Livestock’s Longer Shadow is one the most important books of its kind since Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964). Most people have little idea how eating animal-based foods harm animals, our health and our planet. We want to believe the animals we eat do not suffer pain, injury, live good lives and eating them is a trade-off for the care we afford them. We accept the illnesses we suffer are simply a consequence of getting old. We want to believe our food choices do not cause rainforest and ocean deforestation. We are told farmers are the guardians of the countryside, yet our landscape is over-cultured and biologically dysfunctional, and our environment polluted by livestock farming. Livestock’s Longer Shadow, cuts through the noise for anyone wanting to know how we really treat animals, our health and our planet through the ways we farm and consume animals, through a UK lens.
Tim Bailey is an Environmental Scientist and one of the UK’s leading and most prominent regulatory farm pollution experts. He brings together all aspects of the UK’s animal-based farming and food system, from farm to fork, documents its devastation and provides us with a kinder, more compassionate, sustainable and healthier way forward. In sounding the alarm on the paradigms of animal-based food production, the author uses his own first-hand experience of the impacts of livestock farming from a career regulating the industry spanning over 30-years.