A Thinking Reed

Speaking of conservatives and food…

Written by

Lee M.

in

I discovered (via Clark Stooksbury) that the current issue of The American Conservative features a lengthy article on factory farming and why conservatives should care about it by Matthew Scully (It’s not online at the AmCon site, but you can read the article at Scully’s personal site here). Scully is a former speechwriter for President Bush and the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

Conservatives often balk at the notion of “animal rights,” but Scully points out that if you think (as nearly everyone does) that we have moral obligations toward animals, such as to not treat them with wanton cruelty, this is effectively the same as to say they have a right not to be treated cruelly by us. (Come to think of it, I made a similar argument here, in one of my very first blog posts.)

The other main plank in Scully’s argument is that it makes no sense to say that, for instance, dogs must be protected from cruel treatment but not pigs since there are no morally relevant differences between dogs and pigs that would justify different treatment. As Scully says:

Having conceded the crucial point that some animals rate our moral concern and legal protection, informed conscience turns naturally to other animals—creatures entirely comparable in their awareness, feeling, and capacity for suffering. A dog is not the moral equal of a human being, but a dog is definitely the moral equal of a pig, and it’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say otherwise. We have the problem that these essentially similar creatures are treated in dramatically different ways, unjustified even by the very different purposes we have assigned to them. Our pets are accorded certain protections from cruelty, while the nameless creatures in our factory farms are hardly treated like animals at all. The challenge is one of consistency, of treating moral equals equally, and living according to fair and rational standards of conduct.

This seems to me about as good an example of iron-clad moral argument as we’re likely to get.

Comments

4 responses to “Speaking of conservatives and food…”

  1. Joshie

    I’m going to take the same tact with you as you did with me over the Christian unity thing…so what, specifically, should be done about this? How should farming or slaughterhouse practices be changed to make them more humane?

    Reply
  2. Lee

    I think the most important reform with respect to farming would be the outright prohibition of mass-confinement facilities. In addition to being cruel in itself, it necessitates further cruelties like cutting off pigs’ tails (so they don’t chew on them – a common response to the psychological stress of being confined) and cutting off chickens’ beaks.

    Here’s a helpful article: http://www.thepigsite.com/FeaturedArticle/Default.asp?Display=1319

    Also, curtailing or eliminating gov’t subsidies to agribusiness might not be a bad start.

    Reply
  3. Joshie

    I agree in principle, but both of these measures would lead to higher food prices, would they not?

    Frankly, the reason I don’t buy organic for us more is that the price, especially with meat, is so much higher that it is almost prohibitive. Maybe some of those agribusiness subsities could go toward organic farmers?

    Reply
  4. Lee

    Yeah, I think providing subsidies and/or tax breaks to organic farmers is one possibility.

    Also, if restrictions on mass-confinement farming were put into place, farms would have a strong incentive to look for more cost-effective ways of doing business within those constraints. Hopefully the good ole invisible hand would work its magic and prices would come down.

    Also, it’s worth pointing out that part of the reason industrial meat can be cheaper is that factory farms “externalize” (as the economists like to say) some of their costs by polluting the surrounding environment. See, e.g. http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/ffarms.asp

    If they were forced to compensate the public for that pollution more than they currently are, it’s a safe bet that meat prices would go up.

    Still, it is probably the case that economies of scale do enable ffs to produce meat more cheaply than would otherwise be the case, so restrictions may well result in higher prices, and thus less meat consumption by Americans.

    Reply

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