(1) In defence of the fur trade
(2) In defence of hunting
(3) On producing veal
(4) On Disney and Ovid: the beast, the human and the divine.

In defence of the fur trade
Published in the Daily Express, March 1999

Maria Eagle's private members bill to ban mink farming in the UK will be debated in the Commons today. It will probably be a very popular bill, but only because people haven't noticed that it is grossly unfair. Farmed mink are at least as well off as pigs and chickens, and no-one is seriously thinking of banning production of those.

Ms Eagle has condemned mink farmers for conducting a "barbaric practice to produce an inessential luxury item". The animal welfare minister, Elliot Morley, has said the government backs the bill. Neither has noticed or cared that many observers, including researchers in Danish and Dutch universities, emphasise that both in terms of stress and behaviour patterns, mink do well on well-run farms.

So why the fuss? Leave aside that animal rights groups gave New Labour £1m before the last election, the Government needs all the appearance of radicalism it can get. It is reaching for populist "G" spots. However, though opinion polls are dead set against fur-farming, it's less noted that last year a jury on Ann Widdecombe's TV show, The Whole Truth, returned a 7:5 verdict in favour of fur farming. Of course, that was after hearing both sides of the argument.

Unlike the bill's parliamentary proposers, I have visited five mink farms and spent enough time in each to have a feeling for what the animals are like when people are around, and what they're like when they're left on their own.

Mink spend a lot of time resting up. When they hear a visitor, they seem interested, lively, but also relaxed. They are very handsome, and they have - it's no surprise - gorgeous fur. If you hang around too long and too close, they get agitated. But then, these are not tame animals. They are used to being handled after seventy or more generations in captivity, but there is hot debate about how much they have lost all similarity to their cousins in the wild. They are "semi-wild" say some British researchers. Most continental researchers insist they are domesticated: Knud Heller, of the University of Copenhagen, for instance, insists: "They are fairly well adapted to their environment: we find no signs of long term stress in these animals".

The bare wire cage in which mink live (only for seven months in the majority of cases) is not an exciting place. It doesn't hurt their feet, but it isn't exciting. Badly managed mink do show behavioural problems: but that can be put right, and is true of any badly-managed intensive system.

There is indeed good new evidence from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University that farmed mink will, given the chance, work hard to avail themselves of a daily bath, which is not on offer in most northern mink farms. That they might like water stands to reason: in the wild, they are semi-aquatic. But we can't ask mink who have never known this luxury whether they are pining for it. Some Danish work tentatively suggests that access to water doesn't make mink much better off.

Very few mink get herded about on lorries, and in the UK the vast majority die within half a minute of being gassed within a feet or two of their cage. Some British researchers believe that the system needs to be worked properly to be that quick, and would prefer that the creatures were killed by injection. It's a moot point, and in any case, mink almost certainly have a less unpleasant death than is given to any other farm animal, or to most rich humans, come to that.

Because Europe's mink farmers are subject to reforming pressure from, amongst others, the Council of Europe and the Dutch parliament, research has already led to new standards for mink farming. But any argument about mink welfare would as truly apply to all intensively farmed animals. Research shows that pigs will work hard to be allowed to root about in the ground, which very few of the pigs get a chance to do. It shows that chickens will work hard to be allowed a daily dustbath, which very few laying hens ever get to do.

Respect and others who support Maria Eagle have been showing horror videos of plainly bad practice. One, shot by campaigners, showed a man abusing mink and led to a prosecution, and may be the one case where their work has done good. The Fur Breeders' Association chairman, Len Kelsall, says that the trade has no interest in defending bad farmers and bad farming. He's right, and the point is that mink farming plainly can be and usually is done rather well.

The other great cry is that mink are farmed only for luxury. Almost all animal husbandry is a luxury: no-one needs meat, and almost all of us eat far too much of it. At least mink doesn't contribute to the dangerous fattiness of the Western diet.

Actually, a mink farm takes an unpleasant waste from the food industry (dead chickens, fish remains and damaged cornflakes, for instance) and turns it into a luxury export worth millions. The sole result of Maria Eagle's bill will be that a few more mink are farmed overseas, the British economy will be a tiny bit dented, and more waste will be, well, wasted.

The Vegan animal rights lobbies behind this bill know very well the force of the argument about the parity between mink and all other animal farming: ban this use of animals and they are well on the way to demanding bans on all the others. Mink today, the bacon sandwich tomorrow. Maria Eagle is merely their uninformed stooge.

(2) In defence of hunting(Top)

Theme: Hunting is crazy. That's the point. One shouldn't keep it because it's good for jobs.

Published in the Independent, Winter 1997

Now that it looks as though Britain may free itself of ice, the country's 40-odd thousand riders to hounds will be back in the saddle, and reviled for their pains. Labour want to ban the sport, and probably out there in Carlton-land, the mass of people want to as well. This is a pity, mostly because along with falling in love, bending the knee in prayer, and going to the opera, hunting is one of the few genuinely irrational occupations left to us. Of the three, it is the one most dignified, indeed defined, by extreme risk. Romancing, after all, does have some moments of solace and is not necessarily amazingly risky (though at its most poignant it tends to be). Church-going is almost entirely the business of seeking solace, and is liked best by the risk-averse. Absurdity, which attaches to all these occupations, is even more the preserve of opera-going than either falling in love or church-going. But while opera scores some points for irrationality its tameness in terms of risk makes its claim to be deeply barmy rather weak.

Hunting is not merely very risky, but it has the merits of confining the risk-taking to volunteers. In this is differs from war, motoring or romance. People will go banging on about the fox's suffering, but this is absurd since God or nature have ordained a world in which foxes die hideous deaths anyway. At least a hunt ensures the fox dies on an adrenalin high.

Of course, any rational argument for hunting reduces its charm. Luckily there are very few. It is true that many of the countryside's small woodlands, and some of its hedges, have been looked after for the benefit they bring as cover for pheasants and foxes. But farmers might learn to look after habitat because it is lovely.

The real danger is in suggesting that there is an economic merit in hunting. To be profoundly irrational, and to maximise life-enhancement, activities should demonstrate a vast capacity for getting people's money out of their pockets and then seeming to waste it. Romance, religion and opera all do this quite well, but hunting runs them close and nearly matches gambling.

Hunting is both popular and expensive and so the sums do get to be quite large. Janet George, press officer of the British Field Sports Society says: "My rough count is that every fox killed by hounds sustains at least one full time job and contributes to at least two others." The sum is fairly simply done, and necessarily imprecise. Hunts kill about a tenth, or 20,000, of the foxes which man kills in the UK every year. The country's 189 hunts employ, on average 4-6 people. Then there are all the armies of people in the countryside who are employed by rich riders, or who work for businesses which look after horses at livery for the less rich. Janet George continues: "Livery costs £80-100 a week, then there's shoeing every 3-4 weeks, at an average 35 quid a time. Every time the vet is through the gate it's £25. Let's say, it's something like £5,000 a year for a horse, without the capital cost of buying it." She thinks perhaps 60,000 horses are kept in the country because of hunting.

One way or another, according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation done by Lord Onslow and myself one winter's morning, every fox killed by a hunt has probably had expended on its demise something like £25,000, as people (the least of whom will have spent several hundred pounds on decent attire for the occasion) risk death for fun. All this is without the cost of running a charismatic but decrepit Landrover, which will do 10 miles to the gallon, when it's working at all, and tow a horsebox costing £3,000. "I don't think you can hunt for much less than £7,000 a year", says his lordship.

Luckily, the money argument, which comes near to be boringly sensible, doesn't really help the cause. Sam Brittan, the lofty but liberal economics writer at the Financial Times, once demolished the idea that the arms trade should be preserved because it provided jobs. He did so, not on the grounds often propounded, for instance by Professor Paul Dunne, of Middlesex University, that HMG spends more of our money getting the deals than the deals were worth, but on the grounds that when people and their talents become detached from one occupation, they quickly create or attach themselves to another. The arms trade, then, is no more necessary to the country's well-being than canals, steam engines, or tweenies. Professor Colin Robinson professor of economics at Surrey, and editorial director at the larky Institute for Economic Affairs, says: "What happens over time is that economies change and people find ways of doing things better and using less labour." Hunting is merely very inefficient pest-control and would on economic grounds be swept away. But the real point is that it ill-behoves a bunch of reactionaries and romantics like foxhunters to argue in favour of soviet-style job creation, or even good sense.

If fox hunting is banned, riders will switch to something more vulgar: say drag hunting, which is if anything more dangerous (because even faster than chasing foxes), though more predictable and less romantic. They are likely to fulfil the prediction of the risk analyst John Adams, who promulgates the view that everyone has an inbuilt taste for risk (and he might just as well have added: expenditure), which varies from person to person but cannot be circumvented. On this view, if you deprive a person of one avenue of putting himself at risk (or spending money), he will simply find another. So safer cars and roads simply produce worse driving, though the cocooned drivers may merely be contributing to thousands more virtual accidents to unprotected pedestrians whose response is to stop walking about. Which is what most pedestrians have done.

If hunting was banned, risk-seeking horsemen and women might take to the highway on Kawasaki's. They might take up winter yachting (an idea which seems improbable only until you recall the nature of the activity whose banning causes us to hypothesise on the matter). They might decide to have exotic affairs instead of chasing foxes, and that would hugely increase their phone, restaurant and hotel bills. They might hunt abroad which would delight the poor people amongst whom they disported. All we know is that they would have to get their kicks and spend their money somehow and it might as well be here where we can delightedly keep our eye on them.

(3) On producing veal(Top)

Humane veal production, The Independent, 1995

Only a swine would eat veal. This proposition has become so widely accepted that we now have the mad situation in which the average French person - obvious swines, of course - eat 50 times as much veal as the average British person.

What is worse is that the English production of veal is a tenth of what it was ten years ago. This is sad because this is the only country where veal is by law required to be produced quite or even very humanely. We have a situation in which, on the mainland, a huge number of calves goes into a production style we would regard as morally indefensible, whilst here there is a minute and struggling "welfare" veal industry supplying a market which is pitiably small.

In Rosemaund, near Hereford, a semi-official agricultural research station is setting out to demonstrate to anyone who cares to make an appointment to visit that veal can be produced profitably and humanely. In large, airy pens ten or so little calves are kept for six months, given access to non-stop warm milk, fresh water, clean bedding (it has to be kept nice and fresh, because the calves eat it) and are generally given the life of Riley. Of course both they and their mothers - the dairy herd - might prefer to be together. But there is no milk without the early weaning of calves. Indeed, the getting of milk is necessarily cruel, and arguably more cruel than the production of meat: but this is an argument which you can never get through to the 11-year old thinking which passes for morality in the modern world.

Anyway, we have unwanted calves, and if they can be turned into meat after a fairly happy few months, well, for myself I like escalope rather a lot, and I celebrate the process with a conscience which, if not easy, is certainly manageable.

Interestingly, welfare systems in Britain produce veal which is on a par in price terms with the product of Dutch and French "torture" systems. Both are vulnerable to fluctuations in milk prices, which helped scupper British veal production in the late 80s. But the British trade suffers a particular disadvantage, as the main supplier of British veal to supermarkets told me last week, when we were touring the Rosemaund unit. It happens that the English only eat the back end of a veal calf. This means that the fore-quarters (not to say, the offal, head and so on) are difficult to dispose of profitably. If we could get the British to eat Osso Buco (which is made from shin), the veal trade could start to make money out of the whole animal, which is always the key to the economics of animal farming.

It happens that the Dutch and French have oceans of spare skimmed milk and whey (from their yoghurt and cheese plants). Veal production is really just a way of sucking cash out of the biproduct of the dairy industry. The trick for the scrupulous British is to import that skimmed milk for calves kept nicely here, rather than to export the animals to be fed the same milk in crates overseas.

It is, so far as I can see, not the blindest bit of good British campaigners trying to stop the export trade in calves. The Poles and others would merely supply the replacement beasts, in lorries travelling further and more prone to breakdown.

Here in Hereford we have the chance to see a far better future, though it won't please the campaigners, whose real agenda is lacto-vegetarianism (and, more respectably, veganism). Rosemaund's demonstration unit should be able to show British consumers that welfare production is kind enough for the majority of us who are not tyrannised by sensitivity. And it should be able to show farmers - and especially foreign farmers - that it is profitable. If we can then persuade the British to eat more veal, and more of the veal calf, this very tolerable industry can flourish here. That will keep more British calves in Britain. Indeed, because we have plenty of straw, Britain may be the right place to be the European centre of kinder veal production. Now we have to persuade foreign housewives that welfare is an issue at all: and that may prove the hardest job of all.

(4) On Disney and Ovid: the beast, the human and the divine.(Top)

Published in the Independent, spring 1997

Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast, the stageshow, opens at the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road tonight May 13, 1997. It deserves to be a winner: Disney is, after all, tackling themes of sex and violence with wit and great tunes. But there is tough competition in the field of species cross-over just now.

There is, not least, the current revival of interest in Ovid's Metamorphoses - the classical roundup of every myth which ever saw intraspecific transmogrifications. The Economist reminded us last week that nearly 300 years ago John Dryden was the first poet laureate to have a go at translating this 2000 year old reworking of ancient stories. Now Ted Hughes, a man in whom nature thrums, has triumphed with his gutsy tribute for Faber.

In this company, one remembers that Disney is famous as Bowdler Inc. But its 1992 film of Beauty and the Beast - and the stage show is its clone - was deeply serious. It has a guys and dolls swing to it, but is in an arty tradition too. It is very similar to the movie made by Jean Cocteau in 1945, with its own adherence to Marie Leprince de Beaumont's La belle et la bete (1756), which itself popularised a version of the late seventeenth century. Before that the mists close on the headwaters of the story, though they are surely to be found in classical Greece and Psyche and Cupid, in Ovid's stories about the Minotaur, and Jupiter's bovine disguise (Hughes has "Europa crying out at sea/Astride the bull that had deceived her").

For the theatre, there are some good new songs by Tim Rice, who has rather perversely gone out of his way to insist that this is only entertainment. It's true that overt toughness is usually missing from fairy stories, and even Ovid's myths have a sort of cartoon brusqueness about them. But Hughes brings real blood and passion to the page, and on stage, Disney was bound to make concrete what story-telling might leave elliptical. This year's Theatre Royal, Stratford East production of Beauty and the Beast was a traditional pantomime, but it still carried heavyweight baggage, and the more obviously muscular production at the Young Vic certainly did. All deliver what kids like: magic without nonsense.

Whilst there is no intellectual property right in fairy stories (perhaps part of their charm to Disney), there is plenty of intellectual content. According to Jungian exegesis, fairy stories allow a child to explore the worst of his fears and fantasies as well as his wildest dreams.

That, at least, was the theme of Bruno Bettelheim's fine The Uses of Enchantment, published in 1975. It begins with the premise that fairy stories are both extraordinary and commonplace. Their appeal to children could not be constant were it otherwise: they are not firing blanks.

Beauty and the Beast is, after all, about a girl who loves her father to the point that she is prepared to suffer imprisonment at the hands of the Beast on his behalf. She saves her father by transferring her affection to the Beast. To do this she must embrace the loveliness - presumably the sexuality - of the Beast. She has to grow up. So does the Beast, who has been incarcerated in a loathsome form by a fairy because he had not understood that hidden qualities matter more than loveliness in a woman. Disney's rather human and boyish Beast helps us see that he is an ordinary man condemned to wearing the ugly bits of his untamed heart and mind on the outside. But his deformity is only rare in being visible.

Even in the Disney, the Beast inflicts violence on Beauty, and it is a pivotal moment because she flees from him and he is shocked into redeeming himself. More than would have been the case traditionally, the Beast has to exercise anger management: that's his twentieth century problem. The tale hints at man as voyeur: the Beast looks on at Belle, able to see everything in his castle through the magic mirror, but not tender enough to communicate.

The philosophical message of the Beast is that only things which are capable of ugliness can be beautiful. He and Belle will be delivering an essay on the history of aesthetics to their young audiences. The Enlightenment had suggested that objects and ideas which inspired powerful nervous reactions were ugly and brutish, unless they were found in the classics - Ovid and the like - and kept there. Hughes remarks in his introduction that Ovid is above all about the extremes of passion. But with the Romantic movement of the late 18th century, human and natural wildness constituted the "sublime", which triumphs because whilst it has only a chance of being beautiful, at least it is not definitely condemned to mere prettiness. The Beast may be violent, but he suffers for it and at least he isn't merely mannered.

Herbert Read's account of Beauty and the Beast in an 1962 essay quotes Nietsche: "Greek art has taught us that there are no truly beautiful surfaces without dreadful depths", but he mourns the excesses which flow from celebrating the fearsome: "Again and again modern artists have disowned the concept of the beautiful". Don't we just know it.

Yet in the Vollard Suite, Picasso created in the 30s a great and lovely modern work by examining at length all the themes which are to be found in Beauty and the Beast, and many of those of Ovid. Martin Kisch, an expert on drawings at the British Museum, thinks these preoccupations in Picasso were typically Mediterranean. Anyway, echoing drawings by Goya and especially Rembrandt, Picasso sketched and resketched images of male roughness and worse as it revelled in, was bewildered at, or redeemed by female tenderness and loveliness. It might the male artist gazing longingly at the sleeping model before idealising her in a statue; a Minotaur aching to slough off his hairy carapace. Or just a lover gazing at his mistress (a theme taken up by Stanley Spencer amongst many others).

After seeing Beauty and the Beast, audiences might be advised that further reading should include the Thames and Hudson World of Art series, including its volumes on Picasso, on Romanticism and Art, and on Sexuality in Western Art. The Beast would almost certainly have them in the library Disney has him donating to Belle in his attempts to woo her. He has time to prove himself a classical as well as a romantic hero: he could nip out and add the new Hughes/Ovid volume.