Here’s £1 million for you, off you go

King Willy & Dave have announced you can get £1m for your bestest idea to save the planet, so here’s mine. You can have it for free as long as you make it happen somehow. I can’t be arsed and anyway I don’t know how.

Now this is actually just a Dragon’s Den version of the same thing I’ve always said whenever anyone asks me for my ‘one idea to save the planet’. People tend not to like my idea very much, but there were people who didn’t like the idea of Peanut Butter and Marmite in the same pot and well who looks silly now is all I can say.

No, it’s not to cover everything in solar panels or infest all fossil fuel execs with scrofula or put Donald Trump in a giant wicker phallus and set fire to it.

What we need to do with £1million is this.

We need to make everyone in the world believe that farm animals* can talk.

This is totally the best idea ever.

Why this is totally the best idea ever

Because if we thought farm animals* could talk, we would perhaps feel a bit worse about eating them. And then maybe we’d eat less of them.And then the vast wasteful ruinous industrialisation that is animal agriculture would unwind, allowing space for soils to regenerate and detoxify and suck in carbon, and abundance within which ecologies could renew, and land upon which trees could grow, and muchly less cow farty methane all over the place. And 7.5 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 12 / 15 / 1,000 (they’re trying to cure death, you know, these scientists) billion people might have a better chance of making it, environmentally speaking, to next Christmas.

(Now I accept that ‘being able to speak’ does not necessarily mean humans with bigger weapons will not be a shit to you, as can be seen from a quick glimpse at just about any period of history or indeed lots of things going on in the world at any time.)

But farming: lots of folk already either 1) kind of feel a bit funny about all the slaughter and the commodification of sentient life, but put it to the back of their head a bit because meat=nice > slaughter=bad, or 2) think it’s fine because animals yes OK may be able to feel pain, but the dummies can’t sing operas or commentate on Robot Wars, so yup serve ’em up for my tea, yum yum.

(I have more time for #2. At least it’s an ethos.)

If we thought farm animals* could talk then perhaps we’d then think either 1) oh no, now I feel really beastly, next Friday’s dinner is talking to me, or 2) oh no, next Friday’s dinner isn’t as stupid as I thought it was.

(And again there’s a zonking great problem here, obviously, which is that vast colonial empires thrived and still thrive on the oppression and death of actual humans. So this probably doesn’t work. But so help me I’ve started so I’ll finish.)

(Ah, but then again in the UK the RSPCA was founded when we were still chucking kids up chimneys, and donkey sanctuaries attract untold millions of donations while refugees wash up dead on beaches. )

(Ah yes but then again, some of the worst people on the internet seem to like their pet Alsatian [which can not speak [in human]] far more than they like foreigners or the European Union or face masks. Maybe it’s precisely because an Alsatian is incapable of expressing [in human] challenging opinions that we get on with them so well.)

(I may be talking myself out of this.)

Anyway, your practical options here

Like I said I don’t really know how to do this. I can see basically three Routes To Market:

(1) Actually make a farm animal* talk

I am assuming this is not yet doable although I am not exactly Captain 2020 when it comes to understanding technology. The other day my mate had to talk me through installing a computer game with much the same patience and robustness as is needed when air controllers guide down a passenger at the controls of a 747 after the pilot and co-pilot have died off of bad shellfish.

If this is doable and we can do it in a 100% guaranteed kind and nice way then let’s do this, although Christ knows if we’d be ready for what they’d have to say.

(2) Make it look like a farm animal* can talk

Basically what we want to do here is a cow/sheep/pig version of the That’s Life dog that could (couldn’t really) say the word ‘sausages’.

In fact probably ideally let’s use the actual word ‘sausages’ and let’s make it a pig this time. If you’re going to make a farm animal* look like its talking, you’d better choose a word that can be approximated by moving something’s top lip up and down. And which also through an efficiency of language kind of gets the point across.

You’d have to do this really well though, and probably without it being obvious you’re moving their mouth for them. And not just to your mates in a field, but like at half time in the FA Cup final or something.

(3) Make everyone think that a farm animal* can talk

You can make a critical mass of people believe whatever you want if you chuck enough money at it, as Americans may be about to find out, yay. Plus there is Facebook and wotnot now, so you can just send them things to click on all day which makes all the awful complexity of this entropic world go away.

So it’s probably just going to be easiest to deepfake your way through this one, but I’ll leave the details to you.

OK so I’m really looking forward to seeing how you get on with this

Because if the Babe Effect doesn’t work, we’re going to have to rely on other things, like using our brains or being compassionate, and that doesn’t always go as well as you might like to think it would. And King Willy & Dave aren’t giving out dosh for the application of common sense.

The thing is

While I do genuinely think that if farm animals* could talk then very many things about being a human would suddenly feel different, the truth is that they can’t.

But if a pig could talk and could sit with you in a pub and could get you to explain to it why it is that we are merrily knackering the only place in the universe that any of us (cows or pigs or sheep or humans) can live by turning so much of it over to animal agriculture and the inputs to animal agriculture and the polluted afters from animal agriculture when we really don’t need to, it would probably only need to use a couple of very short and basic words to tell you what it thought.

Oh and

[* There is, of course, no such thing as a “farm animal”. Farms are things we do to animals. Language eh.]