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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Marc Bekoff
- Marc Bekoff is a former professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane
Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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Dead Cow Walking: The Case Against Born-Again Carnivorism
By Marc Bekoff
Dec 27 2011, 8:53 AM ET
280
Pigs, chickens, and other animals raised for food are
sentient
beings with rich emotional lives. They feel everything from joy to
grief.
"Eating Animals,"
by Nicolette Hahn Niman, a livestock rancher, with help from deer
hunter Tovar Cerulli and butcher Joshua Applestone, caught my eye
because, at first, I thought this essay was authored by Jonathan Safran
Foer, who wrote a best-selling book with the same title. While Niman and
her friends do rightly argue against consuming factory-farmed animals
-- who live utterly horrible lives from the time that they're born to
the time that they're transported to slaughterhouses and barbarically
killed -- these three born-again carnivores, all former vegetarians or
vegans, now proudly eat animals and think that it's just fine to do so.
They gloss over the fact that even if the animals they eat are
"humanely" raised and slaughtered, an arguable claim, they're still
taking a life. These animals are merely a means to an end: a tasty meal.
The defensive and apologetic tone of this essay also caught my eye,
as did the conveniently utilitarian framework of the argument. The
animals they eat were raised simply to become meals because Niman and
others choose to eat meat. I like to say that whom we choose to eat is a
moral question, and just because these three now choose to eat animals
doesn't mean that other people should make the same choice. Note that I
wrote "whom" we eat, not "what." Cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals
raised for food are sentient beings who have rich emotional lives. They
can feel everything from sheer joy to deep grief. They can also suffer
enduring pain and misery, and they don't deserve to have the good and
happy lives provided by Niman and others ended early just so that their
flesh can wind up on what really is a platter of death.
Wolves, lions, and cougars are not moral
agents and can't be held accountable for their actions. But most humans
know what they're doing and are responsible for their choices.
Cows, for example, are very intelligent. They worry over what they
don't understand and have been shown to experience "eureka" moments when
they solve a puzzle, such as when they figure out how to open a
particularly difficult gate. Cows communicate by staring, and it's
likely that we don't fully understand their very subtle forms of
communication. They also form close and enduring relationships with
family members and friends and don't like to have their families and
social networks disrupted. Chickens are also emotional beings, and
detailed scientific research has shown that they empathize with the pain
of other chickens.
Raising happy animals just so that they can be killed is really an
egregious double cross. The "raise them, love them, and then kill them"
line of reasoning doesn't have a meaningful ring of compassion. And this
isn't mercy killing (euthanasia) performed because these animals need
to be put out of their pain. No, these healthy and happy animals are
slaughtered, and if you dare to look into their eyes, you know that
they're suffering. If you wouldn't treat a dog like this, then you
shouldn't treat a cow, a pig, or any other animal in this way.
As a field biologist who studies animal behavior, I feel that the
authors' appeal to what happens in the natural world -- "life feeds on
life" -- is an illogical justification for their food choices. I've seen
thousands of predatory encounters. I cringe when I see them, but I
would never interfere. Wild predators, unlike us, have no choice about
whom or what they eat. They couldn't survive if they didn't eat other
animals. And indeed, many animals are vegetarians, including non-human
primates, who eat other animals only on very rare occasions.
Jessica Pierce and I wrote about how appeals to nature are misleading and
illogical in our book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.
We argued that wolves, lions, and cougars, for example, are not moral
agents and can't be held accountable for their actions. They don't know
right from wrong. On the other hand, most humans do know what they're
doing and are responsible for their choices. When it comes down to whose
flesh winds up in our mouths, we can make choices, and in my view,
eating animals is wrong and unnecessary, even when they are "humanely"
raised and slaughtered. Let me add a caveat here because, as a world
traveler, I do know that many people do not have the luxury of making a
choice about their meals and must eat whatever is available to them.
However, those who do have that luxury can easily eat an animal-free
diet. And we can work to show others that a vegetarian or vegan diet can
be very economical and healthy.
Niman and her friends also note that vegetarian and vegan diets have
"never really taken hold." So what? This hardly means that we shouldn't
try to do the right thing. They write, "The vast majority of Americans
who do try vegetarianism or veganism -- about three-quarters of them --
return to eating meat. Rather than urging people to consume only plants,
doesn't it make more sense to encourage them to eat an omnivorous diet
that is healthy, ethical, and ecologically sound?" No, it doesn't. What
it means is that these people should try harder and not give up just
because it might seem difficult to change their meal plans. Perhaps they
just need more time and encouragement from other vegetarians who can
show them how easy it is to stop eating animals.
It's easy to add more compassion to the world and to expand our
compassion footprint. Excuses such as "Oh, I know they suffer, but don't
tell me because I love my burger" add cruelty to the world, even if the
animals people are eating weren't raised on factory farms and killed in
slaughterhouses. You're eating a dead animal who really did care about
what happened to him or her. When I ask people how they can dismiss the
fact that an animal was killed for their pleasure, they usually fumble
here and there and offer no meaningful answer. When I ask them if they'd
eat a dog, they look at me with incredulity and emphatically say, "No!"
When I ask them why they wouldn't eat a dog, they can't really tell me,
offering statements laden with dismissive phrases, such as "Oh, you
know...." Because I often travel to China to help in the rehabilitation of
Asiatic moon bears
who have been rescued from the bear-bile industry, people sometimes ask
me, "How can you go there? Isn't that where they eat dogs and cats?" I
simply say, "Yes, it is, and I'm from America, where they eat cows and
pigs, who are no less sentient and emotional beings." Animals really are
very much like us.
No matter how humanely raised they are, the lives of animals raised
for food can be cashed out simply as "dead cow/pig/chicken walking."
Whom we choose to eat is a matter of life and death. I think of the
animals' manifesto as "Leave us alone. Don't bring us into the world if
you're just going to kill us to satisfy your tastes."
Image: Kurt De Bruyn/Shutterstock.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/dead-cow-walking-the-case-against-born-again-carnivorism/250506/
