It’s no secret that vegetarians and animal rights proponents usually don’t get much respect. I recently saw a “60 Minutes” segment featuring Andy Rooney, that embodiment of crusty old conventional wisdom, where he began by saying “Like most people, I think vegetarians are crazy.” And in fairness that stereotype may even be somewhat justified.

Even on the Left, home of unpopular causes on behalf of marginalized and oppressed beings, animal rights folks are often the red-headed stepchildren. Case in point is this review in the Nation of a new book on the history of vegetarianism which repeats several standard anti-vegetarian arguments that fall apart under examination.

After reviewing the book’s discussion of the history of vegetarianism in Europe, the reviewer, Daniel Lazare, writes:

Unfortunately for vegetarianism, however, it was also during the Enlightenment that the ideology’s shortcomings grew more obvious. The most difficult had to do with ethics. Vegetarianism is most fundamentally about the importance of not taking life other than under the most extreme circumstances. But cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler. A tiger or wolf does not knock its prey senseless with a single blow to the forehead and then painlessly slit its jugular; rather, it tears it to pieces with its teeth. Freeing an animal so that it could return to its natural habitat meant subjecting it to a life of greater pain rather than less. This was disconcerting because it suggested that animals might be better off on a farm even if they were to be slaughtered in the end. There was also the fact that human agriculture created life that would not otherwise exist. If people stopped eating meat, the population of pigs, cattle and sheep would plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish. This was enough to persuade the Comte de Buffon, a freethinker and naturalist, to declare in 1753 that man “seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice” animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place.

Vegetarians were unsure how to respond. Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded “the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder.” But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: “Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” But Franklin’s contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against “sanguinary and ferocious” felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor’s cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: “Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity.” Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more “humane” regime.

There are several of the standard arguments hinted at in this passage, but let’s try to separate them out:

1. The nature is crueler than captivity argument (“cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler”). Undoubtedly some animals raised in captivity may be better off than they would be in the wild. Although, in the case of factory farmed animals, this isn’t as clear as it might seem. But the main point is that no one I’m aware of is proposing that cows, pigs, and chickens be released back into the wild. It’s true that these animals have been bred to the point that they would likely not survive in the wild; but what most animal rights proponents who favor complete abolition of meat-eating envision is a gradual reduction in the number of these animals as the practices of meat-eating are phased out over time. Despite what the connotations of the term “animal liberation” might seem to imply, I’m not aware of anyone who simply wants to empty all the farms and send the animals into the wild.

2. The “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it argument” (“man ‘seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice’ animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place”).
Employed by angry parents everywhere, this argument is so transparently fallacious that I’m surprised people still use it. In having children, you bring into existence life that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Does that give you the right to do whatever you want to them, including killing them if you see a good reason? With respect to animals, it almost certainly doesn’t entail the right to subject them to brief lives of more or less unrelieved suffering.

Again, regarding the population of farm animals that would would “plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish” if meat-eating were abandoned, this assumes a) the general validity of a utilitarian ethic and b) that the lives of farmed animals actually contain an excess of happiness over suffering, a dubious claim in the case of factory farmed animals. More to the point, it seems to imply an obligation to bring more farm animals into existence, if by doing that one would increase the sum total of happiness. But this seems like a counterintuitive result (and, I would say, shows up one of the weaknesses of utilitarianism).

There is also the point to be made that what matters is the well-being of individual creatures. Philosopher Mark Rowlands puts it this way:

One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 milliion, why should this matter? In particular, how does it harm any one of the 400 cows? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. […]

It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. (Rowlands, Animals Like Us, p. 120)

3. Finally, the “nature red in tooth and claw” argument (“if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you”). This is a curious argument in that in almost no other area do we find serious, morally sensitive people arguing that human beings should model their behavior on the animal kingdom. However, if that’s not enough to discredit it, it’s worth pointing out that nearly all, if not all, animal carnivores have to eat meat in order to survive, including Ritson’s “sanguinary and ferocious felines.” Human beings, on the other hand, can do quite well on a plant-based diet. So in our case we don’t even have the excuse of necessity (at least in the prosperous West for the most part; I’m not going to argue that there aren’t times and places where human beings might have to eat meat to survive).

And the notion that vegetarians want “knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more ‘humane’ regime,” while perhaps true of some eccentric thinkers, is a rather unimpressive straw man when applied to the majority of vegetarians. I know of no serious contemporary theorist or animal rights group that wants human beings to patrol nature and force the lion to lie down with the lamb. This would be a very silly thing to do since, as I just pointed out, predators have to prey to survive.

What separates human beings from other animals, by contrast, is that we can choose not to inflict unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures simply to enjoy certain pleasures of the palate. This is reinforced by a point that Lazare makes toward the end of his essay:

The idea is that instead of reigning supreme over nature, humanity should take its place within nature alongside its fellow animals. Instead of domination, this implies sharing, harmony and other New Age virtues. But the trouble with sovereignty is that it cannot be fragmented or reduced; either it’s supreme and indivisible or it’s not, in which case it’s no longer sovereignty. Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even–dare we say it–to improve nature as well.

This is true as far as it goes. But it only prompts the inevitable question of what kind of sovereignty humans are to exercies. We certainly have a de facto sovereignty in view of our power to affect and alter the environment (though we may come to see that nature has her own ways of limiting our sovereignty which we might not find too pleasant). And Christians have traditionally believed that we have a de jure sovereignty as God’s viceroys in this world. But insofar as that’s true, the model of sovereignty is none other than God himself, especially as revealed in Jesus, who came to serve rather than be served. Our sovereignty doesn’t exist solely for the sake of our own needs, but for the well-being of all creatures.

Whether this entails strict vegetarianism is, as far as I can tell, an open question. It seems to me that the argument against industrial or factory-type farming is pretty much open and shut. It’s extremely hard to see what moral calculus can justify inflicting that kind and amount of suffering on animals for the sake of cheap meat.

Lazare seems to concede this point, but I’m not sure if he sees the implications. He writes:

No sane person favors unsustainably produced meat. But, tellingly, Stuart [the author of the book under review] does not consider the possibility of meat that is sustainably produced in accordance with the strictest environmental standards. Should we eat less of that also? Or more? Perhaps the issue should not be quantity but quality–not whether we should eat more or less but whether we should eat better, which is to say chicken that tastes like something other than cardboard, turkey that tastes like something other than Styrofoam and so on. Maybe the solution is to reject bland industrial products and demand meat with character, the kind that comes from animals that have not spent their lives in industrial feedlots but have had an opportunity to walk around and develop their muscles.

What this ignores is the distinct possibility that if we were seriously committed to eating only meat raised sustainably, there would be far less of it available. This is because both that it may not be physically possible to raise nearly the same number of animals in a sustainable fashion and that the resulting meat would almost certainly be more expensive. So “better” would probably also mean “less,” at least for most people.

This is all quite apart from the question of whether it’s all right to kill animals for food even if, for the sake of argument they’re raised humanely (and let’s also leave aside for the moment the fact that even humanely raised animals very often meet grisly ends in slaughterhouses which are a far cry from receiving a “single blow to the forehead and then painlessly [having] its jugular [slit]”). This hinges, at least in part, on whether animals can be said to be harmed by being killed. We certainly think human beings are harmed by being killed (well, most of us think that), so granting that the permissibility of killing animals for food would seem to depend on whether they are so different from humans that killing them cannot be said to be a harm or that the harm is so inconsequential as to be outweighed by the benefits of tasty meat for us. I think this is a genuinely difficult question, but probably one we should take more seriously than we do.