Page 18 - Winter 19-20

Pirates, farmers, homeopathy, dog food and
an appeal...
Avast! What follows is not really an advertisemen
but more a commentary and an appeal.
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There’s a book by Dave Hickey (an American art critic, but you knew that) called Pirates and Farmers in which he suggests that all humans can be divided into two groups: pirates and farmers.
Farmers build fences and control territory. Pirates tear down fences and cross borders. There are good pirates and bad pirates, good farmers and bad farmers, but, he says, there are only pirates and farmers. They are very different kinds of creatures and some pirates even recognise the importance of farmers. Farmers, on the other hand, always hate pirates.
Hickey points out that the good thing about farming is that it keeps you busy and pays good subsidies. The good thing about piracy is that it is cosmopolitan, you get to move around and when it pays at all, it pays well.
For the record, I am a pirate. I am married to a pirate. We have pirate children and, with one exception (an elderly English pointer), pirate dogs.
I can’t say whether homeopathic vets are more likely to be pirates or farmers, but I am absolutely certain there
is a piratical element to homeopathy. It challenges the accepted norm and its professional practitioners are largely shunned by their more conventional, farmer colleagues.
Where am I going with all this?
The raw dog food movement in these islands was, to a great extent, started by homeopathic vets. Actually, it was a homeopathic vet, Tom Farrington, who introduced me
to species appropriate feeding and when I attended the recent Raw Food Veterinary Society conference many of the attendees were also homeopathic vets and nurses.
I don’t think it is co-incidence that homeopathy, with its piratical tendencies should have spawned species appropriate feeding, with its piratical tendencies.
But whereas homeopathy – tragically – is no more accepted today by conventional medical practitioners than it was when I founded Honey’s in 2009, raw feeding looks as if it could become mainstream.
There are now over 80 raw food producers in the UK. Last year, a processed dog food manufacturer
tried (but failed) to buy company and my guess is that sooner or later we are going to see the likes of Mars, Nestle et al move into raw food.
(Why is raw feeding set to experience massive growth, whereas homeopathy isn’t? In a nutshell: money. There’s
a fortune to be made in mass producing any pet food, whereas I defy anyone to make more than a modest living from homeopathy.)
You might think that I would be delighted to see raw feeding really take off and, of course, I am. It should mean, after all, that dogs and cats enjoy happier, healthier and longer lives.
But I am also conscious that the moment commercial considerations creep into anything, the priorities can change. I am concerned about low-quality ingredients, poor formulation, dependence on supplementation and the lack of sound, professional advice and support. More than this, however, I am concerned that the raw food movement will lose its crusading principles and simply become yet another area of business. That it will lose, in short, its piratical aspect.
This matters because there are some big issues that require the attention of people who think outside the box and are willing to challenge the status quo (i.e. pirates!). I’m talking about such matters as the environmental impact of keeping pets, the ethics of ‘owning’ another species and whether dogs actually need to eat meat and bone at all.