I’ve debated, over the last forty-eight hours, whether it was worth responding to this risible National Review article (is that a redundancy, I wonder?): Veganism is Murder. Wesley J. Smith, who is apparently writing a book about the animal rights movement, opines:
Listening to animal-rights activists bray on about the wrongness of slaughtering animals for food — summarized in their advocacy phrase “meat is murder” — one would think that the choice we have is between a diet in which animals are killed and a strictly vegan diet involving no animal deaths.
But life is never that simple: Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use.
Smith is hardly the first to point this out; indeed, serious environmentalists (Smith is neither) have gently made that case to some of the more naive members of the animal rights community. It’s absolutely true that no respirating, masticating, clothes-wearing consuming human can ever claim that the life they live is entirely free from the stain of death. Plant-based agriculture takes lives. A squirrel on the motorway can be crushed as easily by a Toyota Prius as by a Ford Expedition, and the chemicals released by companies making synthetic shoes can do nearly as much harm as is done by those who use real leather. No thoughtful, educated vegan believes the myth of his or her own absolute personal purity. We know, better than most folks, how complicit each of us is in the ongoing Great Crime that human beings are perpetuating against our fellow creatures.
The game that Smith and the others play is a tiresome, but surprisingly effective one. “If you can’t be perfectly ‘cruelty-free’, why try?” If every choice you make results, in some sense, in harm, aren’t all harms equal? Smith suggests that the clearing of fields to plant soybeans is just as murderous (to mice, for example) as the beef industry. In some sense, he may be right, if all we’re going to do is count the total number of organisms destroyed. Of course, the amount of land needed to feed a nation a diet rich in animal protein is far greater than the amount of land needed to feed a nation a plant-based diet, a point Smith and his ilk conveniently ignore. Cattle farming consumes more water and destroys more habitat for small wild creatures than does most plant-farming, if for no other reason than in terms of energy expended for “energy return”, factory farming of animals is wildly inefficient.
Some people become vegan for health reasons. Some people become vegan out of a commitment to living the most sustainable, least cruel lifestyle possible. But “least cruel” is not “cruelty-free”, and despite Smith’s claims to the contrary, no responsible voice in the animal rights community claims otherwise. Since the beginnings of human agriculture some twelve millenia ago, when the first spades bit into the earth so that seeds might be planted and the first streams were diverted for irrigation, humans have been exerting their dominion in destructive ways over the earth. That doesn’t mean that we all need to become fruitarians, or commit suicide. Responsible vegans are not misanthropes, though our enemies love to suggest otherwise. We know that no matter what we do, we — particularly but not exclusively the affluent in the industrialized world — will inflict some degree of damage on the earth and its creatures.
But we don’t let unattainable perfection become the enemy of the achievable good. Death is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t pursue good health. The fact that we will all die someday (should Jesus continue to tarry) is not an excuse for mistreating our bodies and hastening our demise. We want to live as well as we can for as long as we can, even though in the final analysis, our struggle against death will be futile. Similarly, vegans want to live with the least amount of cruelty, with the greatest possible care for our earth and its valuable creatures. We know that we are all complicit in the suffering of other organisms, but we don’t let that awareness incapacitate us. We know that we don’t have a choice to be cruelty-free, but we damn sure have a whole set of choices about the degree to which we choose to participate in cruelty and exploitation. And all else being equal, all the evidence suggests that true vegans are less complicit in the Great Crime than are those who, having choices to do otherwise, nonetheless continue to eat the bodies and secretions of animals.
Hugo-
In a way vegans have “left the conversation.” What they say doesn’t matter to the meat industry . . . AND it is the meat industry that controls the situation. If we accept that animals will continue to be eaten, but campaign for more humane farming, then we can really make a difference. We should tell the industry, “I’m a meat-eater and I want meat that is produced in a humane way. If you don’t provide this I will spend my money elsewhere.”
**International Example**: Dogs will continue to be eaten in Korea and China. It’s just part of the culture. In Korea it’s technically illegal to serve dog meat, but there is a huge black market. The government will deny that it dogs are consumed, but it DEFINITELY is pretty common. Some dog eaters believe that a slow, torturous death results in more delicious meat. As a result there are some horrific slaughter methods. If dog slaughter were made legal and dogs were classified as livestock (subject to government inspection), things would be a whole lot better.
Well, yes and no, Dave. Plenty of folks 200 years ago said that slavery would be inevitable and eternal, and the best that anti-slavery folks could hope for was to ameliorate the conditions for slaves rather than ending their servitude. As far as we can tell, slavery goes back almost as far as animal agriculture, and, despite its continued existence in a few isolated places, we have eradicated it against all prediction and expectation. We’re heading towards a tipping point.
That said, the fight can go on on two fronts. Animal welfare — the drive to improve animal conditions, and animal rights — the drive to have the rights of animals recognized as having a profound moral claim on all of us are not mutually exclusive. We can fight to improve conditions and end the whole practice of animal agriculture simultaneously. Many abolitionists did exactly the same thing, pursuing a multi-tiered strategy.
The difference is that slavery wasn’t crispy and delicious on a barbecue grill. There may be some “natural” built-in desire to dominate other human beings, but we didn’t evolve for slavery. We did evolve as omnivores; meat tastes good to us. See the history of prohibition, abstinence education, and the drug war for the success rate of crusades to stamp out things that people enjoy.
That said, we could all do with eating more vegetables and less tasty animals, for environmental reasons. Those reasons are much more attractive to ordinary people than eye-rolling arguments about cruelty; they’re even compelling to a confirmed carnivore conservative like myself. More salad, less salisbury steak.
In terms of lowering cruelty levels, a smaller meat industry is a sector that can afford to move to more humane practices. When meat was a luxury good for most people, cows had names.
Not everyone thinks they’re crispy or delicious, Robert.
Robert,
Your comparison between meat and slavery is odd; slavery had “crispy and delicious” benefits for the people who participated. They got to make money while other people did the work. I doubt it had much to do with any built in desire to dominate and everything to do with profitting with no overhead costs.
“No overhead costs” would mean your slave workforce was dead in about a month. Think it through. And while there were benefits to the slaveholders, that was a tiny fraction of the population - as compared to the large majority in western societies who enjoy the meat.
I’m sure, by the way, that you didn’t mean to disappear the slaves from the “people who participated” formulation. Their perceived level of benefit, not so high.
Surely, there are people who don’t think meat is tasty. Similarly, there are people who don’t enjoy TV, don’t watch movies, find music a bore, hate sports, don’t like to swim, etc. Tastes vary. Doesn’t mean that a desire for entertainment isn’t a common feature of homo sap.
Social hierarchies are something we are in fact evolved for; as Adam Hochschild points out in Bury the Chains, the idea of not-slavery is kind of a recent one in human history.
That said, Hugo, while it’s true that “you can’t be perfect” is no reason to give up on being vegan, it’s also true that for a certain subset of vegans, purity is the point. Being more concerned about animals, more pure, more careful in one’s diet than somebody else is a kind of one-upsmanship. (In the Jewish community, there are people who play the same game with observing kashrut.) Eating becomes a kind of extreme morality contest.
I’d note that you, yourself, can’t resist a little moral flaunting - “the secretions of animals”? If (as is done in India) I drink milk from a cow without ever eating beef or killing or starving a calf, is that less kind to animals than eating a soy burger that required countless bugs and mice to be killed in its production?
“No overhead costs” would mean your slave workforce was dead in about a month. Think it through.
Erm, slaves were not employees. They were OWNED. They sometimes were worked until they died. Just because they kept them fed enough to stay alive doesn’t mean they fed them well. And how ’bout them slave traders who would toss slaves overboard when the food supply couldn’t support them?
I’m sure, by the way, that you didn’t mean to disappear the slaves from the “people who participated” formulation. Their perceived level of benefit, not so high.
Slaves were not the consumers of the slave trade, the slave owners and the people who benefited from the sales of crops were. Didn’t do no fancy disappearin’ there, I was simply not referring to them as those who participated. They didn’t participate, they were dragged in and used and then discarded.
Trying to refuse similarity between the slave trade and animal consumption is just denial of the fact that we can, in fact, evolve past our current position in being omnivores towards a more plant-based diet. Yeah, so meat tastes good. There are a lot of things that feel good that we limit ourselves in or cut out completely because we know it’s not morally right, or because it’s not good for us to do something in excess.
I reject any similarity between the slave trade and animal consumption. I also reject the term “evolving” in the context of a decision not to eat meat, because of the continuing (inaccurate but pervasive) impression of “evolved” as higher and better. If you want to apply the post-enlightenment European version of rights to the animal kingdom, feel free to do so, but when you consider yourself more “evolved” then other people who do not, then it gets easy to indulge the worst habit of the animal rights movement: violating the genocide convention.
Apart from any other issues around veganism, I don’t believe everyone can live and thrive on a vegan diet. Not all people can eat the plants (primarily legumes) that provide the protein in a vegan diet. I suspect that for a substantial minority of people, enforced veganism would in practice mean a monotonous diet, constant undernourishment, and chronic illness.
Hugo uses the term epistemic conflict to describe our disagreements too often, but in this case, I think his use of the term has merit. We do disagree on a basic level about what we can know.
Then here’s a better analogy for you, B: Morally opposed to steak?
Don’t have one.
If you’re gonna snark, Gonz, at least pick an analogy that’s actually an analogy.
You know, like this one: coming into a vegan thread and arguing for meat-eating ways seems rather akin to coming into a feminist thread and insisting on arguing antifeminist points.
I’m not a vegetarian or a vegan, but I’m slowly sliding my meat consumption back in the interest of both health and being cruelty-conscious. And Hugo’s posts are great for helping me think about my choices. The comments on every vegan thread he posts where people whine about wanting their crispy and delicious meat? Not so much.
Exactly, B.
Furthermore, I think some people are getting the impression that Hugo thinks that raising animals for eating them should be banned. I didn’t read that anywhere in this post.
Exactly, B.
Furthermore, I think some people are getting the impression that Hugo thinks that raising animals for eating them should be banned. I didn’t read that anywhere in this post.
Furthermore, I think some people are getting the impression that Hugo thinks that raising animals for eating them should be banned. I didn’t read that anywhere in this post.
No, Hugo definitely always strikes me as encouraging people to change their habits, but as far as I can remember, has never said “I want to take meat away from everyone.” And so I enjoy coming here in part because I want to read his encouragements and apply them to my life. Comments about “Meat is good! Don’t eat it if you don’t want it!” do not help. Great - people (me included) still like meat - that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about meatless diets.
I’m so sorry to hijack this thread with my complaining, Hugo, but it gets old and possibly scares away like-minded people who might otherwise join in and actually converse.
The game that Smith and the others play is a tiresome, but surprisingly effective one. “If you can’t be perfectly ‘cruelty-free’, why try?” If every choice you make results, in some sense, in harm, aren’t all harms equal?
I agree that the game is tiresome and much like a broken record. I suppose it’s a way to discredit veganism and to silence advocates of more humane methods of slaughtering animals in the meat industry. It sure doesn’t sound like problem-solving.
When I learned, as a child, where meat came from, I had a strong negative reaction and didn’t want to eat it. My mother basically coerced me to eat meat, because she thought she was doing something healthy and nutritional for her daughter. I’m certain they were amused by my reaction, as other people often are and for whatever reason feel the need to blirt and spew criticisms, or commentaries laced with sarcasm, etc. It’s too bad more people don’t focus on problem-solving and try to adopt a more open attitude towards someone with a differing viewpoint. As an adult I still prefer a plant-based diet, and at times have tried to eliminate meat entirely from my diet for reasons mentioned above (healthier, least cruel and more sustainable). I’m not a perfect eater and although, I’ve never been much of a meat eater, I do occasionally eat it for protein. I feel a lot better about that choice and think it a healthier one for me. I know meat eaters and don’t push my views on them. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for them as they come across as angry, caustic, sarcastic and defensive, if I even mention that I prefer a plant-based diet. I’ve also stopped inviting people over for dinner since so many people are more interested in their political agenda’s and need to be heard and that they forgotten how to act like a decent guest, let alone humanbeing or even someone that anyone would want to converse with.
Oh, let me be clear. In some bright and shiny future, animals will be recognized as possessing actual rights, and slaughtering them for food will be unthinkable. But that is a way off, and in the meantime, I want to work to help carnivores transition to, if nothing else, eating meat that lived and died under the best possible conditions.
And mythago, milk is a secretion — when we call it “milk”, we sometimes forget what it is and where it comes from.
Hugo, I don’t know if your last response was to me or not, or to other responders in general. I’m in basic agreement with you. We differ in the bright and shiny future part as I don’t have confidence that human beings will change. Some people like eating meat and they also like to hunt, damage, destroy, slaughter and basically subject animals to all sorts of cruelty, simply because they can. A good many people are damaged and angry and desensitized to the suffering of animals, so they target them to inflict harm and cruelty on, simply because they can. That does not mean that people shouldn’t try to educate the public or work towards promoting and advocating for more humane conditions for animals.
People can and do change — witness our painfully slow, but clearly evolving attitudes towards race, homosexuality, and so forth.
“Opposed to X? Don’t do X” is kind of a silly argument when X is something one considers to be a moral wrong that should be stopped. “Don’t like honor killings? Then don’t kill your daughter”–oh, okay, I guess that I shouldn’t be bothered if people halfway around the world are murdering their children because somebody wolf-whistled at them. (And yes, it’s equally stupid when the X is “abortion”.) Similarly, it makes perfect sense to me that a vegan who believes meat is murder would want to end the killing of animals for food, rather than just saying, yo, I don’t want to murder but it’s OK with me if you do.
Hugo, you DO just realize you told a mother who has breast-fed three children that “milk is a secretion”? No, gosh, really? Thanks for the education! It’s always good to have a man around to explain these things my lady-brain can’t handle.
The point you’re carefully not addressing, though, is that you can gather animal secretions or products (milk, honey, wool) without killing the animal, whereas there’s really only one way to get a steak. So if I am drinking milk from a cow, that doesn’t involve killing the cow - whereas your soy cheese may have required the deaths of many small animals.
(Again, I’m not arguing that therefore there’s no point in trying to be cruelty-free; only that the holier-than-thou mindset is awfully seductive, and it seems to be giving you a lapdance, Hugo.)
Mythago, I use the word “secretion” to drive home a point to people who drink milk to think about where it comes from. I find it sometimes makes people do a double-take, which is always a plus.
You CAN gather milk, honey, and wool without killing the animal — but the mechanized abuse of dairy cows, bees, and sheep is appalling. Animals that aren’t slaughtered don’t necessarily have good lives. The “happy cows” ads on TV don’t reflect the reality that most dairy cows never get to move around. They’re better off than their male offspring, who become veal. It’s pretty tough for your average American to avoid complicity with the abuses committed by the dairy industry. If you’ve got your own cow whom you care for and milk, that’s a big improvement — but that’s not how most Americans live.
Props to Mythago for nailing the problem with don’t like/don’t do, and double props for a very funny metaphor (self-righteousness giving a lap dance).
Hugo, I’m completely in agreement with the position “I won’t drink milk because the way it is produced in this country is cruel to the cows.” But veganism, unless I’m badly mistaken, isn’t about boycotting until conditions are better; it’s about eschewing animal products, regardless of whether it results in suffering or death for the animal, purely because they come from an animal.
And that’s where it becomes problematic. If I can meet my caloric needs in part by getting milk and (non-rennet) cheese from goats I humanely raise myself, am I not a better friend to animals than the vegan who feeds himself with a bowl of rice that involved the killing of many bugs and mice to get that rice to table? Would you happily eat goat cheese at my house, knowing that the goats it came from led happy lives and that neither they nor their offspring would be culled or eaten? Or would you determine that something that came from an animal = bad, and therefore decline?
In other words, drawing a category of “nothing from animals” may make sense as a blunt, practical approach to choosing whether or not to eat commercially-grown food. It’s not a good approach if what you’re trying to decide is “what food choices can I make that are the least cruel?”
It also doesn’t really have the effect you’re looking for, unless that effect is “shock the mundanes”. You’re hoping that people will give up milk. Maybe instead people will shrug and figure that it sucks, but they’re not going vegan. Wouldn’t you rather that people think about ways to get milk humanely, rather than see it as a choice between soy cheese and suffering cows?
No question, Mythago, I want change that benefits animals. The purely vegan choice is, probably, the best one for the entire earth and all sentient creatures on its surface in the longest of long runs. Short term, going vegan is one of the best ways an average American can reduce his or her carbon footprint. No question, I’m not interested in going after milk-drinking Hindus in a small Gujarati village, or after a small-scale family farmer with a flock of sheep in rural New Zealand. Smithfield Foods; Tyson; Foster Farms; Hormel — these are the companies we need to focus our energies on now. And yes, I’m an abolitionist in my heart, but in the short-run, am willing to embrace the welfarist approach.
Then we’re back to the problem of the principle “don’t use anything from animals” being placed above “make the choices that harm animals the least”. When we’re talking about commercial, large-scale production, the two may end up being pretty much the same for practical purposes, but they’re not really the same.
And it’s dishonest to say that you’re ‘not interested’ in going after small herders or ranchers; you are, it’s just that there are more important targets currently occupying your attention.