Jules, reading quoted Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell
To close this chapter, I return to an example that brings together these considerations about the ethics of eating, using energy, and contamination: the cows of Fukushima. Masami Yoshizawa and Naoto Matsumura, formerly farmers, now care for animals left in the wake of the nuclear meltdown that followed on the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Among these animals are cattle too radioactive to eat but which they refuse to kill. These cattle had been declared “walking accident debris,” according to a newspaper article about Yoshizawa—“officials from the Ministry of Agriculture ordered them to be rounded up and slaughtered, their bodies buried or burned along with other radioactive waste” (Fackler 2014).
Yoshizawa says about his care-as-protest work: “The government wants to kill them because it wants to erase what happened here, and lure Japan back to its pre-accident nuclear status quo. I am not going to let them.”
— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 163 - 164)