Let Them Eat Meat

Let Them Eat Meat
07/08/11 11.52
LET THEM EAT MEAT

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2 notes July 29, 2011 10 42 PM
Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human Extinction, Not Veganism
If you dont want to die, dont be born! Child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog. In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, lovable curmudgeon David Benatar argues that life always contains suffering and death and so we cause An ex-vegan on veganism. By Rhys Southan letthemeatmeat [ at ] gmail [ dot ] [ com ]. unnecessary harm by having children. Harm is only possible through existence, and though life contains pleasures, the good almost never outweighs the bad. And even if it does, its still a harm to be born, because life will inevitably contain some suffering, whereas non-existence contains no suffering and yet the lack of pleasures cannot be missed by the non-existent. It is always wrong, then, to bring harm-experiencing beings into existence. If pregnant, please abort. The problem and solution, as Benatar sees them, are clear-cut: Although sentience is a later evolutionary development and is a more complex state of being than insentience, it is far from clear that it is a better state of being. This is because sentient existence comes at a significant cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness. (2) In the ordinary course of events [parents] will experience only some of the bad in their childrens and possibly grandchildrens lives (because these offspring usually survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pairs cumulative descendants over ten generations amounts to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless and avoidable suffering. (6 - 7) Is existence really so bad? In case youre not convinced, Benatar succinctly describes the mundane tortures that inevitably befall any unwitting human thrust into life on this overrated, loathsome orb: As a matter of fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most of us who are, nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often the suffering is excruciating, even if it is in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of frailty. We all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any newborn childpain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the non-existent. Only existers suffer harm. (29) [W]e tend to ignore just how much of our lives is characterized by negative mental states, even if often only relatively mildly negative ones. Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states. For example, unless one is eating and drinking so regularly as to prevent hunger and thirst or countering them as they arise, one is likely hungry and thirsty for a few hours a day. Unless one is lying about all day, one is probably tired for a substantial portion of ones waking life. How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right? (71 72). Boy he sure left out a lot. Nevertheless, its safe to say that Benatar does not look on the bright side of life. He believes that even an impossibly charmed life in which everything is orgasmic pleasure save for a single pinprick is worse than never coming into existence, because the non-existent can neither experience pain nor lament lost pleasure. What intrigues me about his anti-natalism, besides that its outrageous and I love his chutzpah, is that this is the exact argument vegans make when they criticize humane animal farming on suffering reduction grounds. Veganism seeks to reduce demand for animal products so that fewer (and ideally zero) farm animals are born. The idea is that we do a disservice to these animals by bringing them into existence even if its the best kind of humane farming and the animals are treated well and killed painlessly since their lives include suffering and then death. When vegans talk about humanely raised animal products, they may admit that it is at least slightly better than factory farming, but they tend to be like Benatar and focus on the harms. Even if the animals get to wander around, play and eat a natural diet, and are eventually killed painlessly, such a life is worse than never coming into being. While humane farm life may be relatively pleasant overall, the incidents of suffering farm animals often face branding, dehorning, the separation of the calf from the mother, castration, artificial insemination, and early death hopelessly taint the life beyond
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justifiability. As HumaneMyth.org says in Happy Cows: Behind the Myth: The truth of the matter is that each purchase of dairy products or veal directly contributes to more individuals brought into existence who will endure confinement, social deprivation, mutilation, reproductive manipulation, indignity and premature death. (41) The sufferings can be minimized and some can be eliminated, but even if these animals
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are going to suffer only a little then be killed before their natural lifespan is up, they just shouldnt have been born. Fair enough, but when vegans use any amount of suffering to disqualify the legitimacy of bringing a life into existence, this creates some unintended philosophical consequences. If they are going to be so strict about any amount of suffering ruling out the desirability of starting a life, their priority shouldnt be merely the end of animal farming their priority should be ending humans. There are a few reasons for this. One is that even the self-proclaimed ethical humans cause more suffering than even the most unrepentant carnivore species. As Benatar says: Although the arguments I have advanced have not been misanthropic, there is a superb misanthropic argument against having children and in favour of human extinction. This argument rests on the indisputable premiss that humans cause colossal amounts of sufferingboth for humans and for non-human animals. In Chapter 3, I provided a brief sketch of the kind of suffering humans inflict on one another. In addition to this, they are the cause of untold suffering to other species. Each year, humans inflict suffering on billions of animals that are reared and killed for food and other commodities or used in scientific research. Then there is the suffering inflicted on those animals whose habitat is destroyed by encroaching humans, the suffering caused to animals by pollution and other environmental degradation, and the gratuitous suffering inflicted out of pure malice. Although there are many non-human speciesespecially carnivoresthat also cause a lot of suffering, humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans. (223 224) Some vegans already agree with Benatar here and wish for the extinction of humans for the sake of other animals. But even these vegans are overlooking another reason for wanting the end of humans; its not just that humans cause more suffering than other animals they also suffer more. If vegans believe that the life of a humanely raised farm animal is not worth living because of the sufferings endured, then we especially shouldnt be bringing humans to life, since we suffer even more.
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The Denial of Death Ernest Becker Best Price $2.82 or Buy New $8.79
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Most vegan philosophers provide a survival exemption to veganism, allowing for the consumption of animal products when human life immediately depends on it. Their justification for this apparent discrepancy is that human lives are richer than the lives of other animals, since we have a greater appreciation for nuance and a wider variety of pleasures. In other words, our lives are more complicated and thus better. The problem with this is the flipside: due to our complexity and wider range of potential experiences,
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humans also endure a greater variety of sufferings than other animals do. So why do vegans generally believe that the pleasures humans experience outweigh our sufferings and make our lives worth starting, but the same is not true for animals humanely raised for food? Clearly there comes a point when life has too much suffering to be worth experiencing, but if life and death on a humane farm goes beyond the tolerable suffering threshold, then life as a modern human must too. Is life worthwhile if it includes suffering and ends in death? If the answer is no, we shouldnt be raising animals for food, but then we shouldnt be raising humans either. No doubt it hurts like hell to be castrated as a young pig. But is it that much more painful and scary than being circumcised or getting vaccinations? Maybe so, but after that early agony, pigs on humanely raised farms are likely to have a relatively tranquil life that is free of major pains and anxieties, and then theyre ideally killed before they know what is happening to them, without ever having to suffer much if any stress about their mortality. Humans dont have it so easy. An oyster doesnt suffer because it is so simple an organism; humans suffer the most because we are perhaps the most complex animal organism. From a suffering reduction paradigm, the more complex you are, the greater your suffering and the harder it is to justify your existence. Benatar provides the general outlines of human misery, but Im surprised he didnt devote an entire chapter to all the bad things most lives contain. Sit down and think about your past for a minute or two and a chapter like that writes itself. Here are just a few of the standard unpleasantries I can think of that even the most privileged humans face, some of them shared by other animals, but many of them unique to humans: Work suffering. Being out of work, having a job you hate, tedium, stress, lamenting disregarded ambitions, wasted time, fears of not being productive or good enough and being fired, identity suppression to fit in the work culture, resenting others for getting away with doing less than you, the drive to be successful and impress your peers,
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irritating assignments youd rather not do or which go against your beliefs, getting fired. Farm animals often have to work too. Depending on their species, they may have to lay eggs, have their wool sheared, or be milked. But none of that has to take very long its certainly not an eight-hour work day and on a humane farm it shouldnt be that painful.
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Relationship suffering. Unrequited love or lust, the passion paradox, sexual frustration or disappointment, being stuck in an unhappy relationship, STDs, long distance woes, jealousy, fears that the person you love will leave you or cheat on you, discovering lies, mutually waning love, getting dumped, feeling guilty for dumping someone, unwanted pregnancies, depression over miscarriages, post-partum depression, sleepless nights as parents, terror that something will happen to your child or that your child will misbehave, getting divorced, having parents who get divorced. Most other animals experience sexual frustration, and cats sometimes fall prey to the passion paradox, becoming more clingy and desperate the more you ignore them. And sometimes dogs can develop separation anxiety. But the rest of these are more or less human problems.
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Man's Search for Meaning Viktor E. Frankl Best Price $3.98 or Buy New $7.70
Pain. Minor injuries like slamming your finger in a door, severe injuries from accidents or attacks, throwing up, colds, chronic sicknesses, menstrual cramps, headaches, migraines, cluster headaches, burns, puncture wounds, the emergencies that bring you to the doctor, the treatments themselves, going to the dentist, the pain of growing a baby inside of you, having the baby, passing a kidney stone, fracturing limbs, bruising your tailbone, aging, paper cuts. Its likely that animals are about even with us on this one, except that they are less likely to have psychological scars from especially traumatic pain experiences. Violence. Rape, murder, assault and fear of all of these. Animals certainly experience violence, but for them violence would go under the heading of pain, because for humanely raised farm animals, violence is most relevant as a visceral unpleasant momentary experience. Vegans sometimes call it rape when animals such as cows are artificially inseminated, but cows hardly seem to notice this as it is happening, and it certainly does not cause the long-lasting trauma that rape does for humans. Animals experience fear too, but they are less likely to experience chronic fear at the contemplation of something disturbing. Fear for animals usually means reacting to immediate threatening stimuli that they need to escape. On humane farms, this should not be a common occurrence. Self-esteem suffering. Feeling inadequate, ugly, unloved, stupid or worthless; regrets about decisions you made in the past and worries about the future. Animals can feel unloved, but probably dont experience the rest of these. Self-determination infringement suffering. Structural injustice, inequality, oppression,
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patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, dirty subversives threatening straight marriage and Christmas (j/k), immigration restrictions, addiction, bullying, the freedom curtailments that come with voluntary responsibilities such as parenthood, feeling a need to conform to societys expectations, fear that the wrong people are in power and will restrict your freedoms, prison, religious demands, onerous societal or governmental restrictions, over-controlling parents, ideological summer camps, compulsory education. Just because there is not a visible fence around most of us most of the time does not mean that humans feel freer than animals on humane farms do. Other animals dont need as much freedom as we usually require to be happy because they have simpler and fewer needs. The typical humanely raised animal is probably more content with their level of freedom than the typical human living in a country such as The United States or The Netherlands. At least animals dont torture themselves by reading news stories about ideological opponents making laws they dont like, or by contemplating freer animals elsewhere. Vegans point to calves sent to auction or slaughter, and the stress they feel while being transported to a new location. But what human has not felt the stress of an uncomfortable transportation experience to a location that fills them with anxiety?
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Vegans dont like that cows are impregnated every year to keep them lactating. But is that any worse than being a woman in a religious community who is expected to produce as many children as she possibly can? Vegans also dont like that calves are separated from their mothers and confined while they are being weaned. But this is a minor inconvenience compared to separating human children from their parents on the first day of Kindergarten or, god forbid, pre-school, to initiate the next 12 years of their lives confined to a desk, in which they will be forced to memorize and re-hash information they care little about, with summers being the only reprieves, since homework keeps them chained to their desks at night. The suffering unto death. Losing a pet, losing a loved one, losing yourself; also, contemplating all these inevitable future instances of death, and the related existential
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angst of feeling alone in a meaningless universe. Even if every moment of suffering and discomfort could be extricated from humane animal farming, most vegans could not get behind it because it involves death. Specifically, it requires inducing death before the animals natural lifespan is up. (Aka, murder). But death is just as inevitable for humans as it is for farm animals. And even though the cause of death is less predictable for most humans than it is for animals raised
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on a humane farm, and humans often get to live to the natural end of their lives which vegans take as the gold standard for the best possible death its far from clear that death by murder is worse for other animals than death by all means (including natural causes) is for humans.
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When vegans are disturbed by an animals early demise, theyre projecting their fears about human death onto animals who dont have the same neurosis about non-existence. Even though most humans arent murdered, every aspect of death is more brutal for us. Animals dont know what their natural lifespan is, and they dont have to worry about living long enough to accomplish their goals. Surely death by common non-murderous causes like cancer or heart attacks is worse for humans than it is for an animal to die of slaughter. Even a human dying of old age has more to fret about than a slaughtered animal who has no concept of death or desire to see their great grandchildren grow up.
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Living long as a human means seeing loved ones die, an experience that hits humans harder than it does other animals. We never know how we are going to die, so even if it will be of old age, we still spend plenty of time worrying that we will die another way, or that someone we love will die before us. Even though farm animals are the ones guaranteed to die at the hands of someone else, humans stress themselves about this possibility far more than other animals do. Entering the slaughterhouse can be frightening for animals because they are in strange new surroundings, and sometimes they realize that something bad is going to happen, but this is nothing compared to the lifetime humans spend dreading the end. Keep this in mind before you have kids, vegans you are bringing a being into this world whose confrontation with the inevitability of death will be far worse than what any animal
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experiences at slaughter. Humans do at least have religion to counter the sense of existential despair that often accompanies mortality and living in an apparently meaningless world, but this is an imperfect solution to a problem that other animals simply dont have.
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Its not only that humans have to endure more kinds of suffering than humanely raised farm animals do. Even worse is that the bad things that happen to us linger longer. Humans are natures most neurotic creations. We may have invented Buddhism, but were not the most natural practitioners of it. Mother cows are said to moo sadly when their calves are taken from them, but this only lasts for a few days. Human parents suffer more by sending their children to college; if parents were to actually lose a child, they might be wrecked for the rest of their lives. Some may object that Im overlooking the cheerier aspects of human life. Well of course I am, but vegans do the same thing when they condemn humane animal farming by focusing on the worst bits. However, even if its agreed that humans suffer more and in more ways than humanely raised farm animals, there is still the question of whether humans have a greater and richer variety of pleasures to enjoy and whether this high-end pleasure explains why its okay to bring humans but not domesticated animals into existence. Even though humans have potential to enjoy a greater variety of pleasures than animals do, in many cases it is other animals who are better positioned to enjoy the pleasures of life. Humans often undercut the nice things they have through contemplation of the transitory nature of good things. Sex and food are overloaded with caveats for humans; its unlikely that other animals worry about getting fat or unhealthy because of what they eat, or feel moral guilt or regret about their food choices or who they sleep with. What animal other than a human would watch a gorgeous sunset and worry about an email they need to write? Vegans say that the pleasure of eating animal products is fleeting, and not nearly sustained enough to compensate for the suffering that animals endure. If all pleasure were ranked against suffering in that way, it would all fall short of defeating the avalanche of suffering in the world. By this standard, even love, with its comforting, slow, relatively consistent release of joy, isnt enough to make up for all the heartbreak, unhappy relationships, sexual frustration, jealousy, betrayals, dissatisfaction, boredom and waning passion we face on the way to love or after it. It seems highly implausible, then, that the balance is tipped toward suffering for humanely raised animals and toward pleasure for humans. The vegan suffering reduction argument also has major implications for wild animals. In The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering, an anonymous utilitarian writes: The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in
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laboratories, or kept as pets. The agony endured by, say, a frog while being eaten alive by a snake is probably at least as great as anything that a battery-cage hen or factory-farmed turkey experiences, as terrible as their treatment often is. While death may often constitute the peak of suffering during an animals life, day-to-day existence isnt necessarily pleasant either. Unlike most humans in the industrialized world, wild animals dont have immediate access to food whenever they become hungry. They must constantly seek out water and shelter while remaining on the lookout for predators. Unlike us, most animals cant go inside when it rains or turn on the heat when winter temperatures drop far below their usual levels. It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis. When we think about nature, we may picture chirping songbirds or frolicking gazelles, rather than deer having their flesh chewed off while conscious or immobilized raccoons afflicted by roundworms, waiting pleadingly for death to come. Fish and other wild animals suffer immensely even if humans arent to blame. If vegans long for the extinction of domesticated farm animals because they suffer, vegans should root even more loudly for the extinction of wild animals. An impending fish supply collapse should be considered progress with so many breeds of fish going extinct forever, there is less suffering in the oceans. Death is painful, but any premature death of a wild animal spares it from future suffering. If humanely raised animals ought not have been born, then the same must hold true for wild animals, who usually suffer even more than the animals we raise on humane farms. Many vegans believe in not having children, but many others praise the land-use efficiency of vegan food and tout how many more humans a vegan world could feed. If vegans are concerned with suffering, it does not make sense for them to regret the birth of a calf on a humane farm and not regret the birth of a human even more. By any sane suffering reduction standards, the birth of a human (even in the best possible circumstances) brings more harm to the world, especially when you look at the suffering humans cause as well as endure. Vegans concerned with suffering should not waste time passing out pro-vegan pamphlets to meat eaters they should be passing out antinatalism pamphlets to married couples and pregnant women. (It does, however, make sense to end factory farming if suffering reduction is your goal, but human extinction takes care of that as well.) Animals dont consent to being born into a humane farming scenario, but humans dont consent to being born either. If it is wrong to bring animals into a situation with disagreeable aspects, why is it not wrong to do the same for humans, when there are so many more disagreeable aspects to being human? Do suffering reduction vegans think human pleasure outweighs human suffering, even with the whirlpool of unpleasantness all of us experience every single day? If vegans believe that human existence with all its agonies is better than non-existence, why is this not the case for other animals, who have a purer experience of pleasure and fewer unavoidable sufferings? Since humans suffer and cause suffering, and since it is not necessary to create more people, creating people causes unnecessary suffering. If a vegan is okay with humans having kids, that means they are okay with causing unnecessary (and extreme) harms. And so they cannot object to someone eating animal products on the grounds that this is an unnecessary harm. Therefore, they should be able to accept humanely raised animal products. Otherwise, their first priority should be hastening the end of humanity.
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July 29, 2011 9 15 PM
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July 23, 2011 12 31 AM
Interview With a Vegan: Adam Weitz

Adam is a graduate student and instructor of philosophy, maintains the food blog H.E.A.L.T.H., and is a film review editor for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. He emailed me in March of this year; hed come to my blog wanting to hate it, but found himself appreciating some of my arguments, and hoped I would discuss veganism with him. I didnt follow up on the email, but Adam got harder to ignore once he became one of my most challenging and intriguing commenters. Im relieved when Adam agrees with me, because when he doesnt, its not an easy fight. I once took an entry down in defeat after Adam thoroughly dismantled its core point. But hey only once. The problem with debating Adam is that he doesnt rely on the standard animal rights or suffering reduction arguments, both of which I believe have fatal flaws. Its not hard to poke holes in the arguments positing an (unattainable) logical perfection though crueltyfree consumption, but Adam doesnt fall into that trap. He argues for veganism from a perspective of care, a concept that is harder to explain than other cases for veganism drastically curtailing its mainstream appeal but one Im not sure I could debunk. If anyone could convince me that Im wrong about veganism, its Adam. Many of Adams answers could stand alone as individual essays, which is why Adam posted longer versions of some them as entries on his blog. (Be sure to visit it if you want to see more.) But the interview is worth reading if youre curious to see the strongest formulation of vegan beliefs that Ive seen.
You dont agree with how mainstream veganism is often practiced. What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream
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advocates promote? The mainstream discourse and practice of veganism as an individuals (abstention from) the consumption of animal products, I believe, is problematic in three interrelated ways:
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practically as an economic boycott, socially as a privileged consumerism, and philosophically as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle.
Practically, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways. First, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is now sold to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled vegan) by the very corporations (i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals. Second, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). If consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, orin a race to the bottom to where the industry will be exported, displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities. Third, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally empower people to practice a wholly vegetarian diet. Since wholesome food is presently regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people who have little to no financial and/or geographic access to vegetarian food and goods are thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegetarian lifestyle. In sum, mainstream vegan discourse and activisms focus on economic boycott is problematic, not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation. If vegans are sincere about creating a vegan society, veganism ought to be a social space to which people are generously provided access. Veganism will have limited success so long as it remains a luxury reserved for those with privilege, independent of human liberation movements. Socially, what is so troublesome about understanding veganism as primarily an abstention from the consumption of animal products is that it facilitates a number of objectionable social practices: self-righteousness, identity politics, maliciousness, colonialism, classism, and privileged consumerism. These objections to veganism, however, are not universal to all vegan practices. That veganism has been a medium for such unfavorable sociality is due to veganism being understood as a single-issue to which all other social movements are subordinated, backgrounded, or separated. For instance, consumer vegans are often content calling their food or products cruelty-free, even as human animals are exploited and tormented during the production. While I do think most mainstream vegans have very good intentions, the effects of some of their actions and discourse alienate potential allies. There needs to be a shift away from individual consumption to social relations. A politics of alliance that addresses the social structures of oppression in which the degradation of human and animal others are interrelated offers a more promising dialogical medium for vegan advocacy. Philosophically, when veganism is reduced to personal consumption or political action it becomes an instrument of morality rather than an ethics itself. If veganism is primarily a lifestyle that concerns nothing other than (an abstention from) consumption, then veganism is nothing more than a proper extension of or purification of vegetarianism: veganism is simply a vegetarian lifestyle. It logically follows that, if veganism is the moral baseline, that ones consumption is the only qualification for being vegan, then one can very well be a speciesist vegan. This may sound peculiar because it is. According to Ida Hammer, veganism is no accident. Veganism is a revolutionary praxis: an anti-oppression framework that views the abolition of animal exploitation as part of a wider struggle for social justice and leads to a way of life (or lifestyle) that is based on noncooperation with, and divestment from, exploitation. Hammers liberation and antioppression discourse is notably different from Francione and Singers discourse on suffering and equality. Francione fails to recognize how the principles and rights he advocates have not even stopped humans from being oppressed. For instance, AfroAmericans may have been emancipated from slavery, however a new institution was created, the prison-industrial-complex, to place them back into bondage. Hammer explains that [t]he property status of other animals is just one piece of the structure of human supremacy, just as human slavery was just one piece of the structure of White supremacy.
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The theoretical discrepancies and historical failure of these principles can be traversed by focusing on renouncing human privilege and the corresponding institution of speciesism. [S]ince speciesism is an ideology of oppression that legitimates the existing social order, we need to see veganism as a counter-ideology of liberation. Removing the -ism from veganism, risks alienating veganisman anti-oppression frameworkfrom being a vegan, a consumptive pattern that is increasingly self-interested and individualized in contemporary discourse. Actions may speak louder than words, but veganism cannot be reduced to ones (consumptive) actions alone. The fetishization of consumption practices misplaces the potential of veganism as a transformative social and ecological justice modality. Read More --Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--
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June 23, 2011 6 09 AM
Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and Intent Does Nothing For Animals
In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet. As you might have guessed from the title, the paper intended to show that a diet including ruminant animals fed on grass would kill fewer animals than a diet based purely on vegan agriculture. Davis wrote: [A] vegan diet doesnt necessarily mean a diet that doesnt interfere in the lives of animals. In fact, production of corn, beans, rice, etc. kills many animals as this paper will document. So, in 1999, I sent an email to [animal rights philosopher Tom] Regan, pointing this out to him. Then I asked him, What is the morally relevant difference between the animals of the field and those of the farm that makes it acceptable to kill some of them (field mice, etc.) so that humans may eat, but not acceptable to kill others (pigs, etc.) so we may eat? His reply (Regan, 1999, personal communication) was that we must choose the method of food production that causes the least harm to animals. (I will refer to this concept as The Least Harm Principle or LHP.) In his book, Regan (1983) calls this the minimize harm principle and he describes it in the following way: Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm. Production of forages, such as pasture-based forages, would cause less harm to field animals (kill fewer) than intensive crop production systems typically used to produce food for a vegan diet. This is because pasture forage production requires fewer passages through the field with tractors and other farm equipment. The killing of animals of the field would be further reduced if herbivorous animals (ruminants like cattle) were used to harvest the forage and convert it into meat and dairy products. Would such production systems cause less harm to the field animals? Again, accurate numbers arent available comparing the number of animals of the field that are killed with these different cropping systems, but The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in no-till agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet. The specific numbers that Davis concocted at the end of that passage after conceding that there was no way to calculate the true numbers ended up sabotaging what would otherwise have been a salient point. He seems to have been so sure that hed won this argument that he was happy to estimate that raising animals on pasture still kills plenty of wild animals. Hey, why not? Industrial agriculture kills twice as many, so the meaties totally have this one in the bag, right? Wrong, responded Jason Gaverick Matheny. Matheny, who is now a leader in the movement to create lab-grown meat, wrote a rebuttal called, Least Harm: A Defense of Vegetarianism From Steven Daviss Omnivorous Proposal, a paper vegans cite to close the case on Davis objections, and deem this issue dead and buried. In his paper, Matheny pointed out an error in Davis calculations. Davis wasnt savvy enough to say that the ruminant animals should be raised only on marginal land not suited for crop growth. This
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allowed Matheny to retort that because land devoted to crops provides more than double the protein per hectare, and because Davis said that raising ruminants only decreased wild animal deaths by half per hectare, vegans still kill fewer animals per capita than meat eaters who eat large, grass-fed ruminants: Davis suggests the number of wild animals killed per hectare in crop production (15) is twice that killed in ruminant-pasture (7.5). If this is true, then as long as crop production uses less than half as many hectares as ruminant-pasture to deliver the same amount of food, a vegetarian will kill fewer animals than an omnivore. In fact, crop production uses less than half as many hectares as grass-fed dairy and one-tenth as many hectares as grass-fed beef to deliver the same amount of protein. In one year, 1,000 kilograms of protein can be produced on as few as 1.0 hectares planted with soy and corn, 2.6 hectares used as pasture for grass-fed dairy cows, or 10 hectares used as pasture for grass-fed beef cattle (Vandehaar, 1998; UNFAO, 1996). As such, to obtain the 20 kilograms of protein per year recommended for adults, a vegan-vegetarian would kill 0.3 wild animals annually, a lacto-vegetarian would kill 0.39 wild animals, while a Davis-style omnivore would kill 1.5 wild animals. Thus, correcting Daviss math, we see that a vegan-vegetarian population would kill the fewest number of wild animals, followed closely by a lacto-vegetarian population. Matheny never says whether he agrees with Davis numbers (If this is true), but he uses them anyway, because Davis numbers end up being so favorable for Mathenys own argument. This could be why Davis never responded: Davis scuttled himself by being over-confident and allowing for so many wild animal deaths in pasture-raised animals. Because Davis was (by his own admission) making the numbers up, he didnt want to skew them too blatantly in his own favor. Especially since he didnt feel that he needed to, because he didnt predict Mathenys counter-argument about differences in yield. Its about time someone stood up for Davis. There are problems with Mathenys analysis, some trifling and some fatal, and it turns out that even if Davis did a bad job of supporting his argument, his point still stands a vegan diet is not the diet of least harm. First, since Davis simply guessed the amount of wild animals killed in pasture-raised animal agriculture, an anecdote might provide a little more insight. Suzanne, commenting on a vegans entry about Davis paper, wrote: Certainly Davis paper is not free of flaws, but he is to be commended for delving into the realms that many people, especially vegans, would prefer to ignore namely, that there is no way to purposefully raise food for humans, whether that food is fruit, vegetable, or animal without the deaths of other animals and without some degree of negative environmental impact. A previous poster spoke of deep pain at realising that veganism had become his shield and indeed a source of cognitive dissonance that creates a sense of complacency, perhaps even superiority over unenlightened meateaters. Speaking from my own experience with a smallholding in South Africa, theres very little collateral killing when land is perennial pasture. My property was not suited to cropping; it had shallow soil with a lot of ironstone and hardpan resulting from a previous owners misguided attempt to grow maize; the rainfall was marginal; it had been overgrazed. I put my efforts into restoring the acacia savannah natural to this area, and year by year I saw the groundcover thicken and the biodiversity increase. This land, marginal for plant cropping, provided an amazing amount of food in the form of eggs, milk, and meat. My livestock (2 dairy cows, seven sheep, seven goats, three pigs, fluctuating numbers of chickens and meat rabbits) thrived on their roughage diet. Only the rabbits were permanently housed (under the colony system, not in individual cages), with all other species going out to graze each day. I didnt make hay, having no equipment or money for the operation. Instead, I practiced rotational grazing, shutting off some paddocks in early summer to produce winter forage to be rotationally grazed in due time. The bulk carbohydrates provided by the dry grass was balanced by the abundant pods of the Acacia tortilis tree; these pods are rich in protein and oil, and have some sugary pulp a very little to human tastebuds, but obviously delicious to my stock! I bought in a small amount of lucerne from a neighbour who grew it for his horses I got the finer material that shook out of bales and would otherwise have been wasted. I also bought in a small amount of mill sweepings, this being husks and meal spilt during the production of maize meal and wheat flour for human use. Again, material that would have been wasted. I mixed the lucerne and sweepings with rock salt and dicalcium phosphate, as well as bagasse (the fibre left after sugar cane is pressed, another waste material from the human food stream), and fed this as treats morning and evening. My animals were penned at night to protect them from predators, especially bipedal predators, and this manure eventually gave me beds of deep rich loam for the growing of vegetables. Year by year I saw the wildlife on my property increase both in numbers and in variety. An enormous python took up residence beneath the pump house. A breeding pair of duiker took up residence. Tree mice suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and a flock of
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yellow-billed hornbills settled in to exploit the mice. Owls called at night, and jackrabbits exploded under my feet during the day. A redlipped herald snake, feeding on ground-living rodents, found my bed so appealing that after three mornings of waking up nose-to-nose with it, I relocated it on the other side of a stream. There were probably collateral deaths a cow cant rip off mouthfuls of grass without occasionally gathering a grasshopper with it, for example, but certainly there was no carnage. The real collateral deaths took place in my vegetable garden, where I ruthlessly killed slugs, caterpillars, and beetles (I threw them to the chickens, so the actual killing was done by beaks, but I was the one who caught and threw the critters) that would otherwise decimate my beans, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, sweetcorn, etc. This is just a comment on a blog and is not proof of anything, but it illustrates how simplistic it is to generalize that pasture-raising animals kills exactly half the number of wild animals per hectare that raising plants does. Nevertheless, since there has not been much research into the harm that vegan agriculture causes to wild animals (in fact it is probably impossible to accurately calculate such a thing), you cant really blame Matheny for accepting Davis questionable numbers. There are, however, more tangible flaws in Mathenys paper. For one, he assumes that plant and animal protein quality are equivalent, even though it is widely accepted that plant protein is not as digestible as animal protein. In her entry Tryptophan, Milk and Depression, The Vegan RD Ginny Messina writes: Since protein from plant foods is slightly less digestible than animal protein, vegan protein and amino acid needs are about 10% higher than for omnivores. Jack Norris also references that 10 percent figure in his VeganHealth.org article on Protein, though he looks at the scanty and inconclusive evidence available on the topic and suggests that the jury is still out. In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie cites two groups one pro-meat and one pro-vegetarian who agree that animal protein is 1.4 times more digestible than vegetable protein. But Fairlie says that neither group explains where that number comes from. The reality seems to be that it varies from food to food. For instance, isolated soy protein appears to be as digestible as animal protein, while other plant proteins fare worse (at least according to this chart at soyconnection.com). It does appear that most animal proteins are more digestible than most vegetable proteins, apparently since plant products often have fiber, polysaccharides and phytic acid interfering with absorption of nutrients. Also important: Matheny forgot that dead animals arent used only for food. Animal byproducts end up in all sorts of things, and the fact that people are wearing animal skins in Davis world means less cotton and synthetic fibers that need to be created, another way to reduce our impact on animals. But for simplicity, we might as well ignore all that and settle on Messinas figure of animal protein being merely 10 percent more digestible than plant protein, which still leaves vegans killing fewer animals per capita (according to Davis and Mathenys numbers). Yet something still seems off about all this. Does it sound right that an individual vegans diet is only responsible for 0.3 wild animal deaths annually? I once killed more frogs in a few minutes while mowing my lawn (trauma!) than a vegan supposedly kills by eating for a year. Something has to be missing here. What is it? Well, for one thing, insects and other smaller animals. Matheny and Davis only seem to care about mammals. This might have made sense in the context of Regans philosophy, since Regans standards for animal rights are more rigorous than most vegans, demanding that animals be a subject of life, and not merely sentient. Most vegans, however, do settle on sentience and as a consequence are against exploiting and killing bugs. Insects have a central nervous system, feel sensations, and may or may not experience pain. The debate over pain allows some vegans to disqualify anthropods from rights or interest consideration. But since Matheny later implies in his essay that the deaths of animals being sucked into combines are quick and painless, the capacity for insect pain is irrelevant in this case the harm here is the irreversible nonexistence of a being who experiences life, not pain sensations. A recent study shows that bees have the same demonstratable emotions that dogs, rats and starlings do. If insect lives count (and vegans who say they dont will often be at odds with their own ethics), it doesnt make sense to only consider mammals in a calculation of the harm industrial agriculture causes. We should also consider the grasshoppers, bees, leafhoppers, lygus bugs, corn rootworms, jumping plant louse, sugar beet root maggots, slugs, snails, mites, weevils, chinch bugs, armyworms, Southwestern corn borers, aphids, caterpillars and beetles. This of course makes the actual total lives lost to vegan agriculture even more impossible to determine, but at the very least it shows that 0.3 wild animals killed per vegan anually is ridiculously optimistic (does anyone deny that insects are animals?), and gives further credence to the idea that fewer animals could be killed by displacing some crop consumption by eating large ruminants raised on grass. But Matheny doesnt think that number of deaths is all that matters. He wants us to consider quality of life as well. Though we cant really know what the experience of being a non-human animal is like, Mathenys bet is that its better to be a wild animal who dies
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in a combine accident, from pesticides or from other consequences of habit destruction due to vegan agriculture, than to be a free-range pasture-fed animal raised for food and eventually led to slaughter: The wild mouse lives free of confinement and is able to practice natural habits like roaming, breeding, and foraging. In contrast, the grass-fed cow, while able to roam some distance in a fenced pasture, may suffer third-degree burns (branding), have holes punched in his ears (tagging), be castrated, have his horns scooped out of his head (dehorning), and be kept from breeding naturally. Once reaching market weight, he can be transported up to several hundred miles without food, water, or protection from extreme heat or cold; then he is killed in a conventional slaughterhouse. The conditions of slaughterhouses have been described in detail elsewhere (Eisnitz, 1997). Suffice it to say, it is hard to imagine that the pain experienced by a mouse as she or he is killed in a harvester compares to the pain even a grass-fed cow must endure before being killed. I agree with Matheny that instant death for an animal doesnt seem so terrible. First they exist, then they hear a loud noise, and suddenly its lights out forever as if they had never been born, and it was all just a dream. This would be worse if death were merely one possible outcome to life, but its not its the only possible outcome. And because animals have no future goals to achieve, its no tragedy to kill them before a predator or the genetic time bomb of natural causes would have got them. Though I do have to say that its a little inconsistent for vegans to be nonplussed by the disappearance of animals into a farm machine vortex of death yet be outraged when baby male chicks meet pretty much the exact same end as a byproduct of egg production. Why is instant death fine if youre a mouse and horrible if you are a baby chick? To be fair, Matheny does not say anything about baby chickens here. More pressing to him is the treatment of farm animals who live for a while before they become food. Matheny thinks it is incorrect to say that it is good to raise animals for food if they are happy, because he would rather be a wild animal without a secure food source who is in constant peril from predators, but runs free and copulates, than an animal who has all his basic needs covered but has his horns lopped off, his testicles removed and a logo burned into his side. This is a matter of opinion. Some want food and healthcare guaranteed for all (domestication), while others prefer to hack it on their own (the wild). (Some people are into scarification too, though most of them want to pick what gets seared into them.) Is a daily struggle for survival worth it if you get to keep your horns? Thats debatable, but there are ways to make the case for domestication stronger. Dehorning with a caustic paste instead of a hot iron is less painful, and can be avoided completely by breeding naturally polled animals. Pigs are often castrated to avoid the problem of boar taint, but some farmers resolve this problem by killing the male pigs before they reach sexual maturity, or use other alternatives, such as injections that produce anti-bodies against the hormone that creates the unpleasant taste in sexually mature boars. When I buy fertile chicken eggs, I have to assume there is some copulating happening somewhere on that farm. Mobile slaughterhouses make it possible to avoid long trips to the slaughterhouse; another possibility is to allow farmers to slaughter their own animals. Im not sure if there are alternatives to ear tagging and branding, but at least the pain there is temporary, and might be worth a life of ease on the farm. The life and death of a farm animal doesnt have to be that bad, and in fact is arguably better than most of the animals who live in freedom and are constantly fighting for life. Even Matheny agrees that the life of an animal on a farm is probably no worse than never having come into existence: Davis does not address factory farmed animals, as he limits his argument to free-range ruminants, including grass-fed cows. Do these animals have lives worth living? I suspect so, despite the trauma they undergo during transportation and slaughter. Matheny insists that being a wild animal is better, and so raising domesticated animals is bad because it leads to an overall decrease in wild animals. But whats so wrong with humans favoring the option that is pretty good for animals and even better for humans? Vegans loved Matheny for turning Davis argument on its head and using Davis words to promote vegetarianism. But just as Davis fatally undercut his own argument that a human diet including grass-fed ruminants is better for animals than veganism, Matheny undercuts his own that veganism causes the least harm of any other diet. In critiquing the idea that raising happy animals is good overall, Matheny makes a point that could easily be turned on its head and used to defend invasive species hunting over veganism: A total-view utilitarian thinks, all else being equal, it is better to have two happy animals than one. In the past, this view has been used to justify the consumption of meat, since farmed animals would not exist if not for meat production. This argument, sometimes called The Logic of the Larder (Stephen, 1896), is rebutted by recognizing that while a particular animal may have a life worth living, he or she may harm a number of other animals and/or prevent other animals from existing. In such cases, it may be better if
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that particular animal had not existed (Gruzalski, 1989). For example, consider an invasive species such as feral cats on the islands of Northwest Mexico. These cats are responsible for the decline of many seabird colonies and the extinction of multiple terrestrial bird species. The total wildlife population on the islands would have benefited had the feral cat population not increased. For total-view utilitarians, more is merrier until introducing additional animals decreases the total welfare in the population because these additional animals dont have lives worth living, harm existing animals, or prevent some greater number of animals from existing. Davis does not address factory farmed animals, as he limits his argument to free-range ruminants, including grass-fed cows. Do these animals have lives worth living? I suspect so, despite the trauma they undergo during transportation and slaughter. This does not mean, however, that it is better off that they exist than not, as we saw in the case of the feral cats in Mexico. For by using land and resources formerly or otherwise available to wild animals, grazing cattle prevent some number of smaller wild animals from existing. As do feral pigs, starlings, lionfish, Asian carp and iguanas (and vegan agriculture, by the way). Matheny is not making a case for vegetarianism he is making a case for Jackson Landers-style alien hunting. Perhaps that is why he concludes his paper with the line, Nevertheless, in the end, the case for vegetarianism is still stronger [than Davis-style omnivorism]. Stronger perhaps, at least going by Davis numbers, but not strongest. Though Matheny was right about the calculations Davis relied upon, it would have been more honest for him to admit that if Davis had tossed those calculations and relied on speculation and logic, he would have had a real point: a vegan diet is not the diet of least possible harm. How could it be? Veganism is a rigid avoidance of animal products no matter what it doesnt allow for adaptation. In a scenario where it is clearly less harmful to eat animals than to eat plants, veganism demands that you nevertheless eat the plants. And it is easy to think of cases where eating animal products would cause less harm to animals than growing crops. Eating dumpstered meat, road kill, and our companion animals and our relatives when they die, for instance. But we dont have to violate our most cherished taboos to discover less harmful diets than veganism. If Davis had said that the ruminant animals would only be raised on land not suitable for plant farming, this hypothetical would decrease our reliance on crops and save more animals than a purely vegan diet. Raising insects at home likely kills fewer insects and mammals than getting the equivalent amount of calories from crops. Killing a blue whale provides tons (literally) of nutrition and energy. How many more animals would have to die in the growth, production and processing of crops to achieve the equivalent amount of nutrition and energy that a single blue whale provides? More than one, I reckon. Davis actually mentions the whale option at the end of his paper, but dismisses it for practical reasons. Yet even if PETA was joking with their Eat the Whales campaign, whales are edible, and people on a diet that includes whale eat fewer crops than people on an all-crop diet and this decreases animal death and suffering. And of course, as Matheny himself accidentally suggests, a lifestyle that includes hunting invasive species leads to less harm overall than a vegan diet. Settling on veganism as the diet of least harm, then, demonstrates either an unshakable attachment to dogma, or a very limited imagination. Part Two (What, you didnt realize youd been reading Part One?) A few years after Matheny offered his take, Andy Lamey wrote an even more interesting examination of Davis claims, titled Food Fight! Davis versus Regan on the Ethics of Eating Beef (PDF). Like Matheny, Lamey is overly concerned with Davis flawed numbers and misses the point that an animal-product-free diet is not the diet of least harm, no matter how badly Davis botched his argument. However, Lamey makes some intriguing points that complicate the issue. Lamey brings humans into the harm equation, pointing out that more humans are hurt in animal food production than in plant food production. He suggests four areas in which manufacturing flesh is more hazardous than making plants: E. coli, farm accidents, slaughterhouse accidents and greenhouse gas emissions. The second and third examples are easy enough to dispatch. Both consist of consenting adults agreeing to take certain jobs which entail greater risks than certain other jobs. True, its more dangerous to interact with heavy, squirming animals than it is to deal with small, docile plants (this would be the case even if Venus Fly Traps were grown as a human staple), and slaughterhouse jobs arent particularly safe or easy either. But if we are going to use the harm reduction argument to second-guess consensual arrangements between moral agents, there is no reason to stop at animal farming. Pre-marital sex, alcohol, driving motor vehicles, riding bicycles in cities, sanitation work, logging, roofing, coal mining, construction work, swimming pools, acrobatics and vegan cupcakes all need to go if the least harm principle requires that we take safety first literally. According to
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this 20 Most Dangerous Jobs list, ranching is the third most dangerous job, yes, but grain workers were number 10. And slaughterhouse workers are comparatively safe at 19. Besides, just because a job is more dangerous does not in itself make it less desirable. Just as Matheny said we should look at the quality of life of field mice versus farm animals when we are calculating harms, we could look at the quality of career of livestock farmers versus vegetable farmers. I have never been either, but a section in Meat: A Benign
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Extravagance provides some insight into why some people might prefer to farm livestock,
even with the greater risk: In his diatribe against vegan agriculture, the late Mark Purdey (best known for identifying a link between BSE and organophosphates) described how he started in agriculture under the great expanse of striated sky of the fenlands, working thousands of bleak acres of vegetables: The farm workforce clearly felt estranged from what was once their indigenous native landscape. These labourers resented the fact that a mono-arable/vegetable system of farming had been installed two decades ago after a change in the lands ownership. This had left many of their former workmates jobless whilst those remaining felt divorced from an aspect of management or relationship with their work I, too, rapidly found myself unable to form any working relationship with this treeless prairescape of sterile inorganic moondust. Disillusioned, I left my friends on the fens behind. Upon arrival in the West Country, I quickly found my niche within the mixed, small farming landscape. Livestock pumped the economic heartbeat that enabled these smaller farms to survive. My first job was to muck out the yearlings house and I remember experiencing an innate sense of wholeness the first time I watched a shower of dung being flail-fountained out of the back of the muckspreader; fertile fodder. All of the farms and their staff seemed vibrant with the ethereal relationship flowing between the soil, the crops, the livestock and the landscape. A mixed farming system provides more natural landscape than pure arable farming, is less mechanized, and gives humans greater contact with nature. Why should this be so? The answer is that mixed farming, like nature, is complex, whereas pure arable farming (whether it be for animals in feedlots or for vegans in cities) removes an entire order of creation from the system. Moreover it is the order which is closest to humanity, which gallops and gives birth and suckles, which feels pain and anger and joy. Famers talk to their animals and give names to them, perhaps not to all of them but almost always to some of them. What vegetable farmer ever gave a name to a cabbage? (220 - 222) Its doubtful that one could write such a glowing tribute to describe the beauty of chopping at the screaming, half-conscious cows in an industrial-style slaughterhouse, but the standard slaughterhouse of today is not what the omnivore opposition to a purely vegan answer wants. For one thing, in a Davis-style omnivorism, or an omnivorism where animals are primarily raised on non-arable land, there would be far fewer animals to slaughter, and less of a need to rush the job through an assembly line. Most slaughterhouse jobs are miserable, and hardly anybody would choose to work in one if they had connections, an MBA and a limitless trust fund. But smaller scale and more wholesome slaughtering jobs do exist, and that sector is growing as omnivores start thinking more about where their food comes from. Larrys Custom Meats is a slaughterhouse that seems like a good model. (I defy anyone to watch this video and not beg for a hog scalder for their next birthday.) And again, even if slaughtering were a universally terrible job and could never improve, the least harm argument becomes derailed and incredibly demanding if we start going after consensual agreements between moral agents. Lameys E. coli argument is closer to the mark. With E.coli poisoning, the victims are often people who have not really consented to take that risk. Lamey cites a case where E. coli leaked into Walkerton, Ontarios improperly filtered water supply, killing seven people with E. coli. But thats an argument for properly filtering water and not having factory farms with massive pools of useless, poisonous manure, rather than an argument against eating meat. There is a similar problem with vegetables that are contaminated with E.coli tainted fertilizer, or even accidental runoff. Manure from grass-fed cows can have E.coli too, but on small scale farms, that manure is easier to manage. Anyway, if you use such severe cases to call for the disbanding of a particular industry, you need to be consistent and call for the end of any industry whose products sometimes have fatal unintended consequences. Even if we did accept Lameys premise that most animal food production was unacceptably dangerous, there are still non-vegan options that lack the hazards that worry Lamey, and which reduce the amount of sentient animals killed more than a purely vegan system. Eating roadkill, growing elevation-raised bivalves, hunting invasive animals and raising insects for food are a few examples.
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Lameys fourth human-centered objection to meat it releases a lot of methane is of course nothing more than the environmental argument for veganism. And so it fails in the usual way that argument normally does. It is inconsistent to say that we must give up animal products because farming animals releases more greenhouse gases than plant farming, but then not also say that we must give up all activities that release more greenhouse gases than other possibilities. Why do we have to be vegan, but are still allowed to drive, fly, eat more than we must to survive, buy computers and televisions, eat rice, drink coffee and wine, and maintain a civilization? If veganism is not a subsistence lifestyle, it is disingenuous to single out the main thing it dislikes animal use and object to that and only that on subsistence lifestyle grounds. Okay, new farming techniques have drastically reduced the methane released in rice production, but research is promising methane reductions in livestock too. Plus, it turns out that methane emissions from cattle may have been grossly overestimated. Furthermore, if our goal is to reduce methane emissions as much as possible, this means that not raising animals doesnt go far enough. We should also kill all the wild animals that we can, since they too release methane. Just as Mathenys logic supported invasive species hunting over a vegan diet, Lameys appeal to methane reduction is a vindication of plans like the one in Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by killing feral camels. So again were led to non-vegan solutions if we want to cause the least harm possible, going by the vegan definition of harm. Why is Lamey talking about humans anyway, when the question was about animal harm? Lamey justifies this sudden switch from animal to human affairs by honing in on Davis premise that animals dont care whether they are killed in a foreseeable accident or on purpose. Lamey sees this as an equivocation, a trick on Davis part of substituting utilitarian arguments in place of Regans deontological views: As [Davis] writes in contrasting deliberately killed cows and accidentally killed mice, the harm done to the animal is the samedead is dead. This notion is central to Daviss criticism of Regan, as it is what justifies calculating accidental and deliberate harms as indistinguishable wrongs. However, Davis makes a strange remark in justifying his equal ranking of the two forms of killing. It occurs in the following passage: [Angus] Taylor says about the questions of intent, A utilitarian is likely to see no moral difference between the two, since utilitarianism holds that it is consequences that count and not intentions. The reference to utilitarianism is strange because Regans argument is based on deontological rights theory, utilitarianisms great modern rival. Davis does not cite any passage in which Regan himself calls into question the distinction between accidental and deliberate killing, and I am unaware of any instance where Regan does so. So Daviss immanent critique, it turns out, silently depends on a premise that Davis himself introduces. The real question his article raises, then, is whether it is plausible to say there is a difference between accidental and deliberate harms. I believe there is. In most legal systems, the difference between accidental and deliberate killing is the difference between manslaughter and murder. Applied to animals, surely we recognize a distinction between accidentally hitting an animal while driving on the highway and intentionally backing over it with the express aim of ending its life. Indeed we do, but before I get to that, I want to point out that just because Regan calls himself a deontologist doesnt mean that every argument that comes out of his mouth is automatically a deontological one. Thats like saying steak is vegetarian because Paul McCartney ate one. A utilitarian argument is still utilitarian even if a deontologist makes it, and thats exactly what Regan is doing when he says that we are obligated to eat a vegetarian diet because in total it causes less harm to animals: Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm. Regan has dropped the rights talk here otherwise, none of those foreseeable deaths of the innocent would be justifiable. Wanting to reduce harm is just the flip-side of increasing utility/happiness/pleasure, which is a utilitarian concept. I dont see any problem with Davis taking a utilitarian approach to this question when Regan, the deontologist, started it. Lamey continues: Although Regan does not rank animals on a par with people, his theory does urge us to extend many common moral notions we reserve for human beings, such as rights, to other creatures. By that standard, the most plausible version of Regans theory would be one that does make a distinction between accidental and deliberate deaths, in the case of both people and animals. If so, then the debate between Regan and Davis hinges on whether our everyday habit of distinguishing between deliberate and accidental harm
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makes sense. The more Davis seeks to preserve his challenge to Regan, the more he will have to attack this commonsense and, to my mind, reasonable distinction. Moreover, Davis will have to attack it in such a way that accidental deaths become just as important as deliberate ones in the case of animals, but not in the case of human beings. In other words, Davis must show that the accidental death of field mice is no different from deliberate killing and so important that it has ramifications for the agricultural sector as a whole; yet at the same time, he must maintain that the accidental deaths of human beings from E. coli and other aspects of beef production are not to be judged by such a high standard. Surely that would leave Davis, rather than Regan, with the less plausible argument. Dont worry, Davis. I got this one. What Lamey and almost all vegans are forgetting is the purpose of considering intent in harmful or fatal human interactions. To the dead, intent does not matter. Davis is right about that. This is as true for humans as it is for other animals non-existence is the same for everyone. You cant fret about how you died, because there is no you to fret. Anyway, if you could fret, would you really prefer to have died by some pointless freak accident? Who wouldnt rather be assassinated than hit by a drunk driver or an air conditioning unit knocked out of a window? Funerals are for the survivors, and so is intent. And why does intent matter to the survivors? Two main reasons vengeance and future safety. We want to punish those intentionally causing harm because they hurt us emotionally by attacking our loved ones, and this pisses us off. Also, perhaps more rationally, we want to stop them from doing it again, and we assume that someone who does something destructive on purpose is more likely to be a repeat offender. We wouldnt punish the person who accidentally bumps their air conditioning unit out of their window onto someones head the way we would punish someone who shot a diplomat. Emotionally, the accident doesnt piss us off as much, especially if they are remorseful. Its harder to be upset at someone who made a mistake and is truly sorry. And its unlikely that this person will ever do the same thing again. Someone who shoots a diplomat and is proud of this, however, might have their eyes on a senator. Nevertheless, someone who is dangerously clumsy (especially if they are repeatedly so, even if the offenses are all accidents) is likely to find themselves constrained. The punishment will probably be less severe than for someone who intentionally murders we have to send a message that stops those determined to cause harm and its difficult to deter the accident-prone but they will be stopped somehow. George Russell Weller, who was 86 when he accidentally drove his car through Santa Monicas Third Street Promenade and killed 10 people, got five years felony probation and had to pay $107,100 in fines and restitution. The judge thought he deserved to go to prison, but decided against it, reasoning that he was too old and sick and would be a tax burden. To be honest, that Wikipedia entry on Weller makes me think he did it on purpose, but the point is that yes, we make a distinction between accidental and intentional killings of humans, but not the distinction that vegans want to make with animals, which is that intentional killings are a rights violation and foreseeable accidental killings are nothing at all. So the question is how these two key aspects of the human concept of intent (revenge and preventing later harm) relate to other animals, if at all. The revenge aspect of intent does not seem to translate to our interactions with animals. Animals cannot conceptualize our intent and figure out whether fellow species members were killed on purpose or as a side-effect of another activity. Even if they could determine that, Hey, that hunter wants to kill us, but that farmer sitting on the big scary machine just wants to harvest that stuff we like to eat, I have trouble believing that a real life Bambi holds a grudge and would feel any better (or anything at all) to see his moms killers put in prison or executed. That leaves the other relevant aspect of intent: future safety. Just because animals dont understand the idea of intent doesnt mean they are not affected by it. Whether they know whats in our heads or not, if our intention is to wipe out every living non-human animal, that intent will hurt animals more than our intent to live in harmony with them. Applied to animals, Lamey wrote, surely we recognize a distinction between accidentally hitting an animal while driving on the highway and intentionally backing over it with the express aim of ending its life. The animal, being dead, does not care whether it was the victim of an accidental or intentional hit. Any animal relatives left behind dont grasp the difference either. We care, though, because if it was on purpose, the gleeful animal destroyer just got a disturbingly high score on the psychopath test. Thats not necessarily so for someone who realizes that meat is an animal and keeps eating it anyway. (Or if it is, the estimate that psychopaths make up one percent of the population is way off.)
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Either way, were fussing over our own future safety here, which is a different issue. How does our intent affect the future safety of the animals? That is the only relevant question, because without a concept of intent or revenge, the only thing that matters to animals related to their interactions with us is whether they are benefitted or harmed by these interactions. Whether we say oops! and leave them to rot, or eat them and wear their skin is a non-issue to the dead animals and those left behind. Davis is right that it is consequences and not whats in our minds that matters to them. Accidental death and being killed on purpose really are the same thing for beings without an ability to distinguish between the two. Murder and manslaughter are not the same for us only because we have concepts of intent, revenge and ethics of care. A gruesome intentional death of an animal might be a revealing psychopath test, but that is for our benefit, not for the benefit of the animals. Animals dont know they are suffering for a good cause when they are being vivisected, and they dont know they are dying for a good cause when we kill them to eat plants. With humans, intent is an important measure of whether someone will be a repeat offender. Intent does not work this way when applied to animals and our food choices, because all our food choices hurt animals, and we have to keep eating and eating no matter what. When it comes to eating, we are born to be repeat offenders. Animals die as a consequence of vegan agriculture. Vegans know this, yet they are still eating seitan and nothing seems to stop them. Most of these wild animal deaths may be foreseen accidents, but vegans keep repeating the behavior that leads to them just as relentlessly as if they were killing these animals on purpose. This makes them something like the equivalent of an old man who accidentally runs over 10 people every single day on his way to work. Who cares that the old man doesnt mean it? That guy needs to be put away! Or at the very least he should never be allowed to drive again. Why are vegans allowed to eat again? If animals cannot look at our intent to determine whether they should feel vengeful, and good intent is not protecting them from future assaults, intent is absolutely useless for
the animals.
Even if intent did matter to other animals, it makes no sense to say that the intention of a vegan is the best simply because vegans wish no animal had to die, ever. Who doesnt wish that? The Davis-inspired omnivore or the invasive species hunter has the intent of causing the least harm possible, even if that requires eating animals. And in many instances, both hypothetical and actual, they would or do cause less harm than vegans. So why does that intention not count, but vegan intention does? Davis point two main points sullied as they were by poorly-chosen details and imaginary numbers were simple: it is possible to harm fewer animals by eating some animal products, and to animals, less harm is better, no matter how humans make that possible. And it seems to me that Davis was right. --Tagged under: Ethics--
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June 17, 2011 3 54 PM
Interview With a Vegan Paleontologist: The Humane Hominid

Robert, aka The Humane Hominid, is the vegan paleontologist behind PaleoVeganology, a blog that looks at the evolution of humans and animals, as well as the paleo diet movement, from an ethical vegan perspective. Robert went vegetarian in high school to impress a pretty girl, and stayed that way for the animals. He has been vegan for six years. This didnt stop Hurricane Ivan from destroying most of his worldly possessions 2004, so he moved to Los Angeles, figuring that he might as well enjoy nice weather while natural disasters nipped at his heels. He got a spec screenplay optioned not long after moving to earthquake country, but Hollywood was only getting his hopes up in order to dash them (as it tends to do), and Robert gave up that dream to return to paleontology school. The vegan blogosphere is lucky he did. PaleoVeganology is everyones favorite vegan paleontology blog, and is one of the most important contributions to the burgeoning vegan skeptic movement the ethical vegan reformers who are more than happy to hack down fallacious arguments for veganism, like the myth that humans are naturally herbivores. To this end, Robert is currently engaged in an online debate with The Permavegan, a vegan permaculture advocate who believes that it makes no biological sense for humans to eat meat. I have my money on Robert.
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Are humans omnivores? Yes, unequivocally. But Im glad you put that word in scare quotes, because its possible for people to read too much into it. The description of humans as omnivores is observational, not taxonomic, and definitely not prescriptive. When researchers into human evolution use that word, they mean something a bit different than what, say, paleo dieters or other carnists do. Omnivory does not impose behaviors on us; its merely a description of our capabilities and our morphology. Were neither specialized plant-eaters nor specialized meat-eaters. From the perspective of morphology, it cant be inferred that we must eat either plants or animals, only that we can eat them both. Why do you refer to meat-eating humans as carnists? Honestly, because I just think its a cool word, and I am often too lazy to type out the phrase meat-eating humans. The word has its origin in the effort by some vegans to label those humans who continue eating meat after being exposed to cruelties of factory farming; i.e., those who eat meat because of a conscious ethical choice, and not out of habit. A carnist is someone committed to the ideology that it is acceptable to eat (some) animals, and is basically the opposite of vegan. But like I said, I mostly use it because I think its a cool word and a practical shorthand device. Its obvious that you are not using your blog to try to prove that veganism is our natural diet. What would you say your message is? That evolution is complicated and it doesnt make sense to try to base lifestyle choices on it? Thats part of it. Though its not just that evolution is complex far more complex than most people realize, actually but also, paradoxically, that its limited. Evolution is a great tool for figuring out the ancestry of organisms and the mechanisms of speciation and such, but its fundamentally about populations, not individuals. As such, its not a great guide for figuring out what your optimal diet is. The human fossil record is too sparse for that, and even if it were more robust, I think itd be problematic at best to try to base ethical or lifestyle choices on it. I should confess here that the message of my blog is itself evolving. I started it because I kept running into vegans who, upon learning I was a paleontology student, would ask me for rhetorical ammo to use in their own arguments against eating animals. Its common for vegans to argue that humans are natural herbivores, for instance. But things just arent that simple. At first, I was game for the effort, but by the time I decided to start blogging, I had become more skeptical of it. At present, Id say the message of my blog is that veganism is, first and foremost, an ethical stand, and should, first and foremost, be argued and defended as such. Paleontology and evolution can bring a great deal of clarity to our understanding of issues related to veganism and animal rights, but they cant by themselves be used to build a case for (or against) veganism and animal rights. Does our evolutionary heritage provide any clues for healthier ways for us to live? Only in the negative sense of showing us what we cant do, at present, and not in the positive sense of showing us what we should do. Im glad you asked this question, too, because it touches on a fundamental, though very common, misunderstanding of evolution. Natural selection is about constraints on species development, and whether species develop adaptations to get around those constraints. It doesnt have anything to do with individual health. Theres a notion going around in many diet and health subcultures that evolution wants (for lack of a better word) us to live long and healthy lives, and that if we can just discover the right combination of foods and exercises, well unlock our boundless potential. But thats not how evolution works. It doesnt give a shit about your quality of life. It only wants you to make as many babies as possible, and make sure they reach reproductive age. This means that an out-of-shape, SAD-eating, chain-smoking, alcoholic, methaddicted slob who lives half as long but has twice as many babies as a vibrantly-healthy vegan or paleo dieter is more fit than either of them, in evolutionary terms. Natural selection imposes constraints on our development as a species, which can certainly have health consequences, but it has not and will not do us any favors. Theres no design for optimality or perfection hidden in our genes. Nature wants us to screw and die. Thats it. Some people thrive on a vegan diet and some people do not. Do you think this is all psychological, or could genetics play a part? Could some humans have a biological requirement for animal products to thrive, while others do not? I dont want to paint myself into a corner and say that veganism will work for every single person on the planet; after all, nature confounds our categories, and variation abounds. Having said that, though, humans are not snowflakes. We are still primates and are still subject to many of the dietary constraints that nature imposes on all other primates. Its conceivable to me that there are, at the present time, some humans who cannot thrive
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on healthily-structured vegan diets. But thats unlikely, in my opinion, to be because of a dietary requirement for animal products per se. Certainly, we have a biological requirement for specific nutrients, but Im skeptical that anyone has a requirement for specific nutrient sources. Theres nothing magical about meat and dairy. One day, science will figure out the mechanisms imposing those constraints, and then figure out ways around them. And then, those types of people currently stuck with animal products will be able to thrive as vegans, too. Nonetheless, I do suspect these kinds of people are in the minority. I think a lot of exvegans should be skeptical of themselves and inquire whether they engaged in the tendency of diet subcultures to self-diagnose, and thus misinterpreted the data about themselves. They may have attributed a pre-vegan condition or deficiency to veganism itself. As one example, B-12 deficiency is common in the general population, not just among vegans. If the Framingham study is a good indication, about 16 percent of the public may be experiencing undiagnosed B-12 deficiency, and about 39 percent are in the low-normal range, which constitutes a deficiency for some people. Many people who go vegan and experience B-12 deficiency symptoms may have been deficient before they went vegan, even if they only experienced symptoms after. But they will self-diagnose and blame veganism for a pre-existing problem they didnt know they had. I think we should also consider the possibility that a lot of ex-vegans didnt just go vegan, but also signed on to one of the fringier elements of the vegan community, like raw veganism, or low-fat veganism, or fruitarianism (or all three!), which take a lot more effort and have a lot less long-term health viability. Or conversely, they may have been a junkfood vegan and adopted the mindset that since theyre vegan now, all their health troubles are over. Obviously, medicine and nutrition are not my specialty, but I have a hard time swallowing the idea that theres some ineffable quality about animal products that prevents a majority of people from getting those nutrients through supplements or high-quality plant sources. Im inclined to think that if the majority of these ex-vegans had found Jack Norris or Ginny Messina before deciding veganism wasnt working, theyd have turned out just fine. And those populations for whom veganism isnt currently viable will one day have the option, too. Science marches on! If not being specialized plant or meat eaters theoretically makes it possible for humans to choose an all-vegan diet without significant health consequences, would the same hold true for choosing an all-carnivorous diet? First, Im not convinced its possible to choose any diet without significant health consequences. I contend theres no such thing as an optimal or perfect diet. Nature doesnt work that way. I think no matter what you do, you will always have diet-related health issues to deal with. Second, while its true that humans are flexible, we are not infinitely flexible. Natural selection is conservative, and still imposes constraints on us. We may be better at digesting animal products than other primates, but that doesnt mean weve stopped being primates. Its pretty clear that humans in general do best, health-wise, when they eat a diet high in plants and moderate in animal sources. We are by no means natural vegans, but were closer to that on the spectrum than we are to being natural carnivores. In short, I think an all-meat diet would have more health issues to get around than an allvegan diet, though neither of them is optimal. What do the paleo diet people have wrong? I think the historical narrative underlying the paleo diet is a just-so story bolstered by the naturalistic fallacy and embellished with noble savage fantasies of a golden age. This is not to say that its a bad idea to eat less processed food, or that we dont face health problems unique to our era. But the notion running through so much of the paleo diet movement that there was a long-lost health utopia in which flint-knapping personal trainers wandered the Pleistocene with an ethic of enlightened stewardship, is rubbish. As is the idea that we can recover or recreate that lost age in the modern world. No one who actually studies the fossil or archaeological record with any rigor could swallow that narrative; weve seen the diseased hominid teeth and bones for ourselves; weve uncovered the kill-sites where whole herds were driven over cliffs just to claim the meat and skins from a few individuals. We know that humans are like all other animals: they over-breed and consume resources with abandon, unless checked by survival pressures. This has always been true. The paleo diet movement began with a basically reasonable idea that maybe we should try to mimic the diet of our ancestors, since we inherited traits from them that will influence our own health but seems since then to have contorted itself into a grainphobic meat cult based on a vision of human evolution that has no resemblance to what the fossil record tells us about ourselves. No paleontologist or anthropologist doubts that hominins ate meat and, during the Ice Age outside of Africa, probably quite a lot of it or that doing so shaped our evolution, but were not obligate carnivores who evolved in high latitudes. We come from the African tropics, and the ancestors from whom we
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inherited the plan for our digestive and masticatory traits are generally considered to have been largely frugivorous. Some australopithecine fossils even show evidence of grass consumption. But you know what? Even saying that isnt precise enough, which is another major gripe I have with the paleo diet (and with many vegans, too). Paleo dieters are always pointing to our evolutionary heritage for hints about the optimal diet, but no one ever seems to be more specific than that. Which hominin species are you counting as ancestral to us? Which traits on your laundry list of proof are primitive and which are derived? Do you even understand what that question is asking and why its important? If someone making evolutionary claims cant answer these questions, I for one see no reason to take their opinion seriously. Its a bit like listening to New Age gurus invoking quantum mechanics, or young Earth creationists appropriating the lexicon of geology: to the average person, a string of smart-sounding words from such types can sound impressive; but to someone with even a bit of training in the relevant field, it sounds like nonsense. Finally, Im a bit territorial about the nick-name paleos; paleontologists gave themselves that nick-name a long time ago, and now these dieters are trying to muscle in on our turf. I wont have it! In a recent entry you wrote that an adaptation for fruit eating accidentally made humans better at digesting meat. How are fruit eating and meat eating related? Fruigvory is our base gut adaptation, but its flexible enough to allow primates to digest meat, especially cooked meat. When our lineage adopted a greater degree of carnivory as a survival strategy, nature selected for those variations of the base frugivorous gut that were slightly better at meat-digestion. But just because we got better at eating meat, that doesnt mean we got worse at eating fruits, seeds and foliage. We didnt specialize to become obligate carnivores. To give your readers some context, Ive been having an ongoing debate with the Permavegan, Jonathan Maxson, over his hypothesis that meat was a fallback food of last resort for prehistoric humans. At that particular stage in our debate, I perceived him as trying to draw a distinction between frugivores and omnivores, the implication being that if humans were the former, they couldnt be the latter. Im not now so certain thats what he was doing at all (Ill have to wait and see), but in any case, I cited Hladik, et. al.s critique of the expensive-tissue hypothesis as a counter to this perceived claim. Their point was that human gut morphology, being unspecialized, was best described as frugivore, a flexible trait which allowed humans to feed extensively on animal matter. I summarized their point as follows: In other words, modern human guts are adapted to a diet of soft, energy-dense foods, a condition they inherited from frugivorous ancestors but that accidentally also allows them to be better at digesting meat than other primates. To put it succinctly, H. sapiens are functionally omnivorous because of their frugivory, not in spite of it (a point that threatens to undo the whole debate before it even starts)! What Im pointing to here is the concept of exaptation, wherein a trait developed in response to one survival pressure gets passed on to distant descendants no longer facing that pressure, who co-opt it for another use. The use to which they co-opt it, however, isnt the use for which it was meant; it just happens to be flexible enough to be useful for several things. In that debate, Im arguing to a fellow vegan that a human fruigvorous adaptation doesnt preclude an ability to be good at eating meat. If I were debating a carnist on the same point, Id say that just because humans can digest meat, that doesnt mean we evolved to do so; it just means we found a new use for a flexible trait common to frugivorous primates. Has studying paleontology caused you to re-think any aspects of your views on veganism? Definitely! I used to be one of those vegans who argued that humans are natural herbivores, and was quite happy with myself for having memorized the laundry list of traits that supposedly proved it. Once I really began to understand evolution, though, I became far more circumspect about that tactic. Just because we possess a trait does not mean that trait evolved to suit us in particular, for the way we use it in particular. It certainly imposes no dietary obligations on us. I think vegans and paleo dieters alike should take that to heart. Ironically, my coming to understand that evolution, by itself, isnt a great basis for making the case for veganism led me to a deeper appreciation for the moral and ethical arguments for veganism. I didnt read Peter Singer or Tom Regan until after Id read Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. What should paleontology inspire meat eaters to re-think? The ecological sustainability of a widespread human diet centered on eating animals and
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that includes hunting. I know its all the rage to vilify Neolithic agriculture and monocrops and such and there are certainly legitimate and profoundly important issues there but really, the record of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers isnt too admirable, either. Look at Paul Martins work on the Ice Age mammal extinctions; I think hes right and Im far from alone that the most parsimonious explanation for the disappearance of big mammals (especially outside of Africa) at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is human overhunting. During the Paleolithic, the world lost 85 percent of mammal species larger than 44 kg, including several keystone predators whom we either killed off or out-competed. This had enormous ecological impacts: it sparked several secondary, localized extinctions and altered seed-dispersal patterns worldwide. We were able to weather that because our population was so small and scattered, but its in our nature like most other animals to overbreed and overeat, and with the current human population and rate of species extinction, we can afford neither to keep doing things as we do them now, nor to go back to the supposed good-ole-days of the hunter-gatherers. Both legacies are recipes for catastrophe. We have to figure out something new. Do you have any ideas for what the something new should be? Well, veganism, of course. A lot of veganisms critics like to proclaim, theres never been a vegan culture, and as far as I can tell, they are right. But thats not an argument against creating one now. Im not yet learned enough to give specifics, but in general outline, I think we should endeavor to create a civilization that uses other animals as minimally as possible while re-wilding a number of lost habitats. I doubt that will mean universal veganism in the sense that no one anywhere ever uses any kind of animal product or labor ever again, but to my mind its indisputable that many of our most pressing ecological concerns are rooted in our exploitation of animals. Unless we come to terms with that and own up to it and start thinking creatively about it, I think were screwed. You wrote about a new theory that humans adapted an empathy toward animals in order to be better able to procure meat. By knowing more about animals, as well as domesticating animals to be used in part as hunting tools, humans increased their hunting prowess. As you pointed out, this seems to lead to a paradox: meat eating and empathy with animals were dependent on each other, but the empathy that made it easier for us to eat meat now sometimes makes us feel like it is wrong to do so. Domesticating animals that we bond with in order to hunt wild animals also relates to a paradox that a lot of vegans decry: Why love one and eat the other? What significance do you see in this theory, if correct? Could moral schizophrenia loving one and eating the other be in our genes? If so, could that mean the idea of humane meat and eating animals while loving other animals is not as ridiculous as some vegans say? I think youre not doing Pat Shipmans theory enough justice! Shes claiming that empathy for other animals wasnt just a useful trait, but that it actually drove our evolution. I think thats a profound claim, and I ordered her book so I can get a better handle on all the nuances. The significance of her hypothesis is its elegant simplicity; its always been clear that the invention of stone tools, the emergence of symbolic expression (ultimately becoming language), and the domestication of nonhuman animals were important events in human evolution, but no one could ever decide which one was most important to our development. Now Shipman comes along with a simpler proposal: that all three are consequences of a unique human ability to empathize with other animals, and in squabbling over them, weve been missing the forest for the trees. Her initial review article was published with mostly positive feedback from other researchers, and Im looking forward to the more fleshed-out version in her book. I have no problem with the idea that its possible for meat-eaters to genuinely love animals, even animals they have raised and slaughtered themselves. Such moral schizophrenia, as you put it, likely is an expression of ancient and deep-seated traits. But, as with all other traits, one shouldnt read too much into this. It doesnt mean that the humane meat position is more, or less, valid than the animal-rights vegan position. The humane meat position and the animal liberation position would both be expressions of the same primal trait, and thus, equally ridiculous! Evolution will not give us easy answers to animal rights questions. That comes down to ethics, in the end. --Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--
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June 16, 2011 1 35 PM
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Justice Nears for Invasive Species

According to alien eater and subsistence hunter Jackson Landers, the invasive species eating movement is about to take off.
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June 16, 2011 11 54 AM
It's What's For Dinner

By Scott Korb: We must remember that when it comes to our relationship with animals, managing their supposed fear and dread of uspresumably to mitigate both their suffering and our guiltis not a new proposition. Weve been doing it, or so we have always imagined, since the beginning. If humanity was understood to inspire fear and dread in animals as we hear in Genesis, we must also have been understood to be capable of recognizing those emotions. This recognitionor, better, this reckoningis the very basis of the compassion that makes us human and should shape our relationship with animals. On the other hand, theres no place for compassion in a utopia like Isaiahs; theres simply no need for it. And if we believe that the best humanity is capable of is deeply felt compassiona tenet shared by the great religions of the world and our great secularists alikethen theres no place for humanity in a utopia. The choice is clear: we either live in the world we have, or we build a lonesome world where we dont belong. Nowadays, our sense that animals fear us and the notion we have that some may actually dread their deaths, like many of us do, goes a long way to support arguments against eating them. This is particularly true because modern factory farmingwhich had no premodern counterpartenacts a kind of brutality against animals that one can call properly sinful. Think Perdue and Tyson, Cargill and ConAgra, who all produce food that is magically and marvelously inexpensive. Eating from these modern farms requires living without the sympathy we learned in the aftermath of the Delugeafter forty days and nights living cooped up with that whole world of animals. It requires allowing ourselves to believe we still eat of Eden, a mythical world devoid of fear or dread, without remembering that in the beginning there was also no death. Today we must remember: animals in factory farms99 percent of the animals we eat, according to Jonathan Safran Foerlive horrible lives and die horrific deaths. When we come face to face with so many of the animals we eat, it seems impossible not to ask again and yet again, Who do we think we are? After finishing up with Coetzee in my class, most of the students agree it doesnt matter who we think we are: who we
should be are vegetarians. That not all of us are says nothing about the rightness of the
cause, only that most of us are too weak and too stuck in our ways to stop eating animals. But this is basically where we started, a place not so different than where I once lived as a self-important veganabove the fray, away from sin and the pain of the world, or so I thought. Today this is absolutely no place I ever want to end up in. That place I used to live in doesnt really exist. - Via Melissa McEwen
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June 15, 2011 4 27 PM
Its Easier to Tolerate Sinners in Christianity Than in Veganism

Despite the reputation that Christians have for being judgmental, the Christian view of non-believing sinners is potentially more forgiving than veganisms. Christians want to save sinners from themselves, or from Satan, or, you could also say, from Gods overblown standards. Though Christians wouldnt exactly put it this way, their conception of saving frames God as the brutal one, allowing souls to roast in eternal hellfire for sometimes minor infractions like unbelief. God punishes sinners with divine wrath to satisfy a selfish desire for worship. In veganism it is the sinners themselves who are the brutes, victimizing innocents to satisfy their selfish desires for taste and convenience. I was raised without religion, but I went through a Christian phase in middle school. My best friend at the time was a Baptist, and for a couple of years, going to church with him filled the meaning vacuum that my parents had left empty. I became especially fervent about my newfound faith after a week at Bible summer camp, which was a wimpier, less
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over-the-top version of Jesus Camp. I didnt make an effort to save my atheist family, because I knew there was no hope, but I regularly imagined them in hell, screaming in agony (forever and ever). It was a horrifying image, particularly since I thought they didnt
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deserve it. I didnt see my unbelieving family members as bad people. I just thought they
were woefully ignorant of God and his stringent rules. In veganism, on the other hand, the non-believers arent passively violating a perhaps unfair technicality they are actively doing horrible things. A Christian reader once emailed me: The moral dilemma for vegans in meat-eating families is amazing. A Christian like myself may disapprove of homosexual actions, but we dont believe that a homosexual is (in all cases) doing more than moral-spiritual harm to himself and a consenting partner. We may become loathsome in trying to transmit our beliefs into social mores and taboos. But we have nothing like the psychic tension of the vegan. A vegan believes something like a crime or injustice is being committed in their face. As annoying as they can be, I almost feel bad for them, as that is a terrible burden to carry. This is not to say that all Christians actually do tolerate non-Christians better than vegans tolerate non-vegans. Its just that the Christian idea of sin often being a strictly personal problem can make it easier to tolerate sinners than in veganisms conception, where sin is more relevant for its violent external ramifications. Its easier to avoid contempt for those who are harming only themselves. I wanted to tell my family about Christ to do them a favor. Vegans want to tell us about Soy to do animals a favor. Christianity must spread in order to rescue us from becoming the tortured playthings of Satan. Veganism must spread in order to rescue animals from becoming the tortured playthings of us. Vegans dont typically believe in Hell, but many do think that meat eaters will be punished for their sinful eating with heart attacks and premature death, natures punishment for all the cholesterol, saturated fat and cruelty we consume. And as far as many vegans are concerned, we deserve it. --Tagged under: Vegan Cult--
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June 14, 2011 1 59 AM
Why Stun One But Shoot the Other?

After seeing an agricultural scientist shove his arm into a fistulated cow, Marianne Thieme went vegan and founded Party for the Animals, a Dutch political party devoted to advancing animal welfare. They won two seats in Dutch parliament, which is now on the verge of passing Party for the Animals law to rescind the legal exemption allowing Jews and Muslims to kill animals for food without stunning them first. Vegans have often said that Kosher and Halal slaughter methods are worse because animals prefer to be knocked unconscious before they die. William Wallace animals arent. In her defense of the law, Thieme hinted at the vegan trope that animal rights is the natural conclusion of the ever-expanding march for equality: Here in our society we no longer accept that animals must suffer, says Ms Thieme. Religious groups have often opposed progressive social change, she adds. We saw the same thing with womens rights. The animals are justifiably a little pissed that Thieme didnt just ban slaughter altogether, but hopefully theyll understand that these things take time. An interesting implication of this law, which the meat-eating supporters of it might be overlooking, is that if it should be illegal to kill an animal for food without stunning the animal first, then hunting ought to be illegal too. Of course many meat eaters find hunting to be barbaric, so maybe they wont mind if that eventually has to go too. --Tagged under: Vegan Leaders---Tagged under: Ethics--
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June 10, 2011 8 19 PM
"I think consuming animal products is a moral wrong,

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07/08/11 11.52
but just because someone commits moral wrongs sometimes, doesnt make them a grossly bad person (at least not according to act utilitarianism)."
thejoewoods
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Why Stun One But Shoot the Other?

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"I think consuming animal products is a moral wrong,

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