7gen Bloc

In the new edition of our newsletter, we recommend Heifer International as a great place to shop for the holidays. A gift there, made in the name of someone on your list, helps an impoverished family somewhere in the world become self-sustaining through a donation of livestock and/or other related things. That suggestion drew a thought-provoking rebuke from Eric at An Animal Friendly Life.

Sounds to us like a call to dialogue. So we asked Heifer International to start one by sharing their perspective. What’s yours?
I am Ray White, public information director at Heifer. I just read the animalfriendlylife.com posting, and I must say this is the most reasonable-sounding objection to our work from the animal-rights position I have ever seen. It seems odd that the writer says once people decide human rights are more important than animal rights that then those people become intractable in their thinking, because I can tell you that is how animal-rights groups are viewed – as fanatical. Heifer is not fanatical. Heifer is mainly practical.

We inherited this attitude from the farmers who started Heifer as a pragmatic response to helping the hungry. It just so happens that small-scale, rural farms can be a lot more productive and produce better incomes if they incorporate some livestock into their production. Which means livestock, as Jeffrey Sacks (“The End of Poverty”) says, are an “excellent development tool.” A single cow can triple the production of a tiny farm in Honduras, for example. But a cow is a big-ticket item that is out of reach of millions of farmers all over the world. However, if someone like Heifer gives a farmer a cow or a goat, she can use that animal and its byproducts – the milk that can be sold for income, manure to go on crops as organic compost to increase output -- while feeding the cow leaves and grass and things that human stomachs cannot digest, greatly improving their incomes and nutrition while not falling prey to the feeding-grain-to-livestock trap.
So we are:

• Not using grain that humans could better eat;
• Not practicing cruelty but giving animals productive, healthy lives, and, in fact,
• Not doing the kind of things done on factory farms that this website is trying to link Heifer to.

This is just not what we do. We aren’t even a precursor to big factory farming. So I don’t even think it is relevant to talk about our attitude toward large-scale agriculture since it is so far removed from what we do. Our approach is holistic, using bees, trees, crop production, worms as well as more conventional livestock – cows, goats, water buffalo, llamas, sheep, poultry, etc. – together with production techniques to improve small farms. I will say we have a number of vegetarians on staff who recognize that the choices we have about diet in the U.S. are very different from the conditions our partners in developing countries have to deal with. And there’s no question here at Heifer that it would be much more difficult for people to find adequate sources of nutrition without livestock and the manure they produce.
One other point I would make is that, because of the way we work teaching values to community groups who then produce a strategic plan that maps out their activities to improve economically, Heifer is not requiring or even advocating the use of livestock. We look at their plan and decide whether to fund it, and it may involve helping build animal shelters, purchasing livestock, seed, tools, training for veterinary care, etc. Teaching the community to use shared values and planning for community improvement: that is what we do. Teaching people to use resources that are at hand to become more self-reliant. Livestock are just one tool to make better incomes and nutrition possible.
So finally, this writer comes around to realizing he or she has positive feelings for Heifer and we get this paragraph:
“I agree with HI's stated goals, that our humanitarian aid should increase self-sufficiency, rather than relying on handouts to fight hunger, teaching techniques for working with one's environment, and inspiring self-reliance, but one can do this without exploiting animals or taxing the environment. Granted, on a small scale, the environmental impact is geared to be positive, but the ultimate goal of organizations like HI -- with which I emphatically do not agree -- is to create large markets for livestock around the world, which leads inevitably and unsustainably to factory farming.”
So they credit us with increasing self-sufficiency, point out that we do not give handouts, approve our teaching environmental sustainability, like that we insure self-reliance. It’s starting to sound like a love letter to Heifer! But then the writer can’t get over the idea that “organizations like Heifer” create “large markets for livestock around the world” which eventually “leads to” factory farms. But really, if you look closely, even they don’t believe we actually do the thing they accuse us of doing! So their only real “beef” with us is that we use animals, and frankly, we think Heifer encourages the right relationship between humans and domestic animals.
Another thing I would point out is that this writer offers no credible alternative and only says “one can do [what Heifer now does] without exploiting animals.” I’m sitting right next to a veterinarian as I write this and he’s shaking his head no, we can’t.
I would invite anyone who has questions to go to our website and look at the stories about the many projects around the world where Heifer is making a difference, to talk to Heifer’s regional officers, or just delve into us as deeply as they can. I think they will find that what Heifer is doing is really needed and that there should be more efforts like Heifer that respect the poor and see them not as a problem to be solved by us, but the solution to hunger, capable of solving their own problems if given just a toehold on an economic ladder.