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October 28, 2008
More on Stress and Overpopulation
This morning, I awakened to an engrossing documentary on the Discovery Channel dealing with the behavior of piglets weaned prematurely in the interests of increased pork production. Such practices are now routine in a Food Industry that has been growing quietly since the end of World War II to feed the Earth’s booming human population.As has been noted here, other trends, similarly unnoticed, developed over that same interval, only to result in late repercussions now classified under the generic term of blowback.” Two classic examples from the early Fifties, one in Iran, and another in Guatemala, were at first considered “victories;” they didn’t begin to cause trouble for the US for twenty-five or so years, but their, and other sequellae remain major thorns in our side.
What does all this have to do with pot or the drug war? Only that the prematurely weaned piglets' behavior (I have yet to find a URL for that program) is very similar to that of human children labeled with ADD and the ambient stresses of our modern world are clearly exacerbated by overpopulation. Finally, a famous experiment with rats from the Fifties and a less well-known study of mice done by the same investigator in the Eighties, support very similar conclusions.
Oh, yes, “stress” may be the most common and least understood symptom now troubling humans. Ironically, it's also being inflicted by us on record numbers of the animals we are raising to be our food. If we are unwilling to provide them with a humane amount of space in which to await their slaughter, perhaps we could at least add cannabis to the antibiotics and hormones we are now treating them with.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at October 28, 2008 03:34 AM