We all know, or at least we can all figure out with a moment’s honest reflection, that our dominant attitudes on animals are inconsistent. Someone can be incredibly disturbed by the notion of eating their puppy, but happily consume bacon every other morning, and the cognitive dissonance between the two positions never seems to cause any bother. If we’re being serious, though, we know that many sows are smarter than chihuahuas, and that all of the traits that cause us to love our pets are just as present in the animals we regularly devour the murdered corpses of. (I am sorry, that was a somewhat extreme way of putting it.) This is a commonplace observation, but in a way that’s what makes it so strange: it’s obvious that we have no rational reason to think some animals are friends and others are food. The only differences are tradition and the strength of the relationships we happen to have developed with the friend-animals, but that’s no more a justification of the distinction than it would be to say “I only eat people who aren’t my friends.” Even though nobody can justify it, though, it continues. People solve the question “Why do you treat some animals as if they have personalities but other equally sophisticated animals as if they are inanimate lumps of flavor and calories?” by simply pretending the question hasn’t been asked, or by making some remark like “Well, if pigs would quit making themselves taste so good, I could quit eating them.”
The truth is disturbing, which is why it’s so easily ignored. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of all the remarkable facts about pigs. First, the stereotypes are false: they are clean animals and don’t sweat, and they don’t “pig out” but prefer to eat slowly and methodically. They are, as Glenn Greenwald puts it, “among the planet’s most intelligent, social, and emotionally complicated species, capable of great joy, play, love, connection, suffering and pain.” They can be housebroken, and can be trained to walk on a leash and do tricks. They dream, they play, they snuggle. They can roll out rugs, play videogames, and herd sheep. They love sunbathing and belly rubs. But don’t take my word for it—listen to the testimony of this man who accidentally adopted a 500-pound pig:
She’s unlike any animal I’ve met. Her intelligence is unbelievable. She’s house trained and even opens the back door with her snout to let herself out to pee. Her food is mainly kibble, plus fruit and vegetables. Her favourite treat is a cupcake. She’s bathed regularly and pigs don’t sweat, so she doesn’t smell. If you look a pig closely in the eyes, it’s startling; there’s something so inexplicably human. When you’re lying next to her and talking, you know she understands. It was emotional realising she was a commercial pig. The more we discovered about what her life could have been, it seemed crazy to us that we ate animals, so we stopped.
I want to note something that often passes by too quickly, which is that the sentience of animals like pigs and cows is almost impossible to deny. Animals can clearly feel “distress” and “pleasure,” and since they have nervous systems just like we do, these feelings are being felt by a “consciousness.” If a human eyeball captures light and creates images that are seen from within, so does a pig’s eyeball, because eyes are eyes. In other words, pigs have an internal life: there is something it is like to be a pig. We’ll almost certainly never know what that’s like, and it’s impossible to even speculate on, but if we believe that other humans are conscious, it is unclear why other animals wouldn’t be, albeit in a more rudimentary way. No, they don’t understand differential calculus or Althusser’s theory of interpellation. (Neither do I.) But they share with us the more morally crucial quality of being able to feel things. They can be happy and they can suffer.
Of course, critics suggest that this is just irrational anthropomorphism: the idea of animal emotions is false, because emotions are concepts we have developed to understand our own experiences as humans, and we have no idea what the parallel experiences in animals are like and whether they are properly comparable. The temptation to attributes human traits to animals is certainly difficult to resist; I can’t help but see sloths that look like they’re smiling as actually smiling, but these sloths almost certainly have no idea that they are smiling. Likewise, whenever I see a basset hound I feel compelled to try to cheer it up, even though I know that sad-eyed dogs aren’t really sad. Even if we do posit that animals feel emotions, nobody can know just how distant their consciousnesses are from our own. We have an intuitive sense that “being a bug” doesn’t feel like much, but how similar is being a water vole to being an antelope versus being a dragonfly? All of it is speculation. David Foster Wallace, in considering the Lobster Question (“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”), noted that the issues of “whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult,” and many can’t actually be resolved satisfactorily. How do you know what agony means to a lobster? Still, he said, “standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience… To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.”
And lobsters are a trickier case than other more complex creatures, since they’re freaky and difficult to empathize with. As we speak of higher-order creatures who have anatomy and behavioral traits more closely paralleling our own, there is at least good evidence to suggest that various nonhuman animals can experience terrible pain. (Again, hardly anyone would deny this with dogs, and once we accept that we just need to be willing to carry our reasoning through.) Once we accept that these beings experience pain, it next becomes necessary to admit that humans inflict a lot of it on them. We massacre tens of billions of animals a year, and their brief lives are often filled with nothing but pain and fear. The “lucky” ones are those like the male chicks who are deemed “useless” and are “suffocated, gassed or minced alive at a day old.” At least they will be spared the life of torture that awaits most of the creatures raised in factory farms. I don’t know how many atrocity tales to tell here, because again, this is not something unknown, but something “known yet ignored.” I can tell you about animals living next to the rotting corpses of their offspring, animals beaten, shocked, sliced, living in their own blood and feces. I could show you horrible pictures, but I won’t. Here’s Greenwald describing a practice used in pig farms:
Pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never even see their tails, never move more than an inch. They are put in so-called farrowing crates when they give birth, and their piglets run underneath them to suckle and are often trampled to death. The sows are bred repeatedly this way until their fertility declines, at which point they are slaughtered and turned into meat. The pigs are so desperate to get out of their crates that they often spend weeks trying to bite through the iron bars until their gums gush blood, bash their heads against the walls, and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in the wrong places, from the sheer physical trauma of trying to escape from a tiny space or from acute anxiety.
Separate from the issue of “conditions” is the issue of killing itself. Obviously, it is better if an animal lives in relative comfort before it is slaughtered, and better if their deaths are imposed “humanely.” But personally, I find the idea of “humane slaughter” oxymoronic, because I’m disturbed by the taking of life as well as by suffering. This part is difficult to persuade people of, since it depends largely on a moral instinct about whether an animal’s life is “inherently” valuable, and whether they should have some kind of autonomy or dignity. Plenty of people who could agree that animal torture is wrong can still believe that eating animals is unobjectionable in and of itself. My disagreement with this comes from my deep gut feeling that opposing torture but endorsing killing is like saying “Of course, the people we eat shouldn’t be kept in tiny cages before we kill them, that’s abominable.” Once you grant that animals are conscious, and have “feelings” of one kind of another, and “wills” (i.e. that there are things they want and things they don’t want, and they don’t want to die), the whole process of mass killing seems irredeemably horrifying. (...)
Because people slip so naturally into oblivious complicity, it’s crucial to actively examine the world around you for evidence of things hidden. What am I missing? What have I accepted as ordinary that might in fact be atrocious? Am I in denial about something that will be clear in retrospect? Every time I apply this kind of thinking to meat-eating, I get chills. Here we have set up mass industrial slaughter, a world built on the suffering and death of billions of creatures. The scale of the carnage is unfathomable. (I know sharks aren’t particularly sympathetic, but I’m still shocked by the statistic that while sharks kill 8 people per year, humans kill 11,000 sharks per hour.) Yet we hide all of it away, we don’t talk about it. Laws are passed to prevent people from even taking photographs of it. That makes me feel the same way I do about the death penalty: if this weren’t atrocious, it wouldn’t need to be kept out of view. “Mass industrial slaughter.” There’s no denying that’s what it is. Yet that sounds like something a decent society shouldn’t have in it.
The truth is disturbing, which is why it’s so easily ignored. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of all the remarkable facts about pigs. First, the stereotypes are false: they are clean animals and don’t sweat, and they don’t “pig out” but prefer to eat slowly and methodically. They are, as Glenn Greenwald puts it, “among the planet’s most intelligent, social, and emotionally complicated species, capable of great joy, play, love, connection, suffering and pain.” They can be housebroken, and can be trained to walk on a leash and do tricks. They dream, they play, they snuggle. They can roll out rugs, play videogames, and herd sheep. They love sunbathing and belly rubs. But don’t take my word for it—listen to the testimony of this man who accidentally adopted a 500-pound pig:She’s unlike any animal I’ve met. Her intelligence is unbelievable. She’s house trained and even opens the back door with her snout to let herself out to pee. Her food is mainly kibble, plus fruit and vegetables. Her favourite treat is a cupcake. She’s bathed regularly and pigs don’t sweat, so she doesn’t smell. If you look a pig closely in the eyes, it’s startling; there’s something so inexplicably human. When you’re lying next to her and talking, you know she understands. It was emotional realising she was a commercial pig. The more we discovered about what her life could have been, it seemed crazy to us that we ate animals, so we stopped.
I want to note something that often passes by too quickly, which is that the sentience of animals like pigs and cows is almost impossible to deny. Animals can clearly feel “distress” and “pleasure,” and since they have nervous systems just like we do, these feelings are being felt by a “consciousness.” If a human eyeball captures light and creates images that are seen from within, so does a pig’s eyeball, because eyes are eyes. In other words, pigs have an internal life: there is something it is like to be a pig. We’ll almost certainly never know what that’s like, and it’s impossible to even speculate on, but if we believe that other humans are conscious, it is unclear why other animals wouldn’t be, albeit in a more rudimentary way. No, they don’t understand differential calculus or Althusser’s theory of interpellation. (Neither do I.) But they share with us the more morally crucial quality of being able to feel things. They can be happy and they can suffer.
Of course, critics suggest that this is just irrational anthropomorphism: the idea of animal emotions is false, because emotions are concepts we have developed to understand our own experiences as humans, and we have no idea what the parallel experiences in animals are like and whether they are properly comparable. The temptation to attributes human traits to animals is certainly difficult to resist; I can’t help but see sloths that look like they’re smiling as actually smiling, but these sloths almost certainly have no idea that they are smiling. Likewise, whenever I see a basset hound I feel compelled to try to cheer it up, even though I know that sad-eyed dogs aren’t really sad. Even if we do posit that animals feel emotions, nobody can know just how distant their consciousnesses are from our own. We have an intuitive sense that “being a bug” doesn’t feel like much, but how similar is being a water vole to being an antelope versus being a dragonfly? All of it is speculation. David Foster Wallace, in considering the Lobster Question (“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”), noted that the issues of “whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult,” and many can’t actually be resolved satisfactorily. How do you know what agony means to a lobster? Still, he said, “standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience… To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.”
And lobsters are a trickier case than other more complex creatures, since they’re freaky and difficult to empathize with. As we speak of higher-order creatures who have anatomy and behavioral traits more closely paralleling our own, there is at least good evidence to suggest that various nonhuman animals can experience terrible pain. (Again, hardly anyone would deny this with dogs, and once we accept that we just need to be willing to carry our reasoning through.) Once we accept that these beings experience pain, it next becomes necessary to admit that humans inflict a lot of it on them. We massacre tens of billions of animals a year, and their brief lives are often filled with nothing but pain and fear. The “lucky” ones are those like the male chicks who are deemed “useless” and are “suffocated, gassed or minced alive at a day old.” At least they will be spared the life of torture that awaits most of the creatures raised in factory farms. I don’t know how many atrocity tales to tell here, because again, this is not something unknown, but something “known yet ignored.” I can tell you about animals living next to the rotting corpses of their offspring, animals beaten, shocked, sliced, living in their own blood and feces. I could show you horrible pictures, but I won’t. Here’s Greenwald describing a practice used in pig farms:
Pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never even see their tails, never move more than an inch. They are put in so-called farrowing crates when they give birth, and their piglets run underneath them to suckle and are often trampled to death. The sows are bred repeatedly this way until their fertility declines, at which point they are slaughtered and turned into meat. The pigs are so desperate to get out of their crates that they often spend weeks trying to bite through the iron bars until their gums gush blood, bash their heads against the walls, and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in the wrong places, from the sheer physical trauma of trying to escape from a tiny space or from acute anxiety.
Separate from the issue of “conditions” is the issue of killing itself. Obviously, it is better if an animal lives in relative comfort before it is slaughtered, and better if their deaths are imposed “humanely.” But personally, I find the idea of “humane slaughter” oxymoronic, because I’m disturbed by the taking of life as well as by suffering. This part is difficult to persuade people of, since it depends largely on a moral instinct about whether an animal’s life is “inherently” valuable, and whether they should have some kind of autonomy or dignity. Plenty of people who could agree that animal torture is wrong can still believe that eating animals is unobjectionable in and of itself. My disagreement with this comes from my deep gut feeling that opposing torture but endorsing killing is like saying “Of course, the people we eat shouldn’t be kept in tiny cages before we kill them, that’s abominable.” Once you grant that animals are conscious, and have “feelings” of one kind of another, and “wills” (i.e. that there are things they want and things they don’t want, and they don’t want to die), the whole process of mass killing seems irredeemably horrifying. (...)
Because people slip so naturally into oblivious complicity, it’s crucial to actively examine the world around you for evidence of things hidden. What am I missing? What have I accepted as ordinary that might in fact be atrocious? Am I in denial about something that will be clear in retrospect? Every time I apply this kind of thinking to meat-eating, I get chills. Here we have set up mass industrial slaughter, a world built on the suffering and death of billions of creatures. The scale of the carnage is unfathomable. (I know sharks aren’t particularly sympathetic, but I’m still shocked by the statistic that while sharks kill 8 people per year, humans kill 11,000 sharks per hour.) Yet we hide all of it away, we don’t talk about it. Laws are passed to prevent people from even taking photographs of it. That makes me feel the same way I do about the death penalty: if this weren’t atrocious, it wouldn’t need to be kept out of view. “Mass industrial slaughter.” There’s no denying that’s what it is. Yet that sounds like something a decent society shouldn’t have in it.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Katherine Lam
