Over the weekend I was fulminating over an article in the NZ Herald concerning the craze for “stress-free meat”. Apparently some idiot at Silver Fern Farms has buckled to this fad and declared that dogs shouldn’t be used to shift livestock as this might cause the animals distress, and also cause potential consumers distress, in that they are contributing to (oh save us!) cruelty to animals.
Idiots. The animals are dead anyway, and they’ve been herded around on the farm with dogs for ages beforehand. Any attempt to replace dogs with people, or technology, will be too expensive and replace the nonexistent problem with real ones.
The cretins behind this “stress-free meat” business might like to explain to lions that they need to have respect for the feelings of their prey, and perhaps look at some other method of killing them that doesn’t involve a traumatising chase, or the slow and probably painful means of asphyxiation to kill it.
What this stems from is the same unfortunate root that spawned the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, the health-and-safety madness of the UK, PETA and just about every other dictatorial, monomaniac pressure group blighting modern existence. And that root is Minimal Risk.
The problem is that some lunatics take this laudable concept and turn it into the impossible goal of No Risk. And then there is the matter of defining risk…
I feel that most of these No-Risk squallers are selfish, fascist zealots, mainly because they want the world to deform itself to suit them. They want people who are not physical, mental and spiritual carbon copies of themselves to be forced to stop existing; their god is Procrustes.
If there should be a law to minimise risk that I would whole-heartedly support, it would be one to ban these sorts of ill-considered, high-handed we-know-better lobby groups.
People cannot be protected from everything, so they must be prepared to protect themselves. And in order to do so, they must be able to identify and gauge risks wherever they arise; the only alternative is to do away with the dangerous follies of human rights and sovereignty, and turn all the world into one gigantic prison, and ring every man, woman and child around with gates and bars and screws from cradle to grave, their entire lives scheduled and arranged for their safety, convenience, and maximal usefulness.
Originally posted 7 December 2009
