Protecting Animals, One Mouthful at a Time

David Cassuto

Emory University is attempting to preserve “heritage” turkeys by feeding them to its students.  The Standard Bronze and Bourbon Red turkeys are in danger of dying out due to lack of demand.  So, apparently, is the Tennessee Fainting Goat and other species that don’t fit the factory farm mold.  The lede of this Chronicle of Higher Ed. article (pay site but there are day passes…) declares: “Sometimes the best way to save something is to eat it.”  It then describes how Emory ordered 1,600 pounds of birds for its Thanksgiving meals.

I’m fascinated by this rhetoric as well as how this type of logic goes routinely uncontested.  Last time I read the Endangered Species Act, it said nothing about how only edible species merit preserving.  In fact, I can’t remember reading that anywhere.  Why then, do we have this ongoing hagiography of the locavore movement’s desire to preserve animals so that they can be eaten?  Can we think of no other reason for an animal’s survival?  Must we really kill them to keep them?  Is it all about economics?  What does that say about us?