Gates Foundation Live Animal Aid to Africa Is Cruel and Stupid
Mark Graffis
Published on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Gates Foundation Live Animal Aid to Africa Is Cruel and Stupid
by Martha Rosenberg
It almost sounds like a joke. Set up dairy enterprises in rural African
villages with no refrigeration, electricity, veterinary care or passable roads
for a population that cant drink milk because its 90% lactose intolerant.
But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didnt think it was a joke when
it announced the gift of $42 million to Heifer International at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January the biggest gift the Little
Rock, AR-based Christian charity which sends live animals to poor countries
has ever received.
Using cherubic, 4-H/Unicef style advertising kids hugging the animal
gifts they will also dispatch Heifer pledges to stamp out world hunger in
poor countries using the grain, water and grazing land they dont have to
raise animals.
To get around the lack of rural electricity for the proposed dairy
operations in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Heifer will create chilling plants
with their own backup power generators according to a press release where the
milk will be stored for pickup by refrigerated commercial dairy delivery
trucks both of them.
Farmers will artificially inseminate cows, perhaps by candlelight, with
high-production dairy animal semen more backup generators required to keep
it frozen? and increase milk quality through providing improved animal
nutrition to the cows with the food they dont have.
Got that?
Because of childrens natural love of animals, Heifer International is a
popular charity project in elementary schools though it stresses it cannot
reveal the fate of individual animals it sends overseas so dont ask.
But teachers who go on Heifer sponsored junkets to recipient nations can
come back with disturbing stories.
Like Donna Sosnowski, a fourth-grade teacher at Virginia Palmer
Elementary School in Sun Valley, NV who discovered children were sleeping with
their Heifer animals to keep them from being stolen on a tour of Honduras this
summer, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.
And Amy Carrington, a teacher in White County, Arkansas who also toured
Honduras where villagers shared their hardships with her, such as when a
disease killed off all the chickens in a particular village, reported the
Daily Citizen in Searcy, AK.
Then theres Heifer Internationals Global Village program in
Perryville, AK where school kids who vote that they want meat for dinner will
witness the teacher break a rabbits neck, chop off its head, skin it and cook
it.
Last year one unidentified mother emailed Arkansas Fox 16 TV station to
say her son still talks about hearing the rabbit scream as its neck was broken
when he attended a Global Village as a 5th grader.
Heifer also has the nations top columnist, the New York Times Nicholas
Kristof, in its thrall.
The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice
was born and raised, begins a PR Wire style piece this month about Heifer
poster child and star of the childrens book Beatrices Goat, Beatrice Biira.
As a girl, she desperately yearned (sic.) for an education, but it seemed
hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldnt afford to send her to
school.
PR story short, Beatrice grew up, went to college and plans to work
against African poverty all because some children at the Niantic Community
Church in Niantic, CN decided to buy goats for African villagers through
Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps
impoverished farming families, writes Kristof in the irony-free column titled
The Luckiest Girl.
A dairy goat in Heifers online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of
chicks or ducklings costs just $20, he adds, in case you want to donate too.
Since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its grant, Heifer
has received an unprecedented $126.5 million in matching donations which funds
a lot of Noahs Arks or death ships as animal advocates might say.
Despite gender dressing Heifer claims most dairy operations are run by
women experts say animal based agriculture misuses land and resources,
promotes high fat Western diets and jeopardizes human and animal health by
inviting zoonotic diseases like Avian flu.
Programs like Heifer also betray a Caucasian bias by ignoring lactose
intolerance Dr. Hetal Karsan, a gastroenterologist at Atlantas Emory
University, told the Associated Press. Maybe pharma will send Lactaid
supplements.
But there is an up side to Heifer aid. In addition to meat, animals
provide fur and wool it points out always useful under the mosquito
netting.
Martha Rosenberg is Staff Cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable.