A Thinking Reed

Category: Animals

  • Animal rights across the political spectrum

    A writer at Alternet makes the case for vegetarianism to her progressive allies.

    I’ve observed before that even on the Left animal rights still seems to strike many as fringy or unimportant.

    Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President Bush, has made the case for better treatment of animals on broadly conservative grounds. In fact, reading an article by Scully back in 2002 was actually the catalyst that got me re-thinking the whole issue of animals.

    There have even been libertarian defenses of animal rights, though, it has to be said, the vast majority of libertarians seem content to class animals as human property.

  • They’ve got personality

    Jon Katz writes the series Rural Life for Slate.com; he’s a writer who started his own farm with his wife and now writes about it.

    One of his recurring themes is the intelligence and personality of farm animals and how human interaction can affect them. Today’s entry is about a sassy hen named Henrietta and the way she interacts with people and other animals. She perches on the donkey, plays hide-and-seek with the barn cat, and generally behaves in ways not typical for your average hen.

    Katz writes that

    Henrietta is the most recent subject of the unofficial study I’ve been conducting to see if how we treat farm animals can affect their personalities. Animals of the same species can behave very differently, yet there’s little research that explains why. Genetics is a factor, so are health and environment. And I’m coming to believe that humans can also shape the natures of domesticated animals, even creatures that seem to lack individuality.

    This reminds me of a suggestion once made by C.S. Lewis. He said that, in entering into relationships with human beings, animals can in some way participate in human personal life, and maybe even enjoy a postmortem existence having been “taken up” into the lives of their human friends. Stephen Webb, a theologian who has written two books about our relationships to animals, holds up the domesticated animal as in some ways the paradigm of animal existence; the telos of animals is to be taken into community with human beings, and ultimately God.

    It makes a certain amount of sense that if you treat animals like machines or objects, then that’s what they’ll become, but if you treat them like fellow beings with whom some kind of relationship is possible, then who knows what might develop? We hear stories of the saints talking to, bargaining with, and preaching to wild animals, in some ways anticipating the eschatological reality of a restored creation.

    On the other hand, though, I think this needs to be balanced with a sense of the wildness of animals, and a respect for their otherness. Presumably animals have their own worlds of experience which would be as foreign to us as ours would be to them, were we able to experience them (what’s it like to be a bat?). There are kingdoms of which we know very little, and a bit of humility presumably wouldn’t be out of place.

  • Eat less meat, save the planet

    The Christian Science Monitor reports on yet another report linking the raising of livestock on an industrial scale to climate change:

    As Congress begins to tackle the causes and cures of global warming, the action focuses on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly bovines.

    Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. And as meat becomes a growing mainstay of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may prove as hard as changing what we drive.

    It’s not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that’s the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.

    “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.

    Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation.

    Read the rest here.

    After a while it starts to look like the case is over-determined for at least cutting back on the amount of meat we eat. If you’re not persuaded by animal welfare arguments, there’s the environmental impact, the equity angle (land used for raising livestock that could be far more productively used to raise grain for impoverished peoples), the labor issues (exploited workers, often illegal immigrants, who make up much of the workforce in slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants), and, of course, personal health.

  • Nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving

    Today’s Daily Office reading from 1 Timothy (4:1-16) gave me pause, verses 1-5 in particular:

    Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. 3 They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; 5 for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.

    As someone who tries to abstain from certain foods, it might be useful to think about what’s going on here. The context doesn’t make it clear, but it seems like Paul may be referring to a kind of gnostic tendency that takes a dim view of the body and material creation. At least that’s the impression I get from someone who would “forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods.” Paul suggests that such abstinence is an affront to God since the goods of this world were “created to be received with thanksgiving.” So, my sense is that Paul is dealing with a type of gnosticism rather than a “Judaizing” tendency that would insist on an observance of the OT dietary laws.

    And Paul elsewhere comes out strongly against the view that any part of God’s creation is unclean in itself; in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul seems to be advising his hearers not to eat meat sacrificed to idols if their eating it will cause offense to others, i.e. they will appear to be eating it as a sacrifice. But he goes on to tell them to eat “whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” The idea seems to be that one should avoid meat sacrificed to idols not because there is anything unclean about it in itself, but because it may create the appearance that Christians endorse the sacrifice.

    A similar attitude may be at work in Augustine’s critique of the vegetarianism of the Manicheans. While many of the early Fathers were vegetarians or at least tended to abstain from meat, Augustine sharply criticized what he regarded as the Manicheans’ superstitious practices of not eating meat. There certainly is a strain of vegetarianism that avoids eating flesh in order not to “pollute” the self. And the Christian rejoinder is entirely proper: nothing is bad or “unclean” in itself; all things are created by God and, insofar as they exist, are good.

    However, are there grounds for abstaining from meat (or other foods) for other reasons of conscience? They key here seems to be provided by Paul himself when he says “nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” A surface reading of this would suggest that it’s enough literally just to give thanks to God for our food. And this is surely right. But I wonder if there’s more to be gotten out of the notion of receiving with thanksgiving than just that.

    Maybe “receiving with thanksgiving” implies an attitude toward creation which ought to be expressed in our practices of eating (among other things). How can we say we are receiving food with thanksgiving if, for instance, our methods of farming pollute and exhaust the land? Or, indeed, if farm workers are coerced or exploited? To receive with thanksgiving would seem to imply, at the least, respecting the integrity of creation. If someone gives you a gift, you don’t express gratitude by destroying it.

    Likewise with respect to animals. It would be odd, to say the least, if someone used this passage as a proof-text against vegetarianism and to defend current industrial farming practices. Few contemporary vegetarians adopt their diet for fear of being “polluted” by animal flesh, and one hardly shows respect for one’s fellow creatures by torturing them.

    But: aren’t I contradicting the Apostle here when he advises us against “raising any question on the ground of conscience”? The most accurate way of reading Paul here, it seems to me, is that he’s cautioning against ostentatious displays of one’s own oh-so-refined moral sensibilities. For, while he tells us not to ask questions about where food presented to us by a host comes from, he does say that we should refuse food if we’re informed by our host that it came from a sacrifice. And this is both for our sake and theirs. For, if we were to accept meat which we were explicitly told was sacrificed to idols, our host might take that as an endorsement of the idolatry, which could potentially lead them astray, possibly by reinforcing their own belief in the efficacy of the sacrifices.

    How might this translate in our contemporary world? For one thing, it cautions us against flaunting our scruples in front of others. But at the same time it warns us against setting a bad example or witness for others. In most cases only an insufferable prig would demand of his host whether the food being served was organic, fair trade, shade grown, etc. Surely the right thing to do is to accept the food offered with thanksgiving (both to the host and God). However, on other occassions it might be necessary or at least laudable to witness for a better way of interacting with creation. Just as there were idols in the ancient world, there are idols today: efficiency, profit, wealth, displaying a refined palate, or appearing sophisticated or worldly. There are occassions where it might be better to refuse something becuase not to do so will reinforce, in oneself and others, allegiance to these false idols. Refusing a modest meal from a friend is one thing; refusing foie gras at a fancy cocktail party something else.

  • Eat food

    That’s the takeaway point from this NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Pollan details how an unholy trifecta of scientific experts, sloppy journalism and the food industry have distorted the American diet by pushing the idea of “nutritionism” – the notion that nutrients, rather than actual foods, are the building blocks of a sound diet. This makes us beholden to “experts” who tell us what to eat instead of relying on tradition and common sense. Ironically this has had the effect of making our diet worse because nutritionism tends to focus on individual components of food and whether they’re deemed good or bad rather than how foods as a whole affect us. Consequently we end up eating a lot of processed food with the “right” nutrients as determined by current nutritionist orthodoxy rather than foods that human beings have been eating for ages (a.k.a. real food).

    Pollan makes the telling point that what we might call a “technological” approach to eating has consequences which in turn call for a new technological fix:

    The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

    It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

    The solution, he argues, is to return to a food culture as an alternative to food science. This includes things like: eating real food (“Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”), avoid “food products,” even those bearing health claims, buy food directly from the producers by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets whenever possible, pay more for better quality of food while at the same time eating less, eat mostly plants, borrow ideas from traditional food cultures (e.g. the Frence, Greeks, Italians), take pleasure in eating, cook and grow some of your own food if possible, and diversify your diet, including not only new dishes, but new species whenever possible.

    It’s hard not to be reminded of Christopher Lasch’s point (made in his book The True and Only Heaven and elsewhere) that an obsession with expertise has cultivated the sense that ordinary people are essentially helpless to confront routine tasks like choosing what to eat, rearing children, making educational choices, etc. and must rely on a class of benevolent experts to tell them how to live. Lasch and Pollan see traditional as embodied in communal practices and memories as a more reliable guide to living and are, in that respect, profoundly conservative.

    A similar point is made by this article in the Christian Century lauding a return to more traditional forms of animal husbandry. The author contrasts the practices of industrial farming which “relies on monocultural crop production, extensive use of fossil fuels and chemicals, massive injections of growth hormones and antibiotics, expensive capital investment, the confinement of animals, standardized production, farming practices that erode soil and deplete groundwater, and a deceptive way of calculating gains and losses” and Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in central Virginia. Salatin, a Christian whose faith informs his farming practices, “sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.” He does this by allowing the creatures on his farm to follow something closer to their natural patterns of life and interaction:

    This system honors the creatures by enabling them to live the way God intended them to live. The cattle, ruminants created to eat grass, are not fed corn, nor are they stacked up and confined to standing in their own waste. As a result, they do not need the hormones and antibiotics that have become indispensable in industrial beef production. Nor do they produce the deadly strains of E. coli that now regularly surface in our food supply. The chickens, meanwhile, do not peck at each other like their confined and stressed industrial counterparts. They are free to roam.

    The fields, in turn, do not require the synthetic fertilizers and the toxic pesticides that other farmers routinely use. They are fertilized and kept relatively pest-free by the activity of the animals feeding upon them. Conventional farmers who visit Polyface Farm are routinely baffled by the fact that Salatin has no need of costly and toxic inputs.

    […]

    Working with creation rather than against it has made Polyface Farm amazingly productive. It produces annually 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits and nearly a half million eggs.

    Chefs throughout Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area cannot get enough of Salatin’s eggs and meat because they simply taste better. With this food you don’t have to worry about poisoning or periodic recalls. As a bonus, the grass-fed beef (because of the protein structure of the grass) is much healthier than the corn-fed variety.

    The author, Norman Wirzba, a philosophy professor, makes a point similar to Pollans, that the techno-fix approach to raising animals creates unforseen problems which in turn cry out for another techno-fix, and so on. This comes from ignoring the natural patterns of creation and seeking to impose a anthropocentric model of efficiency.

    This is all to the good as far as I’m concerned, and I hate to nitpick, but I do want to demur at Wirzba’s suggestion that concern for the fact that animals are killed (in addition to how they live) is a matter of “sentimentality” in the pejorative sense. He writes:

    Salatin is explicit about saying his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his 500-acre farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.

    Not that there is anything sentimental about his approach. Salatin knows that the animals are not pets. They are raised to be food. But Salatin’s method of food production is designed to honor God’s work.

    There seems to be an emerging orthodoxy of sorts that industrial/factory farming is indeed bad and it’s wrong to subject animals to those kinds of conditions, but killing them for food is, considered in itself, perfectly ok. As much as I think efforts like Polyface Farm are a vast, vast improvement over the status quo, I wouldn’t want to leave that assumption unchallenged. I’m not going to rehash the argument here, but one gets the impression of an attempt to distance oneself from those kooky, extremist, sentimentalist animal rights types, while still being concerned about the treatment of animals (never mind that it was mostly kooky extremist animal rights types who made it an issue in the first place…). But that’s a minor quibble. A world of responsible stewardship instead of rapacious exploitation is obviously far superior. I’d be happy to get to the nearly utopian-seeming point at which all animals we raised for food were being raised in conditions like those of Polyface Farm. Then it might be time to hash out the question of abolition.

    But the noteworthy thing here is that scientism – the view that all of reality can be exhaustively described in the categories offered by natural science and that the world is best understood in strictly material terms – turns out to be not only theoretically inadequate, but to have deleterious practical consequences. And that tradition may in some cases be a more reliable guide to living.

  • The perils of the “virtuous minority”

    Marvin continues his series on vegetarianism wth a post on the eschatological expectation that predation and violence are aspects of creation which will ultimately be done away with. Vegetarianism, then, can be seen as a “living into the kingdom,” a kind of anticipation of what is to come:

    In the present age one cannot dismiss eating meat out of hand, but one good rationale for vegetarianism is as a sign of the kingdom to come. Vegetarianism, like a commitment to non-violence, or a vow of celibacy, may be an appropriate witness to the new heavens and new earth that God will one day create.

    However, in comments to Marvin’s post, Jonathan of the Ivy Bush observes that some theologians, such as Karl Barth, have called vegetarianism a “wanton anticipation” of the eschaton, trying to live, as it were, beyond this present fallen age. But Jonathan, himself a committed pacifist, worries that this could cut against pacifism as well.

    I think that’s a good point. In fact, John Howard Yoder, in his book Nevertheless: Varieties of religious pacifism, discusses how “the pacifism of the virtuous minority” can end up marginalizing the pacifist witness. To relegate pacifism to the status of a special calling for a distinct minority, Yoder worries, can enable the majority to ignore the pacifist’s arguments:

    One normal implication of this minority stance is to approve by implication, for most people, the very position one rejects for oneself. The Catholic understanding of the monastic morality has no trouble with this. Those in this tradition do not identify the freely chosen Rule with everyone’s moral obligation. They tell Christians in the Historic Peace Churches to accept such minority status and be accepted in it. Thus the minority stance can be a special gadfly performance to keep the rest of society from being at peace with its compromises.

    This understanding of a vocational role for the peace churches has been fostered by the relativistic or pluralistic mood of modern denominationalism. The question of objective right and wrong is relativized by the acceptance of a great variety of traditions, each having its own claims to truth arising out of its own history. Each may be recognized as having a portion of the truth, on condition that none impose their view on another. (p. 81)

    Yoder continues:

    Various stances may be recognized as “valid” or “authentic” or “adequate,” but none specifically as true. In this spirit many nonpacifists since the 1930s have been willing to concede to the pacifists a prophetic or vocational role. Nonpacifists grant this recognition on condition that in turn the pacifists accept always being voted down by those who have to do the real (violent) work in the world. (pp. 81-82)

    Likewise, the view of vegetarianism as a special witness or calling to a creation without violence may also fall prey (pardon the expression) to this kind of relativism. And ultimately vegetarians could be similarly marginalized as harmless eccentrics who aren’t trying to make claims on the consciences of others.

    The two issues are somewhat disanalogous though. In one sense vegetarianism is more demanding than pacifism because, while war is a relatively exceptional event in the life of most societies, the use of animals is something that is woven into the very fabric of most societies, especially industrialized ones. On the other hand, the sacrifice of vegetarianism is ultimately less serious. People can live perfectly happy and healthy lives on a plant-based diet, so no one is being asked to sacrifice their life for the sake of animals. Pacifism, by contrast, requires that we be prepared to give up our lives rather than commit violence (though the blow may be softened by noting that war isn’t a very efficient means of getting what you want anyway).

    I would add that most vegetarians ure unlikely to say that meat-eating is always and everywhere wrong. It’s quite likely that there are times and places where killing animals for food is the only way for human beings to survive. In that sense one could devise an ethic of “just meat-eating” that allowed for exceptions for legitimate human need and health. It’s hard to see how that would justify the large-scale industrial production of meat that actually exists, though.

    The point is that vegetarians (and pacifists, and others with unusual moral views) shouldn’t refrain from making arguments to persuade others of the truth of their position. If one takes a moral view seriously, then I think one is committed to its universalizability: that is, that anyone in the relevantly similar circumstances ought to make the same choice.

    That said, I still personally wouldn’t want to try and make vegetarianism a litmus test for Christian discipleship. This is mainly because it’s not obvious that personal vegetarianism is the only, or even the best, way to address issues of animal mistreatment. And secondly because there is no “pure ground” to stand on where one has extricated themselves from involvement with industries and practices that abuse animals. If “ought implies can” it would be foolish to demand an unattainable level of moral purity.

    This is where I think the “Barthian caveat” is helpful. In our fallen world moral choice will always retain an element of ambiguity. And being aware of that will help one avoid pride and self-righteousness. Moreover, trying to live as an example, as proof that it’s possible to live a less violent life, may well end up being the most effective form of argument.

  • Veggie tales

    Marvin has started a series on vegetarianism – first two installments are here and here.

    Kim at Crossroads discusses a New Yorker review of Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution. (I blogged on the Nation review here.)

  • My beef with “My Beef with Vegetarianism”

    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.