My current position on this is, I eat meat and probably always will, and I don’t feel much compunction about it, but I don’t approve of needless cruelty and suffering for animals raised for consumption. While I don’t make much effort to curtail my consumption of animal products, neither would I go to bat for it – if meat were unavailable, I wouldn’t eat it. Those of us lucky folk in the developed world have an abundance of food these days, and all questions of the historical food chain aside, we don’t need to eat animals to survive anymore. Food is not that important and I don’t see meat-eating as somehow essential to my character or inheritance. So, if humane conditions on farms, and in dairies and slaughterhouses and so forth, led to less available and pricier meat, I would think it a worthwhile sacrifice. I would love to know that any animal-derived product I bought had never been the cause of pain and misery to any living creature at any stage of its growth, manufacture and transport – and hell, let’s extend that wish to all clothing, electronics, home furnishings and so forth – and if that guarantee meant that instead of piles of affordable goods to choose from, I had a smaller selection of pricier items, I’d happily make the trade-off and quit inadvertently subsidizing and profiting from exploitation and suffering. I just don’t want to have to work at it.
The more we learn about the evolution of our species, the more difficult it becomes to draw a firm and absolute line between humans and other animals. Apparently, the latest word is we’re closer to dogs than chimps, which may go some little way toward explaining why we treat dogs like they’re people:
The marketing folks of the pet industry, in fact, use the term “humanization” to explain their good fortune. The pet owners driving the growth, many of them baby-boom empty-nesters, aren’t satisfied with shopping for their pets as animals. They’ve promoted them to junior humans, entitled to the same concern for health and happiness and company. Nearly half of pet owners in one survey say their animal sleeps in their bedroom (which probably explains the boom in the grooming business) and the most popular names for pets—Max, Chloe, Bella—sound a lot more like babies than the Spots and Fidos of yesteryear.
While the pet industry may be recession proof, we do not apparently ascribe the same importance to zoos, which have in fact declined in society’s estimation, at the same time as house pets have risen:
A lot of people wonder how much the current economic downtown resembles that of the Great Depression. One big difference comes in the support of zoos. In the ’30s, the institutions received significant support from Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. Artists created advertisements encouraging the public to visit zoos, and new buildings and exhibits sprung up in zoos across the country. St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo, for example, came out of the Depression with a bear grotto, monkey island, barn, and main building, thanks to the WPA.
Now, however, any allocation of funds to struggling zoos is immediately decried as wasteful spending. (I’m not saying I disagree.) And apparently, we haven’t been doing such a hot job of tracking and protecting endangered species, either.
Some feminists have long drawn parallels between mankind’s entitled disregard for animal welfare, and man’s viewing of women as an obligated sex class – both cases involve one group defining itself by its ownership of and right to use another group. Typically, these arguments are attempts by animal rights activists to persuade women of the importance of respecting all life as autonomous; PETA, on the other hand, offensively uses images of degraded women to market their animal rights agenda to men. (To me, the first is a stretch; the latter, an outrage.) Here’s Twisty on this:
The parallels between the myth of the happy hooker and the myth of the self-sacrificing meat animal are legion. . . . Both represent the privileged class’s celebration of itself and its contempt for anything it happens to debase in the course of its daily pillages. And the myths about oppressed individuals choosing to serve the vulgar interests of their oppressors have been created to allow the dominant culture’s beneficiaries to sleep at night.
Actually, these comparisons predate feminism:
A distinguished philosopher, Thomas Taylor, reacted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 call for “the rights of woman” by writing a mocking call for “the rights of brutes.” To him, it seemed as absurd that women should have rights as that animals should have rights.
(from the Kristof article discussed below)
Really, though, we all use animals to serve our purposes, even if that only involves misinterpreting canine affection as familial love, which, while not likely to cause any duress to the animal in question, might be nauseating to other humans.
But despite the many persuasive arguments for prioritizing the ethical treatment of animals, I can’t seem to work up much steam over animal rights. I know that worthy causes need not compete with each other, and that the way we treat animals is part and parcel of our overall attitude toward (and stewardship of) life on this planet, and so animal welfare is an integrated part of everything else in our long march toward a more advanced society. But at the same time, I care more about starving babies and enslaved women than tortured pigs and cows. (And by “care about”, I of course mean “think, read and blog about.” Not “donate to” or “campaign on behalf of.”)
Luckily, while my capacity for caring may be limited, no wee chicken is beyond the reach of the sheltering arms of my favorite journalist, Humanitarian Hero-at-large, Nicholas Kristof, who recently took a break from his usual coverage of the abuse, poverty and disease of unfortunate humans to pen a column on animal welfare:
One of the historical election landmarks last year had nothing to do with race or the presidency. Rather, it had to do with pigs and chickens — and with overarching ideas about the limits of human dominion over other species. I’m referring to the stunning passage in California, by nearly a 2-to-1 majority, of an animal rights ballot initiative that will ban factory farms from keeping calves, pregnant hogs or egg-laying hens in tiny pens or cages in which they can’t stretch out or turn around. It was an element of a broad push in Europe and America alike to grant increasing legal protections to animals.
Let’s hope there’s more of this, and that “guilt-free” food will come to mean something more significant than “low-calorie”.
