According to animal rights theory, respecting the interests of animals in this way would mean abolishing the use of them as resources. So we’d all have to become vegans who neither eat animals nor use any other animal products. Vegan advocates face a daunting challenge, though, since most of us have a strong prejudice in favour of humans. This makes it relatively difficult for us to empathise with non-humans, so we are reluctant to give up the spoils of animal domination — meat, eggs, cheese, wool, fur and leather — and exchange them for tofu, pleather (plastic leather) and animal liberation.
In the face of this inertia, some have asked us to imagine ourselves in the position of the animals that we exploit and kill. Jonathan Safran Foer puts this in the form of an alien invasion in his anti-factory farming treatise, Eating Animals (2009):
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?Suppose that we are doing our usual thing of exploiting animals because they aren’t smart or powerful enough to fight back. An alien species that is smarter and more powerful than us lands on Earth and decides to follow our example by exploiting and killing us. Why shouldn’t aliens use their technological and cerebral edge to turn us into food, clothes, entertainment and research subjects, just as we do to animals now?
This is, of course, a sci-fi repackaging of the ‘Golden Rule’ — that is, one should treat others as one would like to be treated oneself. This argument resonates because most of us have picked up a version of ‘do as you would be done by’ somewhere along the way, no matter how secular our upbringings. Could it be, then, that if we want to be consistent with our own values, the animal activists are right that we need to go vegan?
We might object that there is something misleading about the alien scenario. It wants to make us see things from the animals’ point of view, yet fudges it by putting us in the animals’ place while maintaining our human cultural beliefs and cognitive abilities. There are certainly similarities between human and non-human experiences, especially when it comes to pain, but as with the Epsilons in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) who are genetically designed to tolerate a subservient existence, we assume that cows, pigs, lambs and chickens who are raised on farms and killed in slaughterhouses do not suffer the horror and existential anguish that humans would in the same circumstances. This is why the alien hypothetical is something of a cheat, and equally why comparing factory farms to the Holocaust and human slavery rings false.
Even so, if animals want to avoid suffering and want to live, as surely they do, using them as resources violates those interests. Given that humans cause animals so much suffering and death while offering them so little in return, there’s no denying that for most other animals on this planet, we might as well be a malevolent invasion.
So, my objection to the alien invasion scenario is more sweeping. If we want to take the interests of animals seriously, then the biggest failure of the analogy is that it underestimates just how malign we are. Sure, if we were replaced as the dominant animals on the planet, we’d probably prefer the new ruling species to be vegan. But if aliens with superior technology and minds came here and were determined to treat us the way that vegan humans treat animals on this planet, we’d still be in serious trouble. Veganism would hardly figure as a safeguard of our wellbeing.
Universal veganism wouldn’t stop the road-building, logging, urban and suburban development, pollution, resource consumption, and other forms of land transformation that kills animals by the billions. So what does veganism do exactly? Theoretically, it ends the raising, capture and exploitation of living animals, and it stops a particular kind of killing that many vegans claim is the worst and least excusable: the intentional killing of animals in order to use their bodies as material goods.
Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems.
by Rhys Southan, Aeon | Read more:
Illustration: Salad by Till Nowak
