Farming, a business of difficult choices

Editor:

I’d like to offer a brief reply to Meg Mercer’s rather intemperate comments about dealing with the threat to livestock posed by coyotes.

It was not so long ago that humanity was universally expected to perish because its ability to reproduce would one day outpace the earth’s ability to feed us, a catastrophe the United Nations said in 2002 we had permanently forestalled. 

This miracle was accomplished not by “culling humans”, but by modern agriculture. 

Farming, as far as I can tell, is a business of difficult choices made for the common good against impossible odds, making that accomplishment even more astonishing. 

It seems to me, therefore, that the people who do this work deserve considerably more benefit of the doubt than Ms. Mercer gave them in her letter, and certainly better than the rather mean-spirited rhetoric she employed to do it. 

If she needs a worthy target for her rage, I have several suggestions. 

None of them is a farmer trying to make a living, whose work we probably don’t understand well enough to judge, and upon whom we completely depend.

Bruce Philp,

Creemore.