Bill and Lou: Two Oxen at a College

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Just so others don’t follow the link to a story they may find boring, basically, a college has been using a couple of oxen to do work on a farm. Now for various reasons, the oxen cannot do their work. The college had a vote including both students and faculty and the decision was to slaughter them for food. The animal rights/vegetarian folks are strongly objecting. The blog post is highly biased in favor of vegetarianism. If that sounds interesting to you, by all means read it. I thought it was a lot of talk about something basically boring.

–Jen
 
revert_jen said:
Just so others don’t follow the link to a story they may find boring, basically, a college has been using a couple of oxen to do work on a farm. Now for various reasons, the oxen cannot do their work. The college had a vote including both students and faculty and the decision was to slaughter them for food. The animal rights/vegetarian folks are strongly objecting. The blog post is highly biased in favor of vegetarianism. If that sounds interesting to you, by all means read it. I thought it was a lot of talk about something basically boring.

–Jen
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Thanks Jen. You saved me from losing 5 minutes of my life.👍
 
triumphguy said:
Talking about 15 minutes of fame…

did you know that Andy Warhol was actually a practicing Catholic?
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Since he’s a Ruthenian Catholic, something tells me that he receives communion with the liturgical spoon. 🙂
 
spencelo said:
This is a fascinating story, so I thought I’d share it: animalblawg.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/bill-and-lou-two-oxen-at-a-college/
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Hi Spencelo, welcome back 🙂

Yes, I have been hearing news reports about the situation. It concerns Green Mountain College in Vermont. The college emphasizes sustainable living. Oxen work as pairs, so when one of the 11-year old pair became permanently disabled, the pair were slated for the dinner table.

However, supporters of the oxen, who viewed them as mascots for the college, began a campaign to save the animals. Miriam Jones, cofounder of Vine, an animal sanctuary in Springfield, Vt. is quoted as saying
“We do not believe that the way to conserve resources is to kill the elderly and disabled to prevent them from using up resources because they’re not useful anymore,” Jones says. “We just ethically find that repugnant.”
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Philip Ackerman-Leist, head of Green Mountain College’s Farm and Food project, says the issue is a lot more complicated. “We have been very clear from the beginning that this is not a petting zoo,” he says. “It was going to be a sustainable farm operation.”
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Ackerman-Leist notes that 70 percent of students eat meat. But 12 years ago, when the college began developing its sustainable farm program, vegetarian students specifically asked that livestock be included to confront the realities of eating meat. He says this debate goes way beyond Bill and Lou, and faculty and students have spent a lot of time discussing it.
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npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/22/163257176/despite-protest-college-plans-to-slaughter-serve-farms-beloved-oxen

The college is still committed to slaughtering the two oxen, but, due to threats, it is having trouble finding a local butcher willing to do it
In a statement Wednesday evening, college President Paul J. Fonteyn said the Poultney-based college would not be able to meet that timetable “because regional slaughterhouses have been inundated with hostile and threatening e-mails and phone calls from extremist groups bent on interfering with the processing.”
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“These are mostly small, family operated Vermont businesses that provide local meat for local consumers,” he said. “This is a busy time of year for them, and many have expressed fears that their operations might be shut down by protesters if they accept the oxen for processing.”
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usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/01/college-oxen-slaughter/1676227/
 
What do people here think of the story? Are you in favor of GMC’s decision to slaughter Bill and Lou?
 
Of course I object to killing an innocent creature (or in this case, two of them).

Jala
 
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