Intensive cattle farms get as much as 15% calves mortality during the first weeks*. Animal medicine is a powerful industry. As for human health, it’s far more profitable to use conventional drugs (Paul Polis says « chemotherapy ») than searching for causes and investigating the environment. Let’s not kill the golden eggs goose. However, it’s easy for everyone to admit that poor living conditions lead to higher cattle mortality. Cattle life expectancy is decreasing. Way of life and food just don’t fit! But provided meat and milk yield are sufficient, no matter how we produce! We turn a blind eye, denying terrific lifestyle: concentration camps replacing traditional cowsheds.

Our dominant system, agro-industrial, is de facto based on an historical collusion between governments and industrial lobbies, leading the human herd wherever they want. During the « catarrhal fever » legal battle, some french farmers disobeyed when vaccination was compulsory. These « outlaws » eventually won the battle. Animal can immunize on their own! Nature, no matter what some chemists think, is pretty well organized … In this case, vaccine became optional.

Homeopath and veterinarian, Paul Polis works in a holistic approach, so far from Western modern approach ! Far from the rational, yield-oriented and short-term vision, inherited from mechanistic philosophy of the 19th century, Paul Polis stresses the power of the « invisibles » in cattle farming. It’s made of all these tiny things that, when put together, will turn breeding into a positive life. A British study was recently issued on milk farms productivity. Unlike expectations, the best breeders where the one that named each and every cow!

Alas cows, naturally social animals, do not live any longer within cowsheds, but within gangs. Calves are isolated like prisoners. For lack of education, remains violence. Later on, after artificial insemination, heifers join the adult gang. In this chaos, similar to some suburbs, there is no limit. Animals turn out to be antisocial. So let’s cut horns! Barbaric and ugly cure! Therefore relationships between men and animals get really weird. No more domestication, no longer trust. Men gets scared. And what about animals?

Today, locked within intellectual orthodoxy and ready-to-eat business, technology diktat and administrative pressure (France and UE’s) make both men and agriculture unhappy. How could consumers and citizens, mostly urban and disconnected, escape unharmed?

Laurent

*13% according to official data in Brittany

Paul POLIS – Vivre avec les animaux – Une utopie pour le 21^ème siècle