|
The
American Scholar Spring
2014
Read the whole story
here:
http://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/
Loving
Animals to Death
How can we
raise them humanely and then
butcher them?
By James
McWilliams
Bob Comis
of Stony Brook Farm is a
professional pig farmer—the
good kind. Comis knows his pigs,
loves his pigs, and treats his
pigs with uncommon dignity. His
animals live in an impossibly
bucolic setting and “as
close to natural as
possible.” They are, he
writes, so piggy that they are
Plato’s pig, “the ideal
form of the pig.”
Comis’s pastures, in
Schoharie, New York, are
playgrounds of porcine fun:
“they root, they lounge,
they narf, they eat, they forage,
they sleep, they wallow, they
bask, they run, they play.”
And when the fateful day of
deliverance arrives, “they
die unconsciously, without pain
or suffering.”
Comis’s
patrons—educated eaters with
an interest in humanely harvested
meat—are understandably
eager to fill their forks with
Comis’s pork. To them, Comis
represents a new breed of
agrarian maverick intent on
bucking an
agricultural-industrial system so
bloated that a single
company—Smithfield
Foods—produces six billion
pounds of pork a year. Comis
provides a welcome alternative to
this industrial model, and if the
reform-minded Food Movement has
its way, one day all meat will be
humanely raised and locally
sourced for the
“conscientious
carnivore.”
Except for
one problem: Comis the humane pig
farmer believes that what he does
for a living is wrong. Morally
wrong. “As a pig farmer, I
lead an unethical life,” he
wrote recently on The Huffington
Post. He’s acutely aware
that he “might indeed be a
very bad person for killing
animals for a living.”
Comis’s essential objection
to his line of work is that he
slaughters sentient and
emotionally sophisticated beings.
His self-assessment on this score
is unambiguous. His life is one
that’s “shrouded in the
justificatory trappings of social
acceptance.” To those who
want their righteous pork chop,
he asserts that “I am a
slaveholder and a murderer”
and that “what I do is
wrong.” Even if “I
cannot yet act on it,” he
concludes, “I know it in my
bones.”
THE FOOD
MOVEMENT
Chances are
good that you’ve never heard
of Bob Comis. The carnivorously
inclined Food Movement would like
to keep it that way. With his
confession of ethical
transgression, he has strayed
dangerously from the
movement’s script. To
appreciate the full impact of
Comis’s defection, it helps
to understand something about the
Food Movement itself—a
loosely organized but powerful
coalition of progressive
interests, or “a big, lumpy
tent,” as the
phenomenon’s leader, author
Michael Pollan, calls it. Its
members aim to localize,
downsize, and decentralize the
North American food system in
order to usher consumers
“beyond the barcode”
and into a world of wholesome
whole food.
The
movement’s reformist
concerns are more structural than
dietary. What ultimately matters
to its followers is where their
food comes from and how it’s
prepared rather than what exactly
they’re eating. You want to
eat hog testicles (which a
waitress at an upscale Austin,
Texas, restaurant recently urged
me to order)? Go for it—but
just make sure they come from a
nonindustrial, local, and humane
farm. Craving a plate of
“fried pig head”? Sure
thing. But it better come from a
venue such as Grange Kitchen and
Bar, Ann Arbor’s haven of,
as one local blogger calls it,
“slow foodie
mentality.” In a noble quest
to end the abuses of an overly
industrialized agribusiness
machine that churns out foodlike
substances, the
movement—with
libertarian-like
zeal—fosters a radical
freedom of culinary choice.
Dietary restriction is a phrase
generally absent from its
lexicon.
But there
are standards. Off-grid food
freedom should be exercised at
the Saturday farmers market or by
a slow-food chef rather than in
the sterile aisles of a
fluorescent-lit Walmart
Supercenter. This message is
reiterated at every farmers
market in the country: eat all
the animals you want—and
every part!—so long as they
come from Bob Comis and not Oscar
Mayer. Do that, and you will not
only do right by animals and the
small farms that nurture them,
but you will also be making
important political contributions
to the future of real food. You
will be creating a food culture
in which you can eat the whole
hog and, at the same time, put
the Chinese-owned Smithfield
Foods out to pasture. That
aspiration, especially if you
enjoy the taste of meat, has
become increasingly popular and
hard to resist.
Sometimes
the movement’s rhetoric gets
ahead of itself. It can overstate
the connection between processed
junk food and historically
complex social problems
(“the advent of fast
food,” Pollan has written,
“has, in effect, subsidized
the decline of family incomes in
America”). And the
movement’s well-to-do
spokespeople can exhibit a tin
ear when it comes to the politics
of inclusion (restaurateur Alice
Waters: “Some people want to
buy Nike shoes, two pairs, and
other people want to eat Bronx
grapes and nourish
themselves”). That said, few
conscientious followers of food
politics disagree with the
movement’s core principles,
especially when they’re
articulated by likable
ambassadors such as Pollan (a
gifted writer), the avuncular
Wendell Berry (a contemporary
Thoreau), and even Waters
herself, who has been known to
weep when the integrity of slow
food is challenged.
All of
which is to say that the Food
Movement, despite its missteps
and melodrama, is a relatively
new but quite formidable force
generally pushing the right kind
of goals. Consumers with an
interest in food justice should
root for it to succeed. Who,
after all, doesn’t think
it’s a noble idea to
eliminate food deserts, serve
local broccoli to school kids,
make fresh and healthful food
more accessible, eliminate pink
slime from the food chain, grow
kale in the Midwest, and not have
a secretary of agriculture from a
corn-and-soy state? These are
benevolent objectives by any
standard.
But still,
some skeptics have wondered
whether any of the Food
Movement’s reforms are even
remotely achievable if reformers
continue to ignore the ethical
considerations involved in eating
meat. Simply put, when it comes
to the Food Movement’s
long-term viability, could it be
that changing what we eat is more
important than improving its
source? Might the only way to
reform our food
system—rather than simply
providing alternatives—be to
stop raising animals for
consumption? Pollan has addressed
these questions by explaining,
“what’s wrong with
animal agriculture—with
eating animals—is the
practice, not the
principle.” But what if
he’s got that backward? What
if, when it comes to eating
animals, the Food Movement’s
principles are out of
whack?
THE
OMNIVORE’S
CONTRADICTION
Tacking his
rogue thesis—raising and
killing my happy pigs is
unethical—to the doors of
the Food Movement’s church,
Comis creaked those doors open
for a philosophical investigation
into the principle of killing
animals for food we do not need.
For an earnest movement aiming to
radically alter the way we feed
ourselves, this self-exam is long
overdue. From Jeremy
Bentham’s famous moral
distinction—“The
question is not ‘Can
[animals] reason,’
nor ‘Can they talk,’
but ‘Can they suffer?’
”—to Peter
Singer’s Animal Liberation
to Tom Regan’s The Case for
Animal Rights, philosophers have,
through various perspectives,
been building a multifaceted and
daunting case that animals have
relevant interests and, as a
result, deserve a basic level of
moral consideration. It may very
well follow that because of this
moral consideration, we cannot
justifiably raise sentient
animals and kill them for food
when we could replace them with
plant-based substitutes. Granted,
few philosophers would maintain
that it’s alwaysunethical to
eat animals—there may be
persuasive cases for doing so
under certain circumstances.
However, after two centuries of
debate on the issue, their
arguments do show that the bar
has been set higher than most of
us acknowledge. In short, it
matters to a pig that it leads a
pleasurable life. On what grounds
can we ignore that interest, kill
the animal, and make a pork
chop?
This is not
a parlor game. Indeed,
Comis’s call for a more
philosophical approach to animal
agriculture is neither an
arbitrary nor an academic appeal
to an abstract notion of animal
rights. Instead, it’s
grounded in the humble workings
of daily life, especially the
humble, if complex, workings that
bring to our plate animal
protein—which has been shown
to be not only unnecessary but
often harmful to human health. A
secular and religious consensus
exists that living an ethical
life means accepting that my own
interests are no more important
than another’s simply
because they are mine. Basic
decency, not to mention social
cohesion, requires us to concede
that like interests deserve equal
consideration. If we have an
interest in anything, it is in
avoiding unnecessary pain. Thus,
even though a farm animal’s
experience of suffering might be
different from a human’s
experience of suffering, that
suffering requires that we
consider the animal’s
interest in not being raised and
eaten much as we would consider
our own interest in not being
raised and eaten. Once we do
that, we would have to
demonstrate, in order to
justifiably eat a farm animal,
that some weighty competing moral
consideration was at stake. The
succulence of pancetta,
unfortunately, won’t cut
it.
The Food
Movement should be game for a
serious discussion of this issue.
Its own rhetoric urges us to
“know where our food comes
from” and to trace our
ingredients “from farm to
fork.” Leading figures in
the movement would thus seem
poised to embrace this line of
ethical inquiry as a critical
step in the larger effort to
reform our “broken food
system.” Animal agriculture
is at the heart of almost every
major ill that plagues industrial
agriculture. Identify an agrarian
problem—greenhouse gas
emissions, overuse of antibiotics
and dangerous pesticides,
genetically modified crops,
salmonella, E. coli, waste
disposal, excessive use of
water—and trace it to its
ultimate origin and you will
likely find an animal. Given that
centrality, it’s reasonable
to expect the Food Movement to
leap at the opportunity to
grapple with the implications of
Comis’s conundrum. Research
shows that veganism, which
obviates the inherent waste
involved in growing the grains
used to fatten animals for food
in conventional systems, is seven
times more energy efficient than
eating meat and, if embraced
globally, could reduce greenhouse
gas emissions from conventional
agriculture by 94 percent. Any
pretext to explore meat
eating’s moral
underpinnings—and possibly
land upon an excuse for pursuing
a plant-based diet as a viable
goal—would be consistent
with the movement’s
anticorporate, ecologically
driven mission.
But with
rare exception, those in the big,
lumpy tent have thrown down a red
carpet for “ethical
butchers” while generally
dismissing animal rights
advocates as smug ascetics (which
they can be) and crazed activists
(ditto) who are driven more by
sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed
reason. It’s an easy move to
make. But the problem with this
dismissal—and the overall
refusal to address the ethics of
killing animals for food—is
that it potentially anchors the
Food Movement’s admirable
goals in the shifting sands of an
unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s
call it the “omnivore’s
contradiction.”
Conscientious
carnivores will argue that we can
justify eating animals because
humans evolved to do so (the
shape of our teeth proves it);
that if we did not eat happy farm
animals, they’d never have
been born to become happy in the
first place; that all is fine if
an animal lives well and is
“killed with respect”;
that we need to recycle animals
through the agricultural system
to keep the soil healthy; that
animals eat animals; and that in
nature, it’s the survival of
species and not of individuals
that matters most. These
arguments create room for a
productive conversation. But none
of them carry real weight until
the Food Movement resolves the
contradiction raised by Bob
Comis: How do you ethically
justify both respecting and
killing a sentient
animal?
KILLING
THEM WITH KINDNESS
Consider
why those in the Food Movement
want to end the abuses of
industrial animal agriculture in
the first place: environmental,
health, and labor conditions, for
starters. As conventional
agriculture’s damaging
effects on natural resources,
obesity rates, and workplace
justice and safety become
increasingly obvious, angry
consumers want alternatives.
Gargantuan corporate
consolidation—which seems
only to intensify the worst
aspects of industrial
agriculture—generates
further popular outrage. Even
higher on the list for most
concerned consumers, though, is
the mistreatment of the animals.
What makes us cringe is their
incessant abuse. How can it ever
be okay to chop off an
animal’s tail without
anesthesia, lock it in a cage so
tight it cannot turn around, toss
live male chicks into a grinder,
or jam an electric prod into a
cow’s anus—all of which
are standard procedures on
industrial farms? Everyone gets
the point intuitively: no
self-aware creature should be
subjected to this relentless
gauntlet of abuse—especially
when the purpose of that
suffering is merely to satisfy
our palates. If only by virtue of
our own moral gag reflex, then,
we have granted animals a basic
level of moral
consideration.
The Food
Movement’s popularity is
built upon this idea: that
animals raised in factory farms
have qualities that make them
worthy of our moral
consideration. Animals are not
objects, and their welfare
matters to the extent that they
should not suffer the abusive
confines of factory farms. They
deserve the time, space, and
freedom to exist as the creatures
they were born to be. These
concerns assume that farm
animals—given their ability
to experience suffering in
industrialized settings—have
authentic emotional lives and
intrinsic worth. Our belief that
they should not suffer abuse in
confinement recognizes their
fundamental moral status as
sentient beings. They can suffer,
and as a direct result, we
should,whenever possible, avoid
inflicting suffering upon them.
If animals didn’t matter to
us in a moral sense, then the
harm systematically inflicted
upon them in industrial
operations would pose no ethical
concerns whatsoever. We’d be
indifferent to their
abuse.
If the Food
Movement’s stance on animals
raised in factory farms is clear,
it grows murky when applied to
nonindustrial, more humane,
farms. Indeed, that’s where
the omnivore’s contradiction
comes into sharp focus. The Food
Movement’s premises about
farm animals are (we will assume
for now) adequately met on most
small, sustainable, humane farms.
Still, there’s no denying
that even on the most impressive
of these farms—no matter how
much their owners talk about a
respectful death—animals are
raised for the ultimate purpose
of being killed and turned into
commodities. The Food Movement
habitually minimizes this
reality, but the fact remains:
just as on factory farms, animals
on humane farms are, on slaughter
day, transformed through raw
violence into objects, after
which they are commodified,
consumed, and replaced with all
the efficiency of car
parts.
Ethically
speaking, matters at this point
become significantly more
complicated. This is where, after
all, practice and principle
suddenly converge, revealing the
heart of the hypocrisy: the
elevation of how animals are
raised as a moral consideration
(poorly in factory farms; well on
humane farms) above why we are
raising them (to kill and eat
them in both cases). It is at
this crucial moment in a farm
animal’s life—the human
choice to slaughter the beast
against its will—that the
moral consideration so
effectively deployed to condemn
the factory farming of animals
loses its punch and its
plausibility. Which, again,
brings us to the
contradiction.
It seems
not only reasonable but essential
to ask: How can a movement claim
to care so deeply about farm
animals that it wants to
restructure all of animal
agriculture to ensure their
happiness but, at the same time,
turn those same animals into an
$11 appetizer plate of fried pig
head? What moral principle could
possibly accommodate such a
whiplash-inducing shift in
practice? And if there were such
a principle, would you ever want
it to guide your life? Bob Comis,
who embodies the omnivore’s
contradiction with such
self-awareness, articulates the
problem this way:
[L]ivestock
farmers lie to their animals.
We’re kind to them and take
good care of them for months,
even years. They grow comfortable
with our presence, and even begin
to like us. But in the end, we
take advantage of the animals,
using their trust to dupe them
into being led to their own
deaths.
With
kindness, they kill
them.
WRITING
DEATH OUT OF LIFE
The Food
Movement’s failure to
recognize this contradiction is
most obvious in the culturally
pioneering work of its well-known
leading tastemakers: Pollan, food
journalist Mark Bittman, and
novelist Jonathan Safran Foer.
Together, these writers embody
the omnivore’s contradiction
by evading the question. They are
quick to put down factory farming
and insist that farm animals have
intrinsic worth. Animals are not
objects. They have feelings. They
suffer inexcusable pain and
frustration. But their eloquent
screeds ring hollow the moment
they use the horrors of factory
farming to justify artisanal
production and its ultimate
aim:nicer killing. More palatable
killing. More attractive and
marketable killing.
Writing
about pigs housed in concentrated
animal feeding operations
(CAFOs), Pollan, in The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, nails
it. He offers genuinely
empathetic observations, writing
how radical hog confinement
causes a “depressed
pig,” a “demoralized
pig,” a pig divorced from
his “natural
predilections.” He laments
the way pigs in CAFOs are
“crowded together beneath a
metal roof standing on metal
slats suspended over a septic
tank.” After visiting a
free-range farm where privileged
pigs were being happy pigs,
Pollan admitted that he
“couldn’t look at their
spiraled tails … without
thinking about the fate of
pigtails in industrial hog
production” (where tails are
docked). Explaining how pigs in
confinement experience a
“learned helplessness,”
he writes, “It’s not
surprising that an animal as
intelligent as a pig would get
depressed under these
circumstances.”
Bittman,
the influential New York Times
“Minimalist” food
columnist, has regularly reported
on the dreadful fate of animals
on factory farms. The author of
How to Cook Everything
Vegetarian, he routinely arms his
readers with disturbing facts and
figures. We learn that the number
of cows and broiler chickens
housed in factory farms doubled
between 1997 and 2007, and that
the number of “large
livestock operations” almost
quadrupled between 1982 and 2002.
And Bittman connects these
numbers to the emotional turmoil
experienced by the animals
themselves. “Until a couple
of years ago,” he confessed
in 2012, “I believed that
the primary reasons to eat less
meat were environment—and
health—related.” While
acknowledging that such
rationales remain valid, he
added, “But animal welfare
has since become a large part of
my thinking as
well.”
As with
Pollan, Bittman has experienced
an epiphany in realizing that the
animals we eat have critical
interests in avoiding pain. An
undercover Humane Society video
of a Smithfield Foods hog
facility exposing the chilling
abuse of pigs left the columnist,
a thoroughly seasoned food
writer, “pretty much
speechless.” He lambastes
Smithfield Foods for its
“infuriating disregard for
the welfare of their
animals.” He even suggests
that animal abuse in factory
farming quietly damages the human
psyche, exhorting readers
“to look at how we treat
animals and begin to change
it.”
Foer has
also influenced the public’s
disdain for factory
farming—perhaps even more
than Pollan and Bittman.
Foer’s best-selling book
Eating Animals brought the
condemnation of industrial
agriculture into more
impressively detailed and
thoughtful territory. Young
people in particular were moved
to forgo meat by Foer’s
nuanced but accessible analysis.
He quotes an industrial poultry
farmer who explains how turkey
hens are killed after a year of
life “because they
won’t lay as many eggs in
the second year.” It was,
the farmer continued,
“cheaper to slaughter them
and start over than it is
[to] feed and house birds
that lay fewer eggs.”
Through revealing anecdotes such
as this one, Foer illuminates the
icy banality of animal
objectification, showing how easy
it is to overlook the suffering
of animals raised on factory
farms in the full knowledge of
those who perpetuate it. After an
overview of the egg industry as a
whole, Foer concludes with an
appropriate sense of disgust:
“I didn’t ever want to
eat a conventional egg
again.”
“Nothing
we do,” Foer also writes,
“has the direct potential to
cause nearly as much animal
suffering as eating meat,”
and he makes those words sing
when he wonders, “What is
suffering? I’m not sure what
it is, but I know that suffering
is the name we give to the origin
of all the sighs, screams, and
groans—small and large,
crude and multifaceted—that
concern us.” Suffering is
Foer’s focus and motivation,
the basis of the idea that farm
animals are entitled, at the
least, to enjoy their lives and
not have them arbitrarily cut
short for a back-yard barbecue.
His message was shrill enough for
Pollan to reduce his thoughts on
Foer’s book to two words in
a New York Review of Books essay:
“vegetarian
polemic.”
Given all
this, it’s not unreasonable
to expect that these writers
might advocate an end to raising
and killing animals for food. But
they are not prepared to take
that stand. This
decision—this curious
dodge—is bound to rot the
movement from within. It’s a
typical sleight of hand of which
Pollan is a master. To wit, he
explained to Oprah Winfrey in
2011 that after deliberating
about the legitimacy of eating
meat, “I came out thinking I
could eat meat in this very
limited way, from farmers who
were growing it in a way that I
could feel good about how the
animals lived.”
How is it
possible to ethically raise,
love, and then kill an animal
“in this very limited
way”? If Pollan really does
want to “feel good”
about an animal’s quality of
life—much in the way he
would, say, his pet
dog’s—then what’s
the exact justification for
cutting that life short (by
something like 75 percent) for a
menu choice? Wouldn’t it be
better to spare the
pseudo-philosophizing and just
admit (as Comis did, until he
announced on his blog in February
that he had become a vegetarian)
that he likes meat too much to
stop consuming it? And if
that’s the competing
consideration—loving
meat—then all humanitarian
ballyhooing over animals in
factory farms becomes
meaningless, as do the arguments
over animal suffering in
general.
Bittman
also dances a version of this
dance, writing that
“meat-eating may be too
strong [a habit] for most
of us to give up.” But this
is patronizing. Millions of
consumers have given up meat, and
many go further by giving up
dairy and all animal products.
Bittman, himself, kind of joined
them by claiming to embrace
“semi-veganism”: no
animal products before
dinnertime; carnivorism
afterward. It’s a
confabulation, a dubious premise
that purports to achieve the
unachievable—that is,
getting to a “place where we
continue to eat animals but
exchange that privilege …
for a system in which we eat less
and treat [animals]
better.” Bittman’s use
of “privilege” here is
telling, granting as it does
special immunity to
“responsible” meat
eaters who, unlike Comis or the
7.3 million other vegetarians in
the United States, have faced the
ethical conundrum.
Foer’s
own decision to promote the
consumption of animals from
humane farms in the wake of a
book that turned a lot of people
into vegetarians is especially
confounding. In October 2012, he
responded to a question about the
morality of killing animals for
food by saying, “The answer
doesn’t really matter. Maybe
it’s fun, intellectually, to
consider the question. But
let’s talk about what’s
actually in front of us.”
Back to that whole principle and
practice thing. A few months
before making this remark, Foer
could be found (briefly) on
YouTube promoting a Farm Forward
app informing concerned consumers
where to buy the right kind of
chicken. Foer, who has explicitly
exposed the horror of death for
industrial chickens, wants us to
know where to get humanely killed
poultry because, it is assumed,
that’s the choice
that’s “actually in
front of us.”
But is that
all that’s in front of
us?
WHAT ELSE
IS “ACTUALLY IN FRONT OF
US”?
Look, I get
it. These writers are being
pragmatic and, for better or
worse, pragmatism is persuasive
and professional. Their habitual
appeal to more humane
alternatives, and their tacit
rejection of a plant-based diet
as an explicit path to food
reform, is an example of
preventing, as the saying goes,
the perfect from being the enemy
of the good. Plus, industrial
agriculture is so obviously
antithetical to animal welfare
that any nonindustrial operation
by definition will appear to be
superior and, in turn, garner
public support. Why bother with
the heavy lifting of moral
consistency when consumers can
salve their consciences about
continuing to eat animals in a
way that’s socially
acceptable?
This
question—and the logic
behind it—has not only
shaped the message of our leading
“agri-intellectuals,”
but it has even inspired global
organizations with a professional
stake in animal welfare—the
Humane Society of the United
States, for one—to support
small-scale, humane animal
agriculture as an end in itself
rather than as a stepping stone
to eliminating animals from our
diets. “We at HSUS,”
according to its president and
CEO, Wayne Pacelle, “embrace
humane farmers and an alternative
production strategy to factory
farming.” The Humane Society
is advocating eating animals?
Well, yes. They do so because, as
a personal choice, eating less
meat is perceived to be easier
than eating no meat.
Foer asks
us to consider the reality we
live in when evaluating our
position on eating animals. So
let’s end by doing that.
Let’s consider the nature of
nonindustrial animal agriculture,
bringing the same level of
scrutiny to those operations that
we bring to factory farms. Do
this, and two damning realities
begin to emerge. Together, they
emphasize the consequences of the
movement’s failure to follow
the logic of its own findings and
to promote, as it should, the end
of animal agriculture as a
revolutionary path to agrarian
reform, one with the potential to
meet the movement’s most
passionately articulated
goals.
The first
is that the economics of
nonindustrial animal agriculture
doesn’t work. Consolidation
pays. Pasture-based systems are a
costly alternative to factory
farming and will by necessity
appeal primarily to
Bittman’s
“privileged” consumers
rather than have broad appeal to
the carnivorous masses. In
perhaps the most important and
overlooked book published on
animal agriculture in a
generation, Jayson Lusk and F.
Bailey Norwood’s Compassion,
by the Pound, the
authors—agricultural
economists—document the hard
economic reality of humane
farming. They show beyond a doubt
that Plato’s pig requires
the riches of Croesus and a horde
of foodies willing to pay a mint
for meat. Of course, many
carnivores will happily do that.
Niche support for humane meat,
however, will do very little to
challenge the overall allure of
cheap protein churned out by
agribusiness. Most consumers will
always rally around the lowest
price. If there is no stigma
against eating animals, the
cheapest options will prevail.
And so will agribusiness. Simply
put: you can’t beat the
devil at his own game.
The second
unrecognized reality is that
although nonindustrial animal
agriculture might appear to be
substantially more humane than
industrialized agriculture, small
farms are only nominally more
accommodating of farm
animals’ full interests. My
research for a book looking into
the downside of small-scale
animal agriculture has revealed
that problems reminiscent of
factory farms readily plague many
of their smaller counterparts,
too. Owning animals for the
purposes of slaughter and
consumption means that ethical
corners will be cut to enhance
the bottom line. As competition
for privileged consumers
increases, this corner cutting
can only be expected to
intensify.
A short
list of routine and sometimes
unavoidable problems prevalent on
nonindustrial animal farms, all
noted by farmers themselves,
includes the following: excessive
rates of pastured animals being
killed by wild and domestic
animals, mutilation of pig snouts
to prevent detrimental rooting,
castration without anesthesia,
botched slaughters, preventive
(and illicit) antibiotic use,
outbreaks of salmonella and
trichinosis, acute pasture
damage, overuse of pesticides and
animal vaccines, and routine
separation of mothers and calves.
Animals granted a little more
space, in other words, still
suffer the negative consequences
of being owned for exploitation.
Given that they are destined to
be commodities, not companions,
this should not come as a
surprise. Hence the ultimate cost
of failing to address the
omnivore’s contradiction:
the ongoing suffering of the
animals that farmers and foodies
say they care so much
about.
Nobody is
envisioning the immediate
liberation of farm animals. We
will never realistically face a
scenario in which the billions of
animals we now kill for food roam
the landscape in search of
sanctuary. But what we can
envision—and what the Food
Movement should envision—is
a radical shift in agricultural
practice initiated by a radical
shift in what enlightened
consumers agree not to eat. This
transition would primarily favor
far more diversified systems of
production focused on growing
plants for people to consume
(right now, 75 percent of all the
world’s calories in food
production comes from corn, rice,
wheat, and soy, and the bulk of
all corn and soy goes to
livestock). Necessarily
complementing this shift would be
a gradual but sharp reduction in
the practice of raising animals
for the purposes of killing them
for food, with smaller, more
humane farms serving as a
necessary but temporary phase in
the larger mission of ending
animal agriculture
altogether.
Once these
two related developments are
complete, or at least well
underway, the Food Movement could
then initiate useful debates over
the residual uses of animals in
food production. If we keep
chickens to help fertilize the
soil or to be our pets, can we
justify eating their eggs? Should
we establish municipal programs
to process road kill into safe
culinary options? Should we eat
animals such as jellyfish that
proliferate in ecologically
dangerous ways? These discussions
are all worth having, but not
until we make genuine progress
toward ending the agricultural
tradition of raising animals
capable of suffering and then
eating them.
“I
HAVE THIS THING FOR
COWS”
In addition
to insisting that it
“doesn’t really
matter” whether it’s
morally wrong to raise and kill
animals, Foer also explained that
this “question is the least
relevant to the choices we make
on a daily basis.” In other
words, because our culture is so
deeply infused with animal
products, it makes little
practical sense to investigate
the morality of eating animals.
People don’t care. I might
have agreed with Foer before last
semester, when I helped teach a
course called Eating Animals in
America. But in that class,
something happened that opened my
eyes to the Food Movement in a
new way. We had read Timothy
Pachirat’s Every Twelve
Seconds, a graphic look into the
workings of an industrial
slaughterhouse. In our
discussion, one student—an
elaborately tattooed Iraqi war
veteran, Purple Heart,
competitive weight lifter, and
active Texas rancher—told
his classmates, all of whom were
disgusted by what they’d
read, that there was a better
way. There was, he insisted, an
entirely different way to go
about treating cattle. My
colleague and I asked this
student—let’s call him
Mike—if he’d be willing
to open the next class by
describing how he handles
slaughtering cattle on his
family’s ranch, where they
kill two cows a year for personal
consumption. He generously
agreed.
Mike began
by explaining how horrified he
was by Pachirat’s
description of the way that the
industrial operation’s
cattle were treated. He was
visibly angered. His hands were
balled in fists. Having grown up
around cattle and admitting that
“I have this special thing
for cows,” even more than
his dogs, he said that
slaughtering his animals with
dignity was of the utmost
importance. Mike described how
his family cared for the calves,
nurtured maternal bonds, made
sure that the animals had access
to open pasture during nice
weather and shelter from storms,
monitored feed, never had to
administer antibiotics or
vaccines, and showered the
animals with physical affection.
Lots of scratches and rubs. And
then he took a deep breath,
looked at the class with icy blue
eyes, and began to explain how,
to kill the cow humanely, you had
to create a quiet atmosphere,
make sure the knife was sharp,
gather the whole family around,
and … and then he paused. He
looked shocked for a second as
his voice caught in his throat.
His eyes darted around the room
at his fellow students, who were
dead silent. He took another deep
breath and began to talk about
severing the spinal cord. And
then he was overcome. I sensed
that a cathartic moment was
coming and so looked hard at his
eyes as they began to fill up
with tears. The only thing I
remember thinking was that this
rancher is seeking a new path
that nobody is providing. And
that there’s no way he is
alone.
- James
McWilliams is a professor of
history at Texas State University
and the author of a forthcoming
book on the ethics of humane
animal agriculture. His work has
appeared in Harper’s, Slate,
and The New York
Times.
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