2013
Lantern Books
128 Second Place
Brooklyn, NY 11231
www.lanternbooks.com
Copyright © 2013 James McWilliams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written
permission of Lantern Books.
Cover Image by Ilana Panich-Linsman.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available


For MJ


Contents
Introduction
Interlude #1: Consider the Oxen
Chapter One: The Agrarian Ideals of Cerridwen Farm
Chapter Two: VINE Sanctuary Responds
Interlude #2: Moral Syllogism 101
Chapter Three: Green Mountain College Students Mount a Defense
Chapter Four: Professors and Administrators Make Their Case
Chapter Five: Voices of Dissent Shatter the Cocoon at GMC
Interlude #3: President Fonteyn Provides a Reprieve
Chapter Six: A Wise Intervention, A Suspicious Death

Conclusion
About the Author
About the Publisher


Introduction
“Why Bill and Lou?”
Green Mountain College is nestled in the tiny Vermont town of Poultney.
It's a unique place, describing itself as an “environmental liberal-arts”
college that “takes the social and natural environment as [its] unifying
theme.”1
Coursework at GMC centers as much on outdoor as indoor education.
Students are more likely to become fluent in the politics of recycling than
the poetics of Aristotle. If there's a single word defining this campus, it is
sustainability, a word that unifies the customary fragmentation of campus
life. Sustainability is, in essence, the inspirational glue that holds GMC into
a coherent and functioning whole.
The quest to live sustainably underscores the entirety of GMC's curricula.
The school takes pride in its assessment by Outside magazine as an
institution where a course description might read, “Students will learn the
fundamentals of running international mountaineering expeditions.”2
One student gives the following advice to prospective applicants: “If you
like outdoor recreation, skiing/snowboarding, folk music, picturesque New
England, farming, environmental advocacy, social justice, health food, long
skirts, Carhartt overalls, and lots and lots of snow, GMC might be a good fit
for you.”3 On the college's webpage, it's conspicuously noted how GMC's
extracurricular programs “really rock.”4 GMC is the kind of place where a
graduate can enter the world armed with a degree in “therapeutic
recreation”5 or “resort management.”6
Student life reflects this recreationally enriched approach to higher

education. Explains one first-year female: “There is an unofficial streaking
team, people are allowed to be barefoot pretty much everywhere, and there
are chickens running free around campus, and cats who occasionally sneak
into the classrooms.” She continues: “We are known for having a lot of
stoners and hippies here.”7
Another student, a third-year female, highlights a frustrating aspect about
the student body at GMC: “There is . . . a big gap between the type of


students GMC wants to attract and who it actually attracts. The staff and
administration want to attract progressive-thinking, liberal-minded folks
who really want to help the environment and promote social justice. Often,
though, it attracts a lot of trustafarians and crunchies who prefer to smoke a
lot of pot and wear hemp clothes.”8
#
One need not be a cynic to suggest that GMC's eco-focus is as much a
revenue-generating ploy to attract such trustifarians as an authentic quest for
educational excellence. A few key stats to consider: the acceptance rate at
GMC is 72 percent;9 4-year graduation rate is 41 percent; admissions are
rolling; tuition is $30, 502 a year10; and the minority of students who
graduate do so with an average debt of $40,000—one of the highest in the
nation, according to a Forbes study.11
Nonetheless, nobody at GMC really seems to mind. With fewer than 700
undergraduates and about 100 graduate students, GMC is decidedly a tightknit community. It's a place where, according to one student, “everybody
knows everybody.”12
GMC has been around a long time (it was founded in 1834), but chances
are pretty good that, unless you live in Vermont or another part of New
England, or are a college counselor at an elite college prep school, you've
never heard of it. For the most part, it's a quiet enclave of happy and wealthy
and mostly white undergraduates who seem as content as could be inside

their cocoon of bucolic bliss, isolated from concerns beyond its borders,
accustomed to doing whatever it is they want to do.
#
All this quietude and complacency came to an abrupt end on October 1,
2012. It was then that Green Mountain College exploded viral-like into the
national media. This instant notoriety didn't come from a sordid sex scandal
or an egregious case of economic corruption or a campus tragedy involving
a firearm. Instead, Green Mountain College momentarily became the most
controversial institution of higher education in the nation because of two
eleven-year old oxen named Bill and Lou.
The once sleepy campus suddenly found itself at the epicenter of the most


intense public debate about animal rights since the publication of Peter
Singer's Animal Liberation in 1975. It did so, moreover, because the school
chose to do exactly what's done to millions upon millions of animals every
year: kill and eat them. This is a story about what happened when GMC's
decision to slaughter two oxen went public and the public responded.
As GMC saw it, the choice to kill Bill and Lou made perfect sense. It was
a lesson consistent with the school's environmental curricula. Bill and Lou
had worked hard on the campus's working farm—Cerridwen Farm—for
over a decade. They plowed fields, generated a bit of electrical power,
provided free fertilizer, and served as photogenic proof of the school's
commitment to eco-agrarian values. In exchange for their services, the oxen
enjoyed lush pastures and warm barns, as well as an outpouring of affection
from students who, once the yokes were hoisted off the animals, lavished
them with love.
But Lou had hurt his rear leg in the late spring of 2012—by stepping in a
hole while plowing—and Bill adamantly refused to work without Lou at his
side. Something had to be done; something educational and practical and

regenerative; something decisive and gutsy and rock-ribbed. Something that
yielded a tangible product and stressed exactly what GMC was all about:
sustainability, self-sufficiency, and knowing where your food comes from.
So GMC decided to kill Bill and Lou. And eat them. In their own
cafeteria. Indeed, in the name of ecological efficiency and a short-term
supply of locally sourced burger meat, it was determined that the cycle of
life would cease to spin for the oxen. To keep them alive, school officials
claimed, would have been to waste resources by allotting food for animals
unable to earn their keep.13 To kill and eat them, by contrast, would be a
sober lesson in environmentalism.
Bill and Lou's death was considered essential to the whole notion of
“regenerative” agriculture, the kind that a whole movement tells us would
evidently reform our broken food system, restore dignity to the production
of animal products, and confirm GMC's passionate devotion to its
foundational idea of sustainability—the idea upon which it rebuilt its entire
educational mission when it reinvented itself in the late 1990s as a school
equally dedicated to the barnyard as the lecture hall.
Other groups saw the decision to kill Bill and Lou in a different light. To
a vocal minority of activists outside the GMC community, there was
something fundamentally wrong with the decision to kill the oxen.


Advocates for animal rights, as a rule, believe that it's ethically unacceptable
to raise, exploit, and slaughter a sentient animal if doing so can in any way
be avoided (which, in modern society, it almost always can be). Most of
these animal lovers believed it was wrong for the oxen to have been laboring
on the farm in the first place, yanking around a plow as if it were the
seventeenth century, adding little more than an aesthetic sheen to the GMC
image and virtually nothing to the world at large.
But here's the hard thing that animal advocates must accept on a daily

basis: with 10 billion animals raised, exploited, and slaughtered annually in
the United States alone, it's virtually impossible to individualize the
systematic and inherently depersonalized nature of animal exploitation. The
vast majority of the violence endemic to animal agriculture is structurally
and strategically hidden from view. Such is the burden for those who
advocate for animal rights in the age of industrial production.
Hence the unique appeal of Bill and Lou—a couple of oxen at a small
college in a rural town. They provided a perfect opportunity to help visualize
what is so often hidden. They allowed activists to do something they are
almost never able to do: individualize the collective nature of slaughter.
Make it personal. Bill and Lou became every animal who suffers and is
slaughtered for food we don't need. These were animals, after all, with their
own names, photo albums, Facebook pages, and even a YouTube video
tribute.14 They had a history, a story, and, perhaps most critically, an
articulated fate that had yet to be executed.
Activists thus aimed to make them a cause celebre. They sought to turn
them into a living and breathing symbol for the billions of unspoken farm
animals who die every year for no good reason other than to feed humans
food that makes our health worse and trashes our environment.
Critics would later ask the animal advocates: “Why Bill and Lou?” What
about the billions of other animals killed in factory farms? Indeed, one
student would eventually scream at a clump of protesters outside the Green
Mountain Campus, “Why are you not at a factory farm now?” The critics'
unified answer was that Bill and Lou were those factory-farmed animals.
They were proxies for the ones we never get to see. It is for this reason that
activists would routinely say of Bill and Lou, as one PhD student from the
University of Edinburgh did, “It would be remiss of me not to do everything
in my power to save them.”15



Animal advocates and GMC quickly found themselves on a collision
course. The catalyst was the offer by a local animal rescue organization—
VINE Sanctuary—to take the oxen off the hands of GMC at no expense to
the college. VINE (Veganism Is the Next Evolution) agreed to care for them
for the remainder of their natural lives. In essence, this organization held out
the prospect of a gentle and dignified retirement for Bill and Lou instead of
a painful and bloody slaughter that would have resulted in a few hundred
pounds of unhealthy and, given that the oxen were middle-aged, terribletasting food.
In a response that sent activists reeling, however, the college said no. It
refused to part with their oxen. It insisted that—again, in the name of
ecological sustainability—the loop of life had to be completed and the oxen
had to become part of an educational mission in the form of cafeteria food.
The school had promised to have them slaughtered and it would, officials
insisted, keep that promise. As two GMC representatives proudly explained,
“Green Mountain College's goal is to become the first college or university
in the United States contracted with a major dining services provider to
purchase all animal products provided through its dining services from
humanely managed sources.”16 This was the goal and, regrettably, nobody at
GMC seemed terribly excited about letting an ethical quandary get in the
way of its quest to distinguish itself through its cafeteria offerings.
#
It was at this very moment—the moment of the VINE rejection—that Bill
and Lou caught my attention. I leaped into the fray by dedicating my blog,
Eating Plants17—and, truth be told, much of my time—to covering and
analyzing the saga forming around them. Frankly, the story fascinated me
because it was such a vivid case of sustainability justifying a basic ethical
transgression—a topic I've long worked to understand as a scholar and
human being.
It was also at this point that Bill and Lou became more than a couple of
cattle destined to meet a stun gunner and throat slitter. Instead, they became

tangible symbols of a cause that galvanized animal activists nationwide—
and, to an extent, globally—to fight for their freedom with an intensity that,
however briefly, made the world think seriously about animals as more than
a pretext for a meal or the flimsy basis for a sense of sustainability.


By the middle of October 2012 the battle lines between animal rights
activists (and others who did not want Bill and Lou to die prematurely) and
supporters of “sustainable agriculture” were thus as starkly drawn as they'd
ever been. An ethical notion of sustainability had squared off against an
ecological notion of sustainability. The world was watching, waiting, and—
most importantly—listening to what both sides had to say about the fate of
Bill and Lou. What emerged from this standoff was, in many ways, an
exchange unusual in its depth, passion, and revelatory power about the
relationship between humans and the animals we eat.
To be sure, much of what ensued on both sides was characterized by rage.
For well over a month, in all forms of media, what generally transpired was
little more than a slugfest intended to score points rather than advance
reasonable arguments. As will often happen when humans argue over food
(or religion or politics), matters turned fierce and decency went on a
permanent vacation.
Advocates of sustainability slammed animal rights activists as
opportunistic ideologues forcing utopian schemes onto well-intentioned
pragmatists who were fighting the good fight against industrial agriculture.
Animal rights activists, in turn, portrayed Green Mountain College as a den
of iniquity that took sadistic pleasure in the slaughter of farm animals,
insisting that the school refused to turn over Bill and Lou to a sanctuary
because it was run by bloodthirsty zealots who cared more for a burger and a
stellar image of eco-correctness than the life of an animal.
Much of this so-called discussion played out on Facebook and, for all

intents and purposes, was rather boring and petty, if relentlessly unpleasant
and counterproductive. Much more significant and hopeful, however, was
the persistently rational and less personal—but every bit as impassioned—
dialogue that transcended the bickering ad hominem attacks to advance
honestly held opinions about food, agriculture, and animals. A lot of people
will remember this saga for the invective. For many of those whom I
interviewed, that's all they wanted to discuss. But Bill and Lou, in essence,
sparked an adult discussion about animal rights and, honestly, it's been a
while since such a discussion has taken place.
What thus impressed me the most about the debate over the proper
destiny of Bill and Lou was not that it was loud and lasted a long time and
tended to sometimes bring out the worst in otherwise civil people. Instead, it
was that, amidst all the rattle and hum, authentic responses emerged to


collectively advance ideas that, intentionally or not, pushed to the fore a
question that may very well be the most important one for the future of
agricultural reform:
Can a just system of sustainable agriculture accommodate, or even
co-exist with, the unnecessary slaughter of farm animals? Put
differently, can we have an intellectually honest sustainable food
movement that continues to raise and kill animals for food we do not
need?
In a variety of ways, this book orbits around this question. In this sense,
it's more an intellectual history of the Bill and Lou event than a blow-byblow reconstruction of its intricate chronology—although there will be some
of that towards the end. As a case study exploring the politics of place, the
power of advocacy, and the fate of animals in the sustainable agriculture
movement, The Politics of the Pasture aims to reveal how the internal
dynamics of “sustainability,” as currently understood, are deeply flawed
and, as such, detrimental to the entire idea of agricultural and environmental

reform.
Be forewarned: My intention here is not to provide an “objective”
assessment (whatever that would look like) of the Bill and Lou saga. To the
contrary, I have an agenda. By presenting and analyzing the most articulate
and well-reasoned justifications for both positions, I want to show very
clearly how the concept of sustainability is being purloined and deployed to
erase from public discussion the far more pressing ethical issues raised by
supporters of animal rights.
I also want to demonstrate how the consequences of this erasure have
created the prospect for agricultural reform rooted in the very same
injustices that now characterize factory farming. At the end of the day, I
hope to show how advocates of small-scale agriculture are using the
seductive anti-industrial rhetoric of agricultural sustainability to prevent a
forthright and productive discussion about the ethics of slaughter, a
discussion that could, if undertaken, inspire a truly revolutionary reform
movement.
There is, after all, another notion of sustainability that we've yet to
consider. It is one rooted in ethical veganism, and one that the current food
movement avoids at its peril, thereby undermining its own articulated goals.
This point will be reiterated often in the pages ahead and is, in many


respects, my deepest motivation for writing this book.
1 (accessed March 13, 2012)
2 Avital Andrews, “Outside University: The Top 25 Colleges for Outside Readers,”
OutsideOnline.com, August 14, 2012, (accessed March 13, 2012)
3 />page=2&type=&d_school=Green%20Mountain%20College (accessed March 13, 2012)
4 (accessed March 13, 2012)
5 />(accessed March 13, 2012)
6 (accessed March 13, 2012)

7 (accessed November 19, 2012)
8 (accessed March 13, 2012)
9 />10 />(accessed March 13, 2012)
11 Chris Barth, “Colleges That Leave Graduates with the Most Debt,” Forbes.com, November 14,
2010, />(accessed March 13, 2012)
12 (accessed March 13, 2012)
13 Of course, by this logic, the GMC community should also have killed its pets.
14 (accessed November 30, 2012)
15 (accessed March 13, 2012)
16 Bill Porter, “Vermont college feels heat over oxen's fate,” BostonGlobe.com, October 26, 2012,
/>(accessed March 13, 2012)
17 You can access my blog at www.james-mcwilliams.com.


Interlude #1: Consider the Oxen
“Cattle are not dumb; in fact, they often train the teamster to react to their
cues. In maze tests cattle have performed remarkably well—even better than
swine or dogs—when vision alone had to be used to solve the maze. It
should be noted that it is often the intelligence of oxen and their rebellious
behavior which causes potential teamsters to give up on training.”
—Tiller's Tech Guide: Advance Training Techniques for Oxen18
“Whoever came up with ‘dumb as an ox’ never worked with them. These
are bright animals.”
—Darin Tschopp, driver of oxen at Colonial Williamsburg19
“One desirable trait is friendliness.”
—School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, University of
Alaska, Fairbanks, on the muskox20
“Moses and Abraham are Holsteins. They came to live with us when they
were less than forty-eight hours old. We bottle fed them twice a day for
months. They will also answer your call with a ‘moo.’ Their favorite treats

are kale, carrots, and apples. We sent them to oxen school for six weeks in
the summer of 2006.”
—Owner of Sangha Farm, Ashfield, Massachusetts21
18 “TechGuide Advanced Training Techniques for Oxen” by Drew Conroy (PDF accessed from
www.tillersinternational.org)
19 (accessed December 1, 2012)
20 “The Muskox: A New Northern Animal,” publication by the School of Natural Resources and
Agricultural Sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (PDF accessed from www.uaf.edu)
21 (accessed December 1, 2012)


“Bill and Lou” by Jennifer Wolf


Chapter One: The Agrarian Ideals of Cerridwen
Farm
“Bill and Lou . . . will leave the farm to be processed.”
Cerridwen Farm, Bill and Lou's home, began as a tired half-acre plot of dirt
in 1997. Today it is the self-described and celebrated 22-acre “centerpiece of
campus life,”22 an expanded venue where GMC students pursue sustainable
ideals through a program called the Farm and Food Project.
Inspired by the belief that the future farmers of the world must “reclaim
what matters about nature,”23 the program nurtures a hyper-idealized version
of agrarian independence that would have made Thomas Jefferson proud.
The dominant ethic on the farm encourages students to embrace a sort of
agrarian-libertarian ethos, one that refuses to “leave it all up to someone
else.”24 When it comes to food, “someone else” is a sign of weakness, an
admission of servile dependence for fit fools.
The underlying motivation to achieve such autonomy is twofold: first, by
mastering the basic techniques of pre-industrial farming students can learn

to produce food in a way that fulfills GMC's definition of “sustainable”—
that is, operated without fossil fuels or synthetic inputs. Second, by going off
the current food grid, students, in learning “the craft of farming,”25 can
assume, however implicitly, the position of challenging the artless industrial
food system, a system that is, by any standard, the antithesis of ecocorrectness.
The rhetoric driving the Farm and Food Project is undeniably seductive.
There's a lot of inspiration to be drawn from farm director Philip AckermanLeist's breathless claim that the project “is all about reclaiming what matters
about nature, nurture, and nutrition”26 (note, again, the variation of the word
“reclaim”). Students’ everyday pursuit of sustainability, Ackerman-Leist
continues, “is our way of assuring that the centrality of food permeates
virtually every aspect of our campus.”27
Farm manager Kenneth Mulder sums up the farm's transformative
mission this way: “At GMC, we are not just discussing statistics about soil


erosion, global hunger and malnutrition, agricultural pollutants in our
drinking water, or climate change—all linked to the most essential of human
activities, farming. Rather, we are developing, teaching, and—most
importantly—practicing the solutions to these problems.”28 Needless to say,
a college built on food studies is not your parents’ educational experience.
For that, the overseers of Cerridwen take enormous pride.
But one can imagine why some parents might balk at spending $30,000 a
year so kids can learn to, in Mulder's summation, “drive oxen . . . raise
heritage breeds of livestock and poultry . . . butcher pigs and chickens . . .
[and] shear sheep.”29 Still, all the dirty work notwithstanding, it's hard to
deny that Cerridwen is a rare sort of place, a place defined through the
seemingly noblest of ideals, and a place where students are genuinely
embracing the progressive John Deweyian notion of learning-by-doing. And
it's even harder to deny that it all sounds pretty damn cool.
#

But for all the empowering self-promotional rhetoric underscoring the idea
of Cerridwen Farm, it must be noted that marketing, even for a seemingly
noble cause, is still marketing. It is always slick, always aiming to twist a
story to serve an interest, always partial. In other words, there's more to the
Cerridwen story than the one they are telling.
In GMC's celebratory presentation of Cerridwen's mission, there appears
to be little concern for confronting some of the thornier questions about how
the Farm and Food Project interprets and practices its popular version of
sustainability. What's not being advertised at Cerridwen is just as critical as
what is. And what's not being advertised is precisely how little there is in the
GMC approach to farming that, upon closer scrutiny, could honestly be
called sustainable. What follows are a few points that the promotional
literature obscures, points that nobody at GMC seems to be taking very
seriously.
One example: Scale. Indeed, nothing is said about how the quest for
agrarian autonomy by a small, white, wealthy community might impact the
world at large. It might appear to make sense for a few kids in Poultney,
Vermont, to practice a romanticized notion of old-timey agriculture and
learn about the dust-to-dust philosophy of life in the process.
But do note that this is a sprawling, labor-intensive form of agricultural


production. Even if it doesn't explicitly use fossil fuels (which it most
assuredly does), is it really going to establish a replicable or scalable model
capable of feeding an expanding global population prepared to eat more
meat than its ancestors did? Should agriculture reforms be enacted with the
hope of feeding the world, rather than a tiny wealthy community, a healthy
and sustainable diet?
If the United States as a whole farmed the way Cerridwen Farm aimed to
farm, the result would be an ecological disaster requiring nearly half the land

in the United States. It would also demand just as much water as is now used
by factory farms. It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of flesh,
no matter where or how the animal is raised.30 How any of this is possibly
sustainable, like so many of the school's questionable claims, goes
unaddressed by the farm's gatekeepers.
Another example: energy and economy. The Farm and Food Project talks
big about avoiding the use of fossil fuels in farming (saying nothing about
water). Bill and Lou, in this sense, are understood to be viable replacements
for the fossil fuels otherwise required to furrow and fertilize a field. This
sounds sensible to our eco-sensitive ears. But such an off-the-grid quest is
disingenuous.
With the United States predicted (for better or worse) to achieve energy
independence by 2020 (largely as a result of hydraulic fracturing), how
exactly will such an antiquated approach to agriculture be in any way
economically viable? How, in other words, will a pre-industrial farmer
possibly enter the current agricultural market on its own terms and compete
with industrial competitors? I'd be eager to hear what GMC economics
professors have to say about the oxen-driven model of sustainability.
More importantly, is it even possible to have modern farming of any sort
(even veganic) capable of feeding a global population without the use of
fossil fuel? Where, one wonders, did Bill and Lou's feed come from? How
did labor arrive at the farm (74 percent of GMC students have cars)? It is
highly unlikely that these animals reached 1200 pounds without
supplemental feed (even if organic) generated through fossil fuels (even if
minimal). To claim that oxen are replacing tractors is one thing; to say you
are farming without fossil fuel is another. The latter, I would argue, is not
only unrealistic in a world of 7 billion, it is unrealistic on a 22-acre farm in
Vermont. Cerridwen uses plenty of fossil fuels. They just use the oxen to
trick us into thinking otherwise.



The goal regarding fossil fuels in agriculture shouldn't be to eliminate
them—that would lead to massive agricultural sprawl and dangerously
diminished production—but rather to reduce our reliance on them as much
as possible. As it happens, this is something that is eminently achievable by
doing what nearly every vegan activist advocates doing: growing plants for
people to eat. According to the most recent and comprehensive study on the
matter, such a transition would lower greenhouse gas emissions linked to
agriculture by—this is not a typo—94 percent.31 Not to be dismissive, but
with that kind of reduction, who really cares about the use of a nominal
amount of fossil fuel to bring healthy food to our plates?
A third issue: selective technophobia. Why is GMC so utterly retrograde
about farming but comparatively futuristic about energy production and
communication? Employing oxen to pull plows while pursuing cutting edge
solar and fiber optical technology, as the college does, might seem like
perfectly consistent endeavors melding seamlessly with the school's
dedication to sustainability. And to some extent this is true.
However, as in the quest to localize agriculture in general, there's a highly
selective technophobia applied to food and food alone. Why are GMC
students not making a large percentage of their own clothes, fabricating their
own computers, milling wood for their own furniture, or communicating
with tin cans and string? Is there a reason why Cerridwen refuses to teach
some of the high-tech eco-correct innovations used in modern agriculture
such as precision farming and polymer-coated slow-release fertilizers? What
about a solar powered tractor?32 What accounts for these inconsistencies?
Or, is it just that the image of oxen hauling plows has a kind of eco-chic
appeal that sustains GMC's agri-hipster reputation while nurturing the
seductive, and deeply nativist, myth of frontier independence in order to
attract wealthy applicants who will supply free labor for the twenty-first
century experiment in eighteenth-century farming? Seems like a fair

question to ask.
And yet another question: community. Precisely what kind of community
are we talking about when we refer to the community foodshed? GMC has
less than a thousand students—students who are being taught not to (requoting the Farm and Food Project literature) “leave it all up to someone
else.” But what's wrong with “someone else”? Why can't “someone else” be
part of Cerridwen's imagined community? Why can't a farm have
interdependence with, you know, “someone else”?


Interdependence, after all, was central to pre-industrial agriculture in
North America—communities in one place were mutually dependent on
communities in other places for a variety of necessary goods and services.
They were, moreover, loosely bound together throughout the Atlantic
community by the other thing that nobody at Cerridwen wants to mention:
trade. Trade with outsiders, in particular. Commercial communities are, as
was the case in early America, typically more multicultural and varied and
less close-minded and solipsistic than local ones. GMC, however, seems to
prefer a definition of community that works to keep anyone outside the
GMC circle of trust at bay. As one former student recalled:
One bad thing is the lack of diversity of students, faculty, and staff
from different backgrounds (age, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity,
nationality, physical/mental ability, socio-economic, etc). You will
see, at least as far as students go: 18-22, upper middle class,
heterosexual, non-disability, white students.33
And finally: animals. What does “connecting with our food” actually
mean in the GMC context? It's critical to GMC's agrarian mission that
“students understand that the choices they make, even about a morning
omelet, affect the farmers, people, and environment around them.”
This is all well and good, I suppose. But if the goal here is to truly
understand where our food comes from, to connect as intimately as possible

with what we eat, shouldn't students also consider the deeper nature of the
animals forced to become part of the morning meal? Shouldn't they develop
a more nuanced view of the world from the perspective of the primary
sentient victims of their endeavor?
Despite claims that students read such philosophers as Tom Regan
(author of The Case for Animal Rights) and Peter Singer, such knowledge
appears not to be a high priority with the Farm and Food Project, and the
reason why may have to do with the program's basic misunderstanding of
the place of agriculture in human history. To wit: Ackerman-Leist claims on
the farm's website that “[f]ood and farming have always been central to our
existence.”34 This has a rather nice ring to it. But it's not quite right. Food
certainly has always been central to human life, but farming hasn't. Farming
has only been around for about 5-10 percent of human existence. Farming
and animal domestication are, in the big picture of humanity, quite new.
However, what has been around for the entirety of the human timeline has


been the bond humans have been developing with the animal world.
Humans nurtured this complex relationship for hundreds of thousands of
years before the emergence of domestication. Why is this bond—one that's
fundamental to human life in the natural world—not also explored when
GMC students consider the omelet? Shouldn't a basic understanding of
animal consciousness play some role in the larger effort to know our food,
especially if we are going to kill sentient creatures in order to eat them?
#
These are just a handful of the unaddressed questions lurking beneath the
carefully orchestrated message of sustainability promoted by the guardians
of Cerridwen Farm. In fairness to Cerridwen, these questions are rarely if
ever honestly explored by anyone in the sustainable food movement as a
whole.

Indeed, the entire notion that raising and killing animals on a small scale
is ethically and environmentally sustainable has evolved from unquestioned
premise into established gospel. This has been due to the immeasurable
influence of writers such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, as well as a
generally ill-informed but admiring media. The practice of pasture-based
animal husbandry has been so restrictively framed that few incisive voices
have been able to poke their head into the tightly guarded framework to
declare “Problems! Problems!”
This is a movement that, largely due to its comparative superiority over
the utter hellishness of factory farming, doesn't believe it needs to deal with
objections. In this sense, as a lot of forthcoming evidence will bear out,
GMC's main flaw is its insularity. And it can, unfortunately, afford to be this
way.
For the most part, it's correct that there's little accountability in the
sustainable food movement. Consumers don't want the simplistically pure
portrayal of small-scale animal husbandry to be challenged with
inconvenient objections by a bunch of crazed animal lovers who want to
take away their mouthwatering local burgers. The fact that small farms aren't
factory farms seems to be enough to keep everyone at bay, quiet and happy
about the deeper implications of eating animals. Consumer complicity, in
essence, allows Cerridwen to evade critical opinions while fabricating a
variety of arguments justifying its decision to grant its oxen death rather


than life.
#
This complaisance explains why, on October 1, 2012, GMC announced the
school's decision to kill Bill and Lou as if it were announcing a bake sale.
“Thanks Bill and Lou!”35 read the weirdly upbeat announcement's headline,
as if the animals—who are fully capable of making choices—opted for death

in order to provide an educational experience for the privileged kids at
GMC. “At the end of the month,” the report continued, “Bill and Lou, the
long-standing team of oxen for Green Mountain's Cerridwen Farm, will
leave the farm to be processed for meat.”36
The announcement jarred activists. Beyond the insulting “thanks,” there's
the implication that Bill and Lou had practically packed their own bags to
“leave the farm” for the abattoir on their own volition. A key euphemism
made an impression: they were not to be killed or slaughtered but, as college
officials explained, they were to be “processed.” (At least they didn't write
“harvested,” which is just as common an appropriation of industry doublespeak.) This announcement, moreover, was made in the GMC Journal, a
monthly publication put out by the college's PR outfit. For all the rhetorical
gymnastics required to make this story sound just like any other upbeat
GMC news item, editors did something telling: they conspicuously left out
the Bill and Lou report from the table of contents, the only article to earn
such an omission.37
As is so often the case when humans attempt to justify the unjustifiable—
in this case the unnecessary death of two oxen—a kind of feigned sadness
was juxtaposed with hard rationality and placed in the context of a higher
cause. It's an uncanny pattern that Kenneth Mulder, the farm manager,
followed to a tee. Confirming the school's decision to slaughter Bill and Lou
in the face of VINE's offer, Mulder explained in the journal, “This has been
a difficult decision all around.” Elaborating on the precise nature of this
difficulty, he continued, “It is the traditional understanding with working
cattle that when they reach the end of their working careers they are still
productive as meat animals. But that does not make it easy.”38
One fair response would be to ask: “Why is it not easy?” It's really a
question worth pondering in some depth. What, exactly, makes a person
uneasy about slaughtering Bill and Lou? What aspects of their character, or



sense of their sentience, make it hard to wake up one day and kill them?
Mulder wasn't going there, and never returned an e-mail seeking an
explanation.
Next, one might wonder why an institution dedicated to higher learning
should accede so easily to “a traditional understanding,” one developed not
only to allow the dominion of animals, but also of others—women, slaves,
gays—who were not appropriately white, male, hetero, and hale. Why give
in to what's normally done when you are manager of a farm that's trying to
change the rules of how things are normally done? Mulder strategically
sidestepped these hard questions by framing GMC's decision in the glow of
sustainability. He explained: “Bill and Lou cost approximately $300 per
month to keep and will provide enough hamburger and beef to the college
dining hall to last for a couple months. It is the general feeling of the farm
crew and the farm management that the most ecologically and financially
sustainable decision was to send them for processing.”39
This is a quietly revelatory justification. On the one hand, Mulder is
appealing to a utilitarian understanding of eco-correctness (one that, by the
way, would equally justify killing the most wasteful and resource hogging
humans!). He is highlighting the point that the farm's commitment to
ecologically sustainable principles is so utterly steadfast that it will even
endure the “difficult decision” of killing animals they claim to care about in
order to make that choice.
On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, Mulder is also trying to
make an economic case for the slaughter of Bill and Lou, a remarkably bold
thing to do for a farm preparing kids to practice a low yielding, high costing,
and essentially noncompetitive form of agriculture—a strange thing for a
farm that is almost completely subsidized by tuition dollars and free labor to
announce.
In the end, nonetheless, grave concern over spending $300 bucks a month
at a university whose 2010 990 tax form reported revenue over $28 million

not only rings false, but it draws embarrassing attention to the fact that
GMC, for all its earnest talk of “humane” agriculture, had deemed two
sentient beings—ones that they have exploited to shore up the school's
image as an eco-sensitive kind of place—to be less worthy than the burgers
they'd provide, much less the 300 bucks a month they'd cost in room and
board.
Critics of this manner of thinking—primarily ethical vegans—were


certainly accustomed to witnessing such expressions parading as moral
logic. They're accustomed to hearing self-described sustainable farmers wax
on about the integrity of animal life and the importance of humane farming
only to then bite their lower lip, praise their own resourcefulness, and send
the animals they claim to love to the slaughterhouse. In this respect, GMC's
decision—and the way it was articulated and deemed so very “difficult”—
was nothing new. What was new, though, was the response that followed.
22 (accessed December 1, 2012)
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 (accessed December 1, 2012)
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 In actuality, this figure is likely higher for animals raised on pasture, because they take longer to get
to slaughter weight.
31 (accessed March 13, 2012)
32 Sami Grover, “Solar Powered Tractor: A Small Step Towards Fossil-Fuel Free Agriculture?”,
Treehugger.com, August 5, 2007, (accessed March 13, 2012)
33 (accessed March 13, 2012)

34 (accessed February 14, 2013)
35 (accessed February 14, 2013)
36 (accessed February 14, 2013)
37 (accessed November 19, 2012)
38 (accessed November 20, 2012)
39 Ibid.


Miriam Jones, co-founder of VINE
Credit: Aram Polster