The twelve year old girl[1] who suddenly refuses to touch the main course of her mother’s dinner has taken a lot of flak over the years. She nibbles at her mushy green beans and dry mashed potatoes while her family (often especially the males- what is it with masculinity and beef?) chews its steak and, between bites, ridicules her for daring to admit that she cares about ‘the animals.’ ‘Don’t be stupid-this cow is so delicious,[2] it wanted to be eaten!’ ‘You know pigs don’t actually have feelings, right? But you know what they do have? Protein!’ ‘Oh, she’s just going through a phase. (I knew we shouldn’t have gotten her that hamster.)’ ‘Fine, suit yourself, just don’t go reporting us to those nutjobs at PETA!’
And yet the twelve-year-olds of America just keep giving in to their sappy convictions, in ever increasing numbers.[3]
There are myriad reasons to give up meat, and not all of them are selfless.[4] But while stating that one is vegetarian for health reasons is perfectly acceptable, and even saying that one avoids meat for ecological reasons isn’t too much of a stretch these days, for a grown woman or man to state seriously that they are vegan ‘for the animals’ sake’ is still just a little…kooky. Because how many of their precious animals does it really save when they conspicuously pass up the clam casserole at the company potluck? The clams are already dead, after all (and have been for months, coming, as they did, from a can, just like the mushroom soup which constitutes the rest of the dish…)[5]
You have to be either extremely sensitive,[6] incredibly naive, or else really really into animals to worry about the effect your diet has on their lives. Or so the general line of (not) thinking goes.
But, while it’s hard to take a preteen spouting newly-learned PETA slogans seriously (though we should), America has got to start thinking a little bit harder about the animals we consume in larger and larger quantities each year.[7] As anyone who’s ever petted a cat or walked a dog must realize, these are sentient beings after all.
By now, most people are vaguely aware of the cramped, unsanitary conditions most farm animals are ‘raised’ in, but it’s hard to keep that in mind when you’re just grabbing a quick bite on your lunch break, when you’re contemplating wine pairings in a chic restaurant, when you’re tossing items into your cart at the supermarket…pretty much any time there’s food involved, really. Besides, we are encouraged to forget that animals other than our beloved Chihuahuas experience emotions.
Animals have feelings too! What a quaint notion. If you said that out loud in a serious discussion people would think you were trying to be funny. You have to be careful how you word things, or you’ll be accused of anthropomorphizing. A grave mistake to make in our rational, science-based culture.[8]
Thanks to science’s refusal to even try to take into account that which cannot be quantified and verified, [9] the rather obvious fact that our species does not have a monopoly on consciousness has, until recently, been dismissed by the scientific community as ’sentimental and uncritical thinking to be avoided by serious scientists,’ (according to Donald R. Griffin, author of Animal Minds.)
The perfect rationality that scientists attempt to employ (and which trickles down in muddied form to our culture at large) can lead them to some ridiculous conclusions, such as the widely reported one that fish can’t feel pain. Some scientists studying fish brains couldn’t find any structures similar to human’s brains pain centers, you see. The media latched on to this study from an obscure journal, I think, because it’s such a comforting idea, seeing as how fish are subject to pretty agonizing deaths when caught, if you really think about it.[10] Unfortunately it’s totally false. (We know because someone else then did a study intentionally hurting fish to show that it’s possible to do. Of course the media ignored that one.)
So, fish feel pain and have social hierarchies, similar to chickens’ complex pecking order. Chickens get bored and stressed out, and have the ability to relate specific information to each other. Cows have rich emotional lives and life-long friendships and mourn for months when their calves are taken away (which occurs immediately after birth because we need that milk.) Pigs are ‘inquisitive [...] sensitive, intelligent and highly social animals’ and show signs of clinical depression when confined in the furrowing crates that prevent them from moving, widely used in American pork production.[11]
There is no doubt about it-the vast majority of animals eaten in America were subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment from birth until slaughter. Sure, our advanced society has animal welfare laws, but guess what? None of them apply to animals raised for food.[12] ‘Common farming practices’ are usually excluded from state anti-cruelty laws. Federal farm animal protection laws apply to the slaughterhouse only, and even then, only if mammals (other than rabbits, which are legally classified as poultry) are involved. And these paltry regulations are barely enforced.[13]
No one likes to think about the unfathomable suffering inflicted by ‘common farming practices,’ let alone our own complicity in them. And why should we? Because even more disturbing than those pictures of chickens with their beaks cut off crammed into metal cages is the realization that there’s not much we can do for them.
Ninety-nine percent of chickens eaten in this country come from factory farm production. The sheer pervasiveness of the system seems reason enough to turn a blind eye and order those McNuggets anyway.
But believing we are powerless to stop things is a poor excuse for acting unethically. And given the way meat is produced, eating it is unethical.
And yes, I’m aware that as a vegetarian, I have to be careful using words like that. Don’t want the meat-eaters to think I’m proselytizing! One’s diet is a personal decision, and guilting an omnivore out of ordering any type of animal flesh is a major faux pas.
And so I don’t mention the horrors I associate with the sizzle of a sausage. No one likes a downer, and I hate being accused of self-righteousness, or of having ‘an agenda.’
But I am certain that America’s love of cheap meat stems from willful ignorance, not from innate cruelty. We currently draw an arbitrary line between the pets we coddle in ridiculous new ways[14] every day and the farm animals to whom we deny basic medical care because it’s ‘not cost-effective.’[15]
But our compassion will catch up with us. One twelve-year old at a time.
[1] This is a stereotype, but one that is borne out by research (many people become vegetarian as pre-adolescents for animal-welfare reasons, and the majority of them are female) and one that I’m damned proud of.
[2] My favorite comeback to the ‘but they taste good’ line of argumentation.
[3] Or so we think, anyway. The US government finally got around to its first study of vegetarian youth this year. It estimates that at least 1 in 200 kids under 18 are vegetarian in the US; among middle- and high-schoolers, the number is probably closer to 6.
[4] People who consume a lot of red meat are most likely to die sooner, yet another study just found. The results ’suggest that over the course of a decade, the deaths of one million men and perhaps half a million women [in America] could be prevented just by eating less red and processed meats.’
[5] No, this isn’t a real recipe, at least not as far as I know, though I wouldn’t put it past them. Omnivores will eat anything, after all…
[6] Like the kind of irritating person who meticulously catches insects with a cup and a scrap of paper and brings them outside to safety rather than letting someone else just squash the damn things. Everyone knows a death doesn’t count if it’s very very small…
[7] Meat consumption in the U.S. has been steadily growing since 1950, thanks to ever more efficient (read: inhumane) production methods, from 144lb per person per year, to about 222 lb per person in 2007. Gross. The only change in the average American’s diet that campaigns against factory farming have brought about is a pretty substantial decrease in the amount of veal eaten. I guess pictures of baby animals suffering are effective, at least. You wonder though, if people just substitute the veal cutlet they’d really like to have with the steak they’re not terribly excited about, but will force down so their friends don’t think they’re totally out of touch…
[8] In her excellent collection of essays, Ill Nature, Joy Williams points out that the word ‘anthropomorphize’ originally meant “to attribute human characteristics to god.” That definition is clearly outdated, as now “one is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word.”
[9] Scientific thinking has, until recently, been dominated by the Behaviorist ‘black box theory of consciousness,’ which purports that ‘the mind is fully understood once the inputs and outputs are well defined, and generally couples this with a radical skepticism regarding the possibility of ever successfully describing the underlying structure, mechanism, and dynamics of the mind,’ as defined by Wikipedia.
[10] Is it the fact that we breathe air and they breathe water that lets us overlook that when they’re flopping wildly around on the ground, they’re slowly suffocating? And this is after the trauma of being reeled in by a hook through their mouth (which catch-and-release doesn’t avoid, I’d like to point out!)
[11]The info in this paragraph was provided by the excellent book The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.
[12] Or to animals used for research purposes, for that matter. But that’s another post altogether.
[13] Ditto footnote 11.
[14] Doggie strollers now? Really, is that necessary?
[15] Painful injuries in farm animals routinely go untreated, even when they are noticed by the few humans still employed on mostly automated farms.