On Eating Animals

One of the most important essays on this year - On Eating Animals by Mary Johnson; sadly still not even a fraction of population in this country are aware of their cognitive dissonance.

• For much of our settled history—and even today in parts of the world—most people lived in close proximity to farm animals. Animals fertilized our crops, shared our labors, and nourished our bodies, helping us enlarge our settled communities. Families commonly kept a few farm animals, gave them names, and saw them as individuals with distinct temperaments. Children grew up around them, related to them effortlessly, and came to know their cycles of birth, aging, and death. Our obligations to domestic animals arose in part from a sense of kinship, community, and mutual dependence; we saw in them our own instincts, physical vulnerabilities, and social-filial attachments. They frequently inhabited our myths and polytheistic beliefs. Each time we killed and ate one of them, we also silently paid the price, however small, of having known the animal in life and in its dying moments. Children were often saddened by the slaughter of an animal they knew, and missed the animal for a while. Ritual animal sacrifices occurred only on special occasions. Abuse of animals occurred too, but it was neither systematic nor centrally organized, and depended on the moral compasses of the owners. Like people, animals had their own luck in ending up with a severe human family or a gentler one.
• What might have arrested this decline in the fortunes of farm animals are big cultural ideas, both religious and secular, that for whatever reasons opposed killing animals. But those did not arise in the West as they did, for example, in India. Depending on whom you ask, Western monotheistic religions, while seeing humankind as God’s special creation, ranged in attitude from passive disaffection to active malice towards animals. Christian doctrine has practically no injunctions against treating animals as a means to human ends, so no sin is committed when mistreating or killing animals. Rather, animals were declared vastly inferior, incapable of possessing souls, and created for the use of humans, who stood right below the angels. And so Western monotheisms have long seen animals as dispensable for human interests, desires, and whims. (This is also true for the “Confucian zone” of East Asia.)
• The above quote comes from Franz Kafka, who was writing about literature and contended that, “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us.” How can we confront our colossal indifference regarding animals? Clearly, most people don’t even know about the horror and pain we inflict on billions of birds and mammals in our meat factories. But there’s no good excuse for this, is there? It’s more likely that we don’t want to know—can’t afford to know for our own sake—so we turn a blind eye and trust the artifice of bucolic imagery on meat packaging. Some see parallels here with the German people’s willful denial of the concentration camps that once operated around them, or call those who consume factory-farmed meat little Eichmanns. “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer (who also used to say he turned vegetarian “for health reasons—the health of the chicken”).
• It’s also possible that even if we really took the time to discover how we treat farm animals, most of us might in good faith still decide to patronize factory-farmed meat. We might conclude that the price we make animals pay, and the price we pay in sacrificing part of our humanity, are worth the benefits. Such honest deliberation would require that we make our meat factories open to the public—give them glass walls, so to speak—even visit them with our kids, so they too can decide for themselves. That might be a step towards a clear conscience. But meanwhile, how terribly dishonorable we look by averting our gaze and choosing ignorance, and—in a surreal twist—going sentimental for cows that escape while callously sponsoring the anguish and pain of billions of their fellow animals.