Photo by Anita Austvika on Unsplash 
A sheep truck has just clanged to a halt outside my window. I first heard the rattle of its railings as it slowed, then the baa, baa, baa of sheep huddled in their metal transportation, possibly to the slaughter; we presume that they cannot know it, and are merely oblivious of their unknowable fate. That may not be the case, though I’m not going to ask my neighbour Johann, whose truck-for-hire it is, as I’d rather not know the beasts’ fate. For the guilty conscience, you understand.
I do get the irony that on a Friday morning I might see a bakkie rattling along the street and wince for the fate of the three woolly occupants at the back, then that night light a fire and braai some chops. As if the two things are unrelated – with luck the sheep is off for the shearing, you might hope, and anyway, those chops came from a packet in the supermarket fridge. The mind has a way of blocking out all the in-between bits. As it happens, shearing is done on the farm, then the wool is sorted to go for auction or sale, often to China (when they aren’t banning SA wool because of an outbreak in Limpopo or elsewhere very far from your Eastern Cape farm where your meat was raised). This will bring the farmer the annual wool cheque, on which much of the farm has to run for very long months.
Maybe the rattled sheep are headed for the abattoir. But they may just as well be being shipped to a farmer elsewhere who has bought them, there being a great need among the more hard-pressed to sell their stock or, more bluntly, as some of them put it candidly, to liquidate their assets. Or headed for auction, where their fate rests on the needs of whoever’s buying them – if they’re in luck, that’s a sheep farmer in a good rain area who can afford to fatten them up for the inevitable. But it’d be a reprieve at least. Or they could be en route to a feedlot, where sheep are fed a formula diet that may preclude their owner from naming their meat Karoo Lamb, if plans reach fruition to shackle farmers to a madly strict spider’s web of rules designed to ensure that the customer is sold proper Karoo lamb, and not merely the best lamb from the Karoo that the drought-embattled farmer can manage to produce. Again, the end result is the slaughter. That’s the lot of the embattled Karoo sheep farmer: shackled, and hobbled, by the need for rules, where good practice and commonsense ought to be enough.
I’m not saying vegan activists and climate activists don’t have a case – they absolutely do. The damage to the planet is set out sensibly in the following video by The Economist, which argues that if cows were a country, they’d be the third-largest emitter of greenhouses gases on the planet:
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A lot of food, it is maintained, is wasted to feed animals which we then eat. Bear in mind where the word “husbandry” comes from. A sheep or cattle farmer’s business is to “put the ram to the ewes”, as the sheep farmer, or grazier in Australian parlance, might say, in order to create more animals to feed until maturity (yet more costly during times of drought, when the “free” grazing of the veld is not available, so has to be supplemented with very expensive bought feed). So a lot of effort and expense is gone to so that we have the lamb and mutton the market demands. And that global market is way beyond massive.
I do hear those people in their fancy city butcheries and others in academia who charge that it is just not good enough to finish a sheep off in a feedlot – where they’re fattened up with manufactured feed to please or appease the market, saving the original farmer a lot of money and probably enabling him to stay afloat – because the meat won’t be as “Karoo” as it “should” be. But it’s not as simple as that in the real life of the poor farmer fighting drought and debt. There’s a six-year-plus drought going on all around them. There’s nothing on the veld the beasts can eat. The rainclouds come and the rainclouds go, leaving no gift behind them. What the hell is the farmer supposed to do? Let the sheep starve until their gaunt carcasses are strewn all over the veld? If I were that sheep, please, send me to the feedlot.
Ah, the vegan might say, but we shouldn’t be farming them anyway. Because The Planet. And therein lies a massive and insulting presumption. I get that this must be hard reading if you’re a vegetarian or vegan. We’re from different planets, admitted. And the planet is key in this story. We all want to save it. Even meat-eaters use eco-friendly recyclable bags for their shopping and separate their bottles and plastic from their paper goods and leftover food. Yet suddenly we find ourselves the Enemy, the Culprit, spoken about as if we’re a Pariah, an Unconscionable, an Untransformable.
I watched this video in growing horror the other day: