The
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.
Singer and the swelling ranks of his
followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on
my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age.
Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing
animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us,
will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view
''speciesism'' -- a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes --
as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.
Even in 1975, when ''Animal Liberation'' was first published, Singer,
an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that
he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past
was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another.
Slowly but surely, the white man's circle of moral consideration was
expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each
case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing ''we''
as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted
to the club. Now it was animals' turn.
That
animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of
moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A
growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers,
ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great
moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
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.
