JOEL HOSTS BRITISH SCHOLARSHIP VET

I’ve hosted numerous Nuffield scholars over the years.  This is a British scholarship given to aspiring agriculture folks to travel the world and seek an answer to a burning question.  

Last summer Claire Whittle stopped in for a day and I showed her around.  I never know where these brief encounters will take either the guest or the movement.  Claire recently presented her findings at a Nuffield Scholarship symposium and honored me with “the biggest influencer of the USA farms she visited.”

The hilarious part, which you may not catch right at the outset, was that when she visited us, she went over and used a blue porta-potty and thought the urinal was a sink.  She uses that in her introduction to show how powerful our biased expectations make us toward seeing what we want—or don’t want—to see.  She wanted to see a sink, and the fact that it had no faucet, was awfully low, and had a werid configuration didn’t stop her from “seeing” a sink.  That is a profound and powerful—albeit embarrassing—story to describe one of the most common weaknesses of the human condition.

At 6:24 minutes along and she mentions her visit with me at about the mid-point.  You’ll love her British accent, of course, but more importantly how, as a vet, she completely converted to a different view of livestock rearing.  And now some wealthy encouragers have bought her a property she can farm.  One person, one acre at a time, folks.  Enjoy the short video.

And here’s the question:  do you think it matters if a pig can express its pigness?