Why I’m not going to buy a bale

Please, stop asking me to buy a bale. My friends are asking me, advertisements and media are asking me, even my kid’s school is asking me to buy a damn bale. For the most part I’ve been wearing a hole in the “hide post” button, scrolling on, or even getting halfway through an honest response and deleting it. 

But this is my blog, and on my blog I tell the truth, even when that makes me unpopular. 

For my offshore readers, there’s a massive drought in Australia. We are the “land of drought and flooding rains”. Whilst no one seems to be able to agree if it’s the worst drought in ten years, eighteen years, or eight hundred years, one thing is for certain: it’s a big deal.

The people hit hardest are out beyond the sandstone curtain, feeling unheard, unseen and forgotten. Our farmers in particular. Media down here is flooded with images of starving animals and teary, weather beaten, battlers. Like any normal human, my heart goes out to them.

But not my wallet.

If I buy a bale, or six, what happens then? Those starving animals you feel so bad for… Are they saved? No. They still get to die. They just die in a way that makes a profit. They die in a way that brings average Joanne happiness when she can get a good deal at the butcher. But they still die. Horribly.

No don’t pull the “they die humanely” card. It makes you sound uneducated. Even if you ignore the literal definition of the word humane, their deaths are anything but. The documentary Dominion gives an accurate representation of Australia’s animal agricultural industry. If you want to play the humane card, watch that first.

But I’m not here to talk about animal welfare. I’m not going to sit here with all the other Aussies pretending to care about farm animals right now. If you cared, you wouldn’t eat them. It’s not the animals you’re trying to help, it’s the farmers, right? The backbone of our great nation.

A lot of people are seeing innocent victims of nature here, like nobody knows why our dry spells are getting longer and our summers are filled with blistering heatwaves.

Except we do know. And turning money into bales – or complaining that our government gives too much foreign aid – isn’t going to fix it.

Let’s strip this shit back to the bare bones:
Our climate is changing, rapidly. That’s science. You don’t have to believe it, but you don’t have to believe the wold is round either. Truth doesn’t give a shit what you believe. 

So. Our climate is changing, and our farmers are being destroyed by the resulting drought.

Here comes the infuriatingly obvious part:

Animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change, doing more damage than all the cars, trucks, buses, trains and fucking planes on the planet combined.

Again for the people in the back: Farming animals is destroying the planet.

These farmers, knowingly or not, are direct contributors to their own problem.

What good then, is buying a bale? Why help someone continue to make the same mistake? 
And what about all the farmers growing crops? Why are we hearing nothing about the people who grow food that heals rather than harms us? Where is their aid? Where is the uproar over their losses?
Why aren’t we helping these cattle farmers move away from their out dated, environmentally destructive, careers, toward something that benefits not only their pockets and our nation, but the rest of the world too?

Surely I’m not the only person who thinks it’s counter intuitive to buy a bale and call it good!

Like you, I want to see my fellow humans thrive. I don’t want farmers committing suicide. I don’t wish misery upon them. I don’t want animals (who didn’t ask to be born into exploitation) to starve in the dust. But buying a bale won’t solve the problem. It’s a band aid at best, and a match on dry tinder at worst. 

Comment down below, or message me with your links to helping those farmers who are producing fruits and veggies, or who want to move away from animal agriculture and make a fresh start. I’d like nothing more than to throw my support (and wallet) behind them.