As a member of the Social Media Team at Heifer I have a fun task of reading tweets from our wonderful donors and supporters who help spread the word about our mission, especially during the holiday season. This holiday season, it’s been extremely fun watching all of the actors and celebrities join in on the Heifer holiday spirit. (This could be because I’m a closet celebrity lover. I’m guilty of choosing the longest line at the supermarket just so I have time to read a gossip magazine … or two.)
So far our list of celebrities who have tweeted us include: Patricia Heaton, Adrian Grenier, Ed Asner, Lauren Bush, Mia Farrow, Ashley Judd, Joe Mantegna, Eva Amurri, Janie Bryant and Serinda Swan.
Each celebrity has picked their favorite Heifer gift for the holidays. Ashley Judd loves bees, Patricia Heaton has chosen sheep, and Adrian Grenier has trees at the top of his list.
Even though Ed Asner is pictured to the right with a goat, his animal of choice this year is water buffalo.
Celeb Tweets We Love:
@PatriciaHeaton
Almost forgot! It’s #CyberMonday, I’m giving sheep through@Heifer! hefr.in/utglcl One of many gift ideas I’ll be tweeting!
@JanieBryant
Llamas rarely make it on top 10 gift lists–but they make mine! @Heiferhefr.in/vVERlC
@adriangrenier
I’m doing all my #BlackFriday shopping from home this year by giving through@Heifer – the gift that keeps on giving.hefr.in/vwHOLn
It’s been a lot of fun so far watching all the celebs share their support to our organization. I think I’m going to join Patricia this year with sheep. Which celebrity will you team up with?
This is an atrocity. You're making one group of mammals better off by promoting the slaughter of another group of mammals. Beyond the enormous ethical implications (can you say "net welfare decrease"?), this ignores the fact that more people can live off plants than by feeding the plants to animals and then eating the animals. This is worse both ethically and in terms of environmental sustainability.
You would do so much more good by promoting birth control to fix the real underlying problem — too many humans. No increase in resources or efficiency will save us from sufficiently large population increases.
Thanks for reading and contributing, broken ladder. While I know it would be foolish to attempt to change your beliefs, I would like to take the opportunity to make the case that Heifer's approach to ending hunger and poverty through gifts of livestock and training is environmentally sustainable ethically responsible.
I agree that most Americans eat too much meat, and that the current industrial agricultural model is doing vastly more harm than good. However, providing livestock as part of a holistic community development model is a proven method for helping people meet their nutritional needs while taking care of the Earth's resources.
Unlike herbivorous animals, whose protein needs are met without external input (ruminants get their protein from rumen bacteria, for example), humans rely on the food we eat to meet our protein needs. In the developed world, we have many options for getting protein (and other important things like iron, vitamin D and calcium) that do not involve animals. So we can count ourselves fortunate to have the option to healthfully live our lives without relying on animals.
In the predominantly rural areas where Heifer works, however, there aren't grocery stores selling rice milk, soy yogurt, calcium-fortified orange juice, enriched bagels, tofu, almond butter, or vitamin supplements. While Heifer is by no means trying to encourage American-style consumption of meat, we do want children and adults to have what they need to be healthy.
It is absolutely true that there are foods that are naturally occurring sources of protein, calcium, iron and vitamins. But our project participants are small-holder farmers living on very small (and often degraded) plots of land. They do not have the resources they would need to choose a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Further, as much as it is my prerogative to be an omnivore, vegetarian or vegan, it is also up to our project participants how they choose to feed themselves and their families. Diet is as linked to culture as it is to health. It would be unrealistic and unfair to ignore the cultural influences on diet and to ignore not only the needs of the hungry, but also the preferences. It is the communities with whom Heifer works that decide what agricultural inputs they receive.
For our project participants, livestock development lowers rates of starvation and death due to easily preventable diseases; provides manure to enrich the soil so more vegetables can be grown; leads to increased income that can pay for school, clothes, medicine and other food. Heifer is committed to ensuring our gifts of livestock are well cared for and raised using sustainable, humane practices.
The livestock raised by Heifer participants are not fed cereal grains that could otherwise be eaten by humans. Instead, they are eating roughage and crop wastes that are inedible for humans and converting those plants into food energy (milk, eggs, meat) that our bodies are equipped to digest.
As for population, global agriculture currently produces 17 percent more calories per person than it did 30 years ago, even though the world's population has increased 70 percent in that same time (http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm). So, at our current level of population, people are not hungry because there aren't enough calories to go around, they're hungry because they continue to lack access to the food they need to survive. Heifer works to redistribute food resources, and our practice of Passing on the Gift ensures that future generations of families in the places we work will also be able to produce their own food.