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So far the movement has scored some of its biggest
victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to
grant animals a constitutional right: the words ''and animals'' were added
to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of
human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England.
In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor
laying hens to ''battery cages'' -- stacked wired cages so small the birds
cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the
status of animals from ''things'' to ''beings.''
Though animals are still very much ''things'' in the
eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty-seven states have
recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them
by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists,
McDonald's and Burger King forced
significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters
animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all
struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.
Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement
now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on
behalf of animals, a new book called ''Dominion,'' was written by a former
speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their
way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of
Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as
human children.
What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural
confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to
extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory
farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than
at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to
uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool
making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive
domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized
very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were
mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There's a schizoid quality
to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist
side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this
year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an
animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham.
We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the
pig has moved out of view. When's the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn't
count.) Except for our pets, real animals -- animals living and dying -- no
longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store,
where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as
possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in
which there's no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality.
This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a
space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can
evidently thrive equally well.
Several years ago, the English critic John Berger
wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss
of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the
loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our
relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny,
had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like
and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar
(pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this
paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor
and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much
broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians.
For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing. Which might
explain how I found myself reading ''Animal Liberation'' in a steakhouse.
This is not something I'd recommend if you're determined to continue eating
meat. Combining rigorous philosophical argument with journalistic
description, ''Animal Liberation'' is one of those rare books that demand
that you either defend the way you live or change it. Because Singer is so
skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change. His book has
converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn't take long for
me to see why: within a few pages, he had succeeded in throwing me on the
defensive.
Singer's argument is disarmingly simple and, if you
accept its premises, difficult to refute. Take the premise of equality,
which most people readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? People
are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all -- some are smarter than others,
better looking, more gifted. ''Equality is a moral idea,'' Singer points
out, ''not an assertion of fact.'' The moral idea is that everyone's
interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of ''what
abilities they may possess.'' Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this
far. But fewer have taken the next logical step. ''If possessing a higher
degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or
her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same
purpose?''
This is the nub of Singer's argument, and right around
here I began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from
animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer acknowledges,
which is why we shouldn't treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration
of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children
have an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But
where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they
receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest that we
share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding
pain.
Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy
Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher, that is the wellspring of
the animal rights movement. Bentham was writing in 1789, soon after the
French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental rights. ''The
day may come,'' he speculates, ''when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights.'' Bentham then asks what characteristic entitles any
being to moral consideration. ''Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the
faculty of discourse?'' Obviously not, since ''a full-grown horse or dog is
beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal,
than an infant.'' He concludes: ''The question is not, Can they reason? nor,
Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?''
Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers
call the ''argument from marginal cases,'' or A.M.C. for short. It goes like
this: there are humans -- infants, the severely retarded, the demented --
whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee. Even though these
people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless include them
in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the
chimpanzee?
Because he's a chimp, I furiously scribbled
in the margin, and they're human! For Singer that's not good
enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he's
not human is no different from excluding the slave simply because he's not
white. In the same way we'd call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist
contends that it is speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely
because he's not human.
But the differences between blacks and whites are
trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp.
Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical society that
discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial -- say,
intelligence. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the
fact that animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a
basis for discrimination? Either we do not owe any justice to the severely
retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities.
This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in
equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics,
then either I have to take the interests of the steer I'm eating into
account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to
plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.
But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the
days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights
thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the
legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Matthew Scully.
I didn't think I minded being a speciesist, but could it be, as
several of these writers suggest, that we will someday come to regard
speciesism as an evil comparable to racism? Will history someday judge us as
harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the
shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J.M.
Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he
answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, ''a crime of
stupefying proportions'' (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us
every day, just beneath our notice.
It's an idea almost impossible to entertain seriously,
much less to accept, and in the weeks following my restaurant face-off
between Singer and the steak, I found myself marshaling whatever mental
power I could muster to try to refute it. Yet Singer and his allies managed
to trump almost all my objections.
My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill
one another all the time. Why treat animals more ethically than they
treat one another? (Ben Franklin tried this one long before me: during a
fishing trip, he wondered, ''If you eat one another, I don't see why we may
not eat you.'' He admits, however, that the rationale didn't occur to him
until the fish were in the frying pan, smelling ''admirably well.'' The
advantage of being a ''reasonable creature,'' Franklin remarks, is that you
can find a reason for whatever you want to do.) To the ''they do it, too''
defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really want to
base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too.
Besides, humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive;
animals do. (Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill
for sheer pleasure.)
This suggests another defense. Wouldn't life in
the wild be worse for these farm animals? ''Defenders of slavery
imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,'' Singer retorts.
''The life of freedom is to be preferred.''
But domesticated animals can't survive in the
wild; in fact, without us they wouldn't exist at all. Or as one
19th-century political philosopher put it, ''The pig has a stronger interest
than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there
would be no pigs at all.'' But it turns out that this would be fine by the
animal rightists: for if pigs don't exist, they can't be wronged.
Animals on factory farms have never known any
other life. Singer replies that ''animals feel a need to exercise,
stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or
not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.'' The measure of
their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily
frustration of their instincts.
O.K., the suffering of animals is a legitimate
problem, but the world is full of problems, and surely human problems must
come first! Sounds good, and yet all the animal people are asking me to
do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. There's no
reason I can't devote myself to solving humankind's problems while being a
vegetarian who wears synthetics.
But doesn't the fact that we could choose to forgo
meat for moral reasons point to a crucial moral difference between animals
and humans? As Kant pointed out, the human being is the only moral
animal, the only one even capable of entertaining a concept of ''rights.''
What's wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to
reciprocate it? Right here is where you run smack into the A.M.C.: the moral
status of the retarded, the insane, the infant and the Alzheimer's patient.
Such ''marginal cases,'' in the detestable argot of modern moral philosophy,
cannot participate in moral decision making any more than a monkey can, yet
we nevertheless grant them rights.
That's right, I respond, for the simple reason that
they're one of us. And all of us have been, and will probably once again be,
marginal cases ourselves. What's more, these people have fathers and
mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare
deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most brilliant ape.
Alas, none of these arguments evade the charge of
speciesism; the racist, too, claims that it's natural to give special
consideration to one's own kind. A utilitarian like Singer would agree,
however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the
principle of equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice
between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded
orphan and on a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the
ape has a greater capacity for pain.
Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A.M.C.: it
can be used to help the animals, but just as often it winds up hurting the
marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism will bring us to a moral cliff from
which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us.
And yet this isn't the moral choice I am being asked
to make. (Too bad; it would be so much easier!) In everyday life, the choice
is not between babies and chimps but between the pork and the tofu. Even if
we reject the ''hard utilitarianism'' of a Peter Singer, there remains the
question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral
consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we do owe them
moral consideration, how can we justify eating them?
This is why killing animals for meat (and clothing)
poses the most difficult animal rights challenge. In the case of animal
testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are willing to balance
the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That's because the unique
qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus:
human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified
by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal's
because we understand what death is in a way they don't. So the argument
over animal testing is really in the details: is this particular procedure
or test really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it's not, in which
case we probably shouldn't do it.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat
or wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the
scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?
I suspect that this is finally why the animal people
managed to throw me on the defensive. It's one thing to choose between the
chimp and the retarded child or to accept the sacrifice of all those pigs
surgeons practiced on to develop heart-bypass surgery. But what happens when
the choice is between ''a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and
the gastronomic preference of a human being?'' You look away -- or you stop
eating animals. And if you don't want to do either? Then you have to try to
determine if the animals you're eating have really endured ''a lifetime of
suffering.''
Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being
eaten (assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the
vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know
what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly
speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since humans are all
basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that other
people's experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about
animals? Yes and no.
I have yet to find anyone who still subscribes to
Descartes's belief that animals cannot feel pain because they lack a soul.
The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it
comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same
evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at
face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing --
the reason it has value -- is that animals' experience of physical and even
some psychological pain closely resembles our own. Otherwise, why would
cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they
sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee
heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and ''learned
helplessness'' in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of
electrical shock?
That said, it can be argued that human pain differs
from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is
largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language,
an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to
our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we
would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals
experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness
only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just
lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness,
worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.
Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure
is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do
not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival's
testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly
little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend
the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate
its aftermath, represents an agony of another order.
By the same token, however, language and all that
comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to
the dentist would be a torment for an ape that couldn't be made to
understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.
As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of
animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same
experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp
to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is
not Sean Penn in ''Dead Man Walking,'' that in a bovine brain the concept of
nonexistence is blissfully absent. ''If we fail to find suffering in the
[animal] lives we can see,'' Dennett writes in ''Kinds of Minds,'' ''we can
rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If
we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.''
Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm,
the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw
lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog
operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and
animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learned
about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To
visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world
that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according
to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain.
Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial
animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the
people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of
everyone else.
From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are
the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit
standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick.
And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a
hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of
their confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too
small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying
hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens
in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet.
Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of
behavioral ''vices'' that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and
rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding.
Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on
more neutral descriptors, like ''vices'' and ''stress.'' Whatever you want
to call what's going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that
can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when
the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ''force-molted'' --
starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a
final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done.
Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn
from poultry-trade magazines, makes me sound like one of those animal
people, doesn't it? I don't mean to, but this is what can happen when . . .
you look. It certainly wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's breakfast. But
now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about
the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog
production that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial
logic.
Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from
their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because
they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed.
This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and
chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal
in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a
demoralized pig has stopped caring. ''Learned helplessness'' is the
psychological term, and it's not uncommon in confinement operations, where
tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or
earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats
suspended over a manure pit. So it's not surprising that an animal as
sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig
will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs,
being underperforming ''production units,'' are clubbed to death on the
spot. The U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution to the problem is called ''tail
docking.'' Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of
the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of
the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render
it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even
the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.
Much of this description is drawn from ''Dominion,''
Matthew Scully's recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a
North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no
patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man
''dominion'' over animals (''Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat
for you''), he also admonished us to show them mercy. ''We are called to
treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some
claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before
us.''
Scully calls the contemporary factory farm ''our own
worst nightmare'' and, to his credit, doesn't shrink from naming the root
cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he
resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's publication.) A
tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize
efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have
historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market.
This is one of ''the cultural contradictions of capitalism'' -- the tendency
of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy
toward animals is one such casualty.
More than any other institution, the American
industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can
look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these
places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with it
suffering. That venerable word becomes ''stress,'' an economic
problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or
beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan, by simply engineering the
''stress gene'' out of pigs and chickens. ''Our own worst nightmare'' such a
place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky
enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief,
pitiless life of a ''production unit'' in the days before the suffering gene
was found.
Vegetarianism doesn't seem an unreasonable response to such an evil. Who
would want to be made complicit in the agony of these animals by eating
them? You want to throw something against the walls of those
infernal sheds, whether it's the Bible, a new constitutional right or a
whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking in and liberating the
inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms, Coetzee's notion of a
''stupefying crime'' doesn't seem far-fetched at all.
But before you swear off meat entirely, let me
describe a very different sort of animal farm. It is typical of nothing, and
yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture
in a different light. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling grassland
and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his
family raise six different food animals -- cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits,
turkeys and sheep -- in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow
each species, in Salatin's words, ''to fully express its physiological
distinctiveness.''
What this means in practice is that Salatin's chickens
live like chickens; his cows, like cows; pigs, pigs. As in nature, where
birds tend to follow herbivores, once Salatin's cows have finished grazing a
pasture, he moves them out and tows in his ''eggmobile,'' a portable chicken
coop that houses several hundred laying hens -- roughly the natural size of
a flock. The hens fan out over the pasture, eating the short grass and
picking insect larvae out of the cowpats -- all the while spreading the cow
manure and eliminating the farm's parasite problem. A diet of grubs and
grass makes for exceptionally tasty eggs and contented chickens, and their
nitrogenous manure feeds the pasture. A few weeks later, the chickens move
out, and the sheep come in, dining on the lush new growth, as well as on the
weed species (nettles, nightshade) that the cattle and chickens won't touch.
Meanwhile, the pigs are in the barn turning the
compost. All winter long, while the cattle were indoors, Salatin layered
their manure with straw, wood chips -- and corn. By March, this steaming
compost layer cake stands three feet high, and the pigs, whose powerful
snouts can sniff out and retrieve the fermented corn at the bottom, get to
spend a few happy weeks rooting through the pile, aerating it as they work.
All you can see of these pigs, intently nosing out the tasty alcoholic
morsels, are their upturned pink hams and corkscrew tails churning the air.
The finished compost will go to feed the grass; the grass, the cattle; the
cattle, the chickens; and eventually all of these animals will feed us.
I thought a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights
during the day I spent on Joel Salatin's extraordinary farm. So much of what
I'd read, so much of what I'd accepted, looked very different from here. To
many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at
these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same
way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal
happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.
For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the
opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or
wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's
''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if
we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our
farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal
rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think
of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to
misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto
what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is
an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a
regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.
Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of
especially opportunistic species discovered through Darwinian trial and
error that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with
humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and
protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk
and eggs and -- yes -- their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the
relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for
themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans
gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists.
(Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance
for lactose as adults.)
From the animals' point of view, the bargain with
humanity has been a great success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs,
dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have
languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor
does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong,
the rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather than ''ends,'' yet
the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving
as a ''means.'' Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say
of one of Joel Salatin's caged chickens that ''the life of freedom is to be
preferred'' betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences -- which on this
farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels.
But haven't these chickens simply traded one predator
for another -- weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is
probably not a bad deal. For brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm
animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence
or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear will eat a lactating ewe
alive, starting with her udders. ''As a rule,'' he explained, ''animals
don't get 'good deaths' surrounded by their loved ones.''
The very existence of predation -- animals eating
animals -- is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in animal rights
circles. ''It must be admitted,'' Singer writes, ''that the existence of
carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal
Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.'' Some
animal rightists train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note:
cats will require nutritional supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully
calls predation ''the intrinsic evil in nature's design . . . among the
hardest of all things to fathom.'' Really? A deep Puritan streak pervades
animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality,
but with the animals' animality too.
However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter
of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the
wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on him for its well-being;
without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve.
In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological
role. Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human
predators -- not individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest
way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would be to grant chickens a
''right to life.''
Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not
concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case
for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not
individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of
species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that
only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have
interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a
corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with
individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of
liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?
In 1611 Juan da Goma (aka Juan the Disoriented) made
accidental landfall on Wrightson Island, a six-square-mile rock in the
Indian Ocean. The island's sole distinction is as the only known home of the
Arcania tree and the bird that nests in it, the Wrightson giant sea sparrow.
Da Goma and his crew stayed a week, much of that time spent in a failed bid
to recapture the ship's escaped goat -- who happened to be pregnant. Nearly
four centuries later, Wrightson Island is home to 380 goats that have
consumed virtually every scrap of vegetation in their reach. The youngest
Arcania tree on the island is more than 300 years old, and only 52 sea
sparrows remain. In the animal rights view, any one of those goats have at
least as much right to life as the last Wrightson sparrow on earth, and the
trees, because they are not sentient, warrant no moral consideration
whatsoever. (In the mid-80's a British environmental group set out to shoot
the goats, but was forced to cancel the expedition after the Mammal
Liberation Front bombed its offices.)
The story of Wrightson Island (recounted by the
biologist David Ehrenfeld in ''Beginning Again'') suggests at the very least
that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit
when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: morality
is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social
relations. It's very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature
doesn't provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn't it
anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for
nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with
the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and
animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us
humans today.
To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate
just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could
thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural
world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of
nature seems absolute. ''In our normal life,'' Singer writes, ''there is no
serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.'' Such a
statement assumes a decidedly urbanized ''normal life,'' one that certainly
no farmer would recognize.
The farmer would point out that even vegans have a
''serious clash of interests'' with other animals. The grain that the vegan
eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's
tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop
songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State
University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly
vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would
actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis
contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people
should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least
intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear
that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.
When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian
utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to
importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley
receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would
hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the
hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the
time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the
only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it --
especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose
presence can actually improve the health of the land.
The vegetarian utopia would make us even more
dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That
food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil
fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and
manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a
more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support
local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather
than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of
our souls -- then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to
do.
There is, too, the fact that we humans have been
eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need
to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of our evolutionary
heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our
digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and
biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in
size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human
culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the
brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our
identity -- our own animality.
Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal
rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and
then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or
not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to
eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We
might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere
''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is
something very deep indeed.
Are any of these good enough reasons to eat animals? I'm mindful of Ben
Franklin's definition of the reasonable creature as one who can come up with
reasons for whatever he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter
Singer and ask him what he thought. In an e-mail message, I described
Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good
Farm -- one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all
appearances did not suffer.
''I agree with you that it is better for these animals
to have lived and died than not to have lived at all,'' Singer wrote back.
Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and
suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn't comprehend that death
need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal
happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one.
However, he added, this line of thinking doesn't obviate the wrongness of
killing an animal that ''has a sense of its own existence over time and can
have preferences for its own future.'' In other words, it's O.K. to eat the
chicken, but he's not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, ''I would not be
sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who purchased meat
from one of these farms.''
Singer went on to express serious doubts that such
farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the
marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense
of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not conducive to
treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more
expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein.
These are important considerations, but they don't alter my essential point:
what's wrong with animal agriculture -- with eating animals -- is the
practice, not the principle.
What this suggests to me is that people who care
should be working not for animal rights but animal welfare -- to ensure that
farm animals don't suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless. In
fact, the decent-life-merciful-death line is how Jeremy Bentham justified
his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was
himself a carnivore. In a passage rather less frequently quoted by animal
rightists, Bentham defended eating animals on the grounds that ''we are the
better for it, and they are never the worse. . . . The death they suffer in
our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means, a
less painful one than that which would await them in the inevitable course
of nature.''
My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at
what happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that, in theory
at least, a utilitarian can justify the killing of humanely treated animals
-- for meat or, presumably, for clothing. (Though leather and fur pose
distinct moral problems. Leather is a byproduct of raising domestic animals
for food, which can be done humanely. However, furs are usually made from
wild animals that die brutal deaths -- usually in leg-hold traps -- and
since most fur species aren't domesticated, raising them on farms isn't
necessarily more humane.) But whether the issue is food or fur or hunting,
what should concern us is the suffering, not the killing. All of which I was
feeling pretty good about -- until I remembered that utilitarians can also
justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn't the problem for them
that it is for other people, including me.
During my visit to Polyface Farm, I asked Salatin where his animals were
slaughtered. He does the chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would
do the cattle, pigs and sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him.
Salatin showed me the open-air abattoir he built behind the farmhouse -- a
sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with stainless-steel sinks,
scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine and metal cones to hold the birds
upside down while they're being bled. Processing chickens is not a pleasant
job, but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he's convinced he can
do it more humanely and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters
every other Saturday through the summer. Anyone's welcome to watch.
I asked Salatin how he could bring himself to kill a
chicken.
''People have a soul; animals don't,'' he said. ''It's
a bedrock belief of mine.'' Salatin is a devout Christian. ''Unlike us,
animals are not created in God's image, so when they die, they just die.''
The notion that only in modern times have people grown
uneasy about killing animals is a flattering conceit. Taking a life is
momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals
for thousands of years. Religion and especially ritual has played a crucial
part in helping us reckon the moral costs. Native Americans and other
hunter-gathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the
eater might live (sort of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered
sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves
that it was the gods' desires that demanded the slaughter, not their own. In
ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests! -- now
we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the
sacrificial animal's brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this
was taken as a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn't necessarily preclude
respect. For all these people, it was the ceremony that allowed them to
look, then to eat.
Apart from a few surviving religious practices, we no
longer have any rituals governing the slaughter or eating of animals, which
perhaps helps to explain why we find ourselves where we do, feeling that our
only choice is to either look away or give up meat. Frank Perdue is happy to
serve the first customer; Peter Singer, the second.
Until my visit to Polyface Farm, I had assumed these
were the only two options. But on Salatin's farm, the eye contact between
people and animals whose loss John Berger mourned is still a fact of life --
and of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these animals have
been secreted behind steel walls. ''Food with a face,'' Salatin likes to
call what he's selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers.
People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a
chicken or a steer -- a being without a soul, a ''subject of a life''
entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for pain and pleasure,
a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can eat, might
begin with the looking.
We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer.
Salatin told me the story of a man who showed up at the farm one Saturday
morning. When Salatin noticed a PETA bumper sticker on the man's car, he
figured he was in for it. But the man had a different agenda. He explained
that after 16 years as a vegetarian, he had decided that the only way he
could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. He had come
to look.
''Ten minutes later we were in the processing shed
with a chicken,'' Salatin recalled. ''He slit the bird's throat and watched
it die. He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly, didn't do a
Disney double take. The animal had been treated with respect when it was
alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death -- that it
wasn't being treated as a pile of protoplasm.''
Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally powerful
idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is
apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for
the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to
redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law
requiring that the steel and concrete walls of the CAFO's and
slaughterhouses be replaced with . . . glass. If there's any new ''right''
we need to establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look.
No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn
many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their
meat, to farmers like Salatin. There are more of them than I would have
imagined. Despite the relentless consolidation of the American meat
industry, there has been a revival of small farms where animals still live
their ''characteristic form of life.'' I'm thinking of the ranches where
cattle still spend their lives on grass, the poultry farms where chickens
still go outside and the hog farms where pigs live as they did 50 years ago
-- in contact with the sun, the earth and the gaze of a farmer.
For my own part, I've discovered that if you're
willing to make the effort, it's entirely possible to limit the meat you eat
to nonindustrial animals. I'm tempted to think that we need a new dietary
category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don't
have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort
of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I've become the sort of
shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been
humanely grown (the American Humane Association's new ''Free Farmed'' label
seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork
come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring
slaughterhouses. I've actually found a couple of small processing plants
willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon
Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir.
The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of
American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon:
no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively
or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become
transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to
do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would
disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour
would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get
more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat
animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they
deserve.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
|
he
first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone
at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this
sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion),
that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of
animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading ''Uncle Tom's
Cabin'' on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852. 
