This is undoubtedly the best essay I have read so far this year. James McWilliams thank for writing Loving Animals to Death.
Consider why those in the Food Movement want to end the abuses of industrial animal agriculture in the first place: environmental, health, and labor conditions, for starters. As conventional agriculture’s damaging effects on natural resources, obesity rates, and workplace justice and safety become increasingly obvious, angry consumers want alternatives. Gargantuan corporate consolidation—which seems only to intensify the worst aspects of industrial agriculture—generates further popular outrage. Even higher on the list for most concerned consumers, though, is the mistreatment of the animals. What makes us cringe is their incessant abuse. How can it ever be okay to chop off an animal’s tail without anesthesia, lock it in a cage so tight it cannot turn around, toss live male chicks into a grinder, or jam an electric prod into a cow’s anus—all of which are standard procedures on industrial farms? Everyone gets the point intuitively: no self-aware creature should be subjected to this relentless gauntlet of abuse—especially when the purpose of that suffering is merely to satisfy our palates. If only by virtue of our own moral gag reflex, then, we have granted animals a basic level of moral consideration.
Ethically speaking, matters at this point become significantly more complicated. This is where, after all, practice and principle suddenly converge, revealing the heart of the hypocrisy: the elevation of how animals are raised as a moral consideration (poorly in factory farms; well on humane farms) above why we are raising them (to kill and eat them in both cases). It is at this crucial moment in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the beast against its will—that the moral consideration so effectively deployed to condemn the factory farming of animals loses its punch and its plausibility. Which, again, brings us to the contradiction.
It seems not only reasonable but essential to ask: How can a movement claim to care so deeply about farm animals that it wants to restructure all of animal agriculture to ensure their happiness but, at the same time, turn those same animals into an $11 appetizer plate of fried pig head? What moral principle could possibly accommodate such a whiplash-inducing shift in practice? And if there were such a principle, would you ever want it to guide your life? Bob Comis, who embodies the omnivore’s contradiction with such self-awareness, articulated the problem this way in a recent interview with Modern Farmer magazine:
[L]ivestock farmers lie to their animals. We’re kind to them and take good care of them for months, even years. They grow comfortable with our presence, and even begin to like us. But in the end, we take advantage of the animals, using their trust to dupe them into being led to their own deaths.
With kindness, they kill them.
Consider why those in the Food Movement want to end the abuses of industrial animal agriculture in the first place: environmental, health, and labor conditions, for starters. As conventional agriculture’s damaging effects on natural resources, obesity rates, and workplace justice and safety become increasingly obvious, angry consumers want alternatives. Gargantuan corporate consolidation—which seems only to intensify the worst aspects of industrial agriculture—generates further popular outrage. Even higher on the list for most concerned consumers, though, is the mistreatment of the animals. What makes us cringe is their incessant abuse. How can it ever be okay to chop off an animal’s tail without anesthesia, lock it in a cage so tight it cannot turn around, toss live male chicks into a grinder, or jam an electric prod into a cow’s anus—all of which are standard procedures on industrial farms? Everyone gets the point intuitively: no self-aware creature should be subjected to this relentless gauntlet of abuse—especially when the purpose of that suffering is merely to satisfy our palates. If only by virtue of our own moral gag reflex, then, we have granted animals a basic level of moral consideration.
Ethically speaking, matters at this point become significantly more complicated. This is where, after all, practice and principle suddenly converge, revealing the heart of the hypocrisy: the elevation of how animals are raised as a moral consideration (poorly in factory farms; well on humane farms) above why we are raising them (to kill and eat them in both cases). It is at this crucial moment in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the beast against its will—that the moral consideration so effectively deployed to condemn the factory farming of animals loses its punch and its plausibility. Which, again, brings us to the contradiction.
It seems not only reasonable but essential to ask: How can a movement claim to care so deeply about farm animals that it wants to restructure all of animal agriculture to ensure their happiness but, at the same time, turn those same animals into an $11 appetizer plate of fried pig head? What moral principle could possibly accommodate such a whiplash-inducing shift in practice? And if there were such a principle, would you ever want it to guide your life? Bob Comis, who embodies the omnivore’s contradiction with such self-awareness, articulated the problem this way in a recent interview with Modern Farmer magazine:
[L]ivestock farmers lie to their animals. We’re kind to them and take good care of them for months, even years. They grow comfortable with our presence, and even begin to like us. But in the end, we take advantage of the animals, using their trust to dupe them into being led to their own deaths.
With kindness, they kill them.
No comments:
Post a Comment