I took the unusual step ( for me) of messaging an animal activist recently on Facebook. If truth be told, I didn’t do it knowingly. I made a comment and somehow was sent as a personal message!

I will be more careful in future because I can only summarise the experience as 30 minutes of my life I will never get back.

While I presented carefully worded paragraphs and statements about a farmer’s right to privacy, his legitimate business and the guidelines already in place, the need for meat in a world hungry for protein and the self-centred attitude of a privileged few living on irrigated mung beans and rice; I got nothing back of any substance.

Activists like to think they are living on a higher plain than the rest of us, believing only they know the true path of righteousness and they are intent on forcing the rest of society onto it. That is pretty damn arrogant. I know that in a feedlot as in any other livestock industry, there are a percentage of deaths. Life and death is something we as a society must learn to accept.

Too many people are disengaged from the real world. The realities of death are not something we have to deal with, unless we are in the funeral business or work in a hospital.

Accepting that death, pain and injury are part of life is something animal activists have never come to terms with. I don’t think they ever will. They are too high on their moral outrage and the feelings of virtue that accompany it, to ever give it up.

They claim to be part of a world-wide phenomenon but they are living in a bubble of self-centred indulgence. Only in countries like Australia with its high standard of living is choice of diet an option. In 3 rd world countries people will eat whatever is available to keep them from starving. Thirty years ago it was estimated by the World Food Summit that 840 million people in the world were hungry and malnourished.

That number has only increased over the years reaching a record of 1 billion undernourished people worldwide and 2 billion people who have sufficient deficiencies in diet to cause stunted growth and intellectual development. To those vegans who would deprive the world of much needed protein, I want to shout – stop thinking like children and look at the realities of life!

His arguments were naïve and misinformed. “Farming destroys the soil” and “A cow eats four times what it takes to feed four children.” I told him a cow will feed a whole village, a paddock of grass won’t. He called me crazy! I know who is crazy and it’s not me!