As the letters from both Ted Talbot and Ivor Kenna point out (Weekly Worker 373, March 1), communists have for too long relegated the question of animal rights to the sidelines, regarding it as somehow peripheral to the communist project. However, as well as the compelling moral and ethical dimension, there are sound economic reasons for radically rethinking the way in which animals are used in society. Quite apart from the cruelty involved - of which Mary Godwin is either unaware or prefers to ignore - the politics of meat production and consumption is an issue communists cannot disregard, not least of all because it is inextricably linked to a critique of the imperialist plunder of the world by global agribusiness.

As well as the increasingly detrimental effects on human and animal
health, meat production is inherently wasteful. Depending on the
animal, between 4 and 17 kilos of grain are required to produce 1 kilo of
meat. More crucially, whereas it takes approximately 1000 and 10,000 litres of water to grow 1 kilo of grain and rice respectively, 1 kilo of meat
requires 100,000. Given the fact that in many parts of the imperialised world there is a major shortage of clean drinking water, this is profligacy on a massive scale. Similarly, recent research shows that in the USA alone, if meat consumption was reduced by just 10%, more than 1 billion people could be fed from grain grown on that land.

Sadly, in common with most bourgeois thought, communists have on the whole resisted any rational debate on this question, choosing instead to simply accept the erroneous notion that animal protein is a necessary and
'natural' component of the human diet. The time has come for us to seriously and imaginatively confound this orthodoxy.