold ceremony for it's life and spirit. Then the burial was done and no one but those involved know where this was done, even though the news people tried to follow.

 

[Tantalus]

i may be able to understand a bear (though with difficulty you are right)

but for petes sake a sheep ..............

what is next rabbits ?

we have become so removed from nature that it is seen as a threat

and yet society seems to think polar bears are cuddly disney type things

reminds me of the time my little brother tried to rescue a mouse out of the feed bin instead of letting my grandad swat it

one bitten fingertip and one tetanus jab later and mice were public enemy number 1

:?:

Tant

 

[Kim]

So my question is what changed us and why? We still know its wrong, we still know the wisdom of the ancient ones so why do we ignore it?

We changed us, for a thousand different reasons. One because with the age of technology we've always sort the quickest, cleanest, easiest, most efficient way to harvest things, and that meant centralising them, bigger more efficient slaughterhouses, intensive farming methods etc, etc...which went hand in hand with the impersonalisation of animals and fewer and fewer people actually came into contact with the care/reproduction/killing of a walking larder, so to speak! Another, because if you've had generations upon generations of people having to survive on basic foods, if you said to them in one hundred years time you can have stores filled with amazing foods in ample amounts...whose going to say no? We also have a twisted idea of what is 'clean' to eat and what isn't. Societies obsession with health and germs and what's 'nasty' and what isn't has had a huge affect on what people think is 'safe' to eat and most people have no knowledge of how to kill something or what parts of it are edible. Also, how many of you say...I'm not going to eat that bacon because the animals are treated abissmally until death? How many of you actively promote animal friendly farming? How many of you research where your meat comes from? (and any foods really). It's about a loss of control. Perhaps if we were still farming/culling for ourselves we would think about what we were doing more, but people are gloriously adept and not caring about what they don't see and most of them believe in abundance...why live with just enough when you can have more! I made a promise to myself some time ago not to eat anything I didn't think I could kill myself, or that came from 'intensive' animal agriculture. No, I don't keep this up twenty four hours a day, and yes, I do have relaxed days, the point is, I may not be able to change the world by doing this, but I can have a direct influence on my life and know that I'm living by principles I believe in. So to part of Gary's question...why do we ignore it...you don't have to...live in a way that honours at least some part of that, it's not impossible, it just requires a little effort on your part to find out where the meat you're eating comes from. It's about reclaiming the power you have over what you eat and taking responsibility for accepting how it gets to your plate. You can choose to live with it - most people already do - but don't get all high and mighty about the systems in place because they're so horrible to animals if you continue to support them - and the other choice you have....is don't live with it, change your habits, get to know your food and whether you can live with it arriving on your dinner plate in the way that it has. I'm not saying there's a right or wrong way, but if you make a choice about how to live, don't turn around and say...my, isn't the way those animals are kept/transported/killed just terrible. Why do we ignore the wisdom of the ancients...because most of us are too lazy to do anything about it, myself, included. But I believe in change and I will continue to change so that I can bring such wisdom into my life and not be so much of a hypocrite anymore.

 

[zen]

Nice one Kim, :You_Rock_

I thoroughly agree with the practice of making wiser decisions over where we get our food from, and doing our best to ensure that it comes to us from more sustainable & humane methods of food aquisition / production, and not the battery cage or the over worked and pesticide / fertiliser sodden soil.

I think the world changes slowly for the better by individuals making decisions to do what's best for all, and not just for "me".

:biggthump

 

[Andy]

My parents has this crazy idea that he should retire early and get a small holding and grow most of the food they need. My dad thought working part time with this set up should work.
Does this sound like a TV program to you