Reading: June 2008 Archives

Dr. Steve Best, Ph.D. writes,

Each year, in the U.S. alone:

• Over 10 billion farmed animals are killed for food consumption
• 17-70 million animals are killed for testing and experimentation
• Over 100 million are killed for hunting
• 7-8 million animals are trapped or raised in confinement for their fur

These figures do not include the millions of animals killed by The Wildlife Services division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (formerly known as Animal Damage Control) to protect livestock industry cattle; the 55,000 horses killed in the United States and processed for human consumption; the countless numbers of animals exploited and killed by various facets of the animal "entertainment" industry; and other forms of killing by human predators.

Speciesism is so ingrained and entrenched in the human mind that the human pogrom (i.e., a sanctioned extermination or persecution) against animals does not even appear on the conceptual radar screen. Any attempt to perceive nonhuman animals as innocent victims of violence and human animals as planetary terrorists is met with befuddlement and derision.

But if terrorism is linked to intentional violence inflicted on innocent persons for ideological, political, or economic motivations, and nonhuman animals also are "persons" [morally]...then the human war against animals is terrorism.

Every individual who terrifies, injures, tortures, and/or kills an animal is a terrorist; fur farms, factory farms, foie gras, vivisection, and other exploitative operations are terrorist industries; and governments that support these industries are terrorist states. The true weapons of mass destruction are the gases, rifles, stun guns, cutting blades, and forks and knifes used to experiment on, kill, dismember, and consume animal bodies.

The ironies are all too painful:

• When beagle puppies are crippled and punched in the face,
• when monkeys are strapped into restraint devices that smash their skulls,
• when kittens have their brains invaded with electrodes,
• and when rabbits and guinea pigs are pumped with toxic chemicals until they die,

...we are asked to believe that this is science, not terrorism.

• When over 10 billion animals each year in the US alone are confined and killed in unspeakably vicious ways by food industries,

...we are told this is business, not terrorism.

In this sick and violent society, property is more sacred than life. [What could be more] heinous than anally electrocuting mink or conducting the LD50 tests that pour industrial chemicals into the bodies of animals until half of them die. 

The hypocrisies, inanities, ironies, distortions, lies, and contradictions that billow forth from a barbaric society that pretends to be civilized and humane are so massive, staggering, and outrageous that they are numbing to contemplate.

It's not the [animal rights movement] that deserve vehement condemnation, but rather the industries that exploit animals so viciously, the legal systems that institutionalize their interests, the media moguls that denigrate animal rights, and the states that run the whole insane asylum.

David Hume said that reason is and ought to be a slave of the passions. Hume should not be interpreted as favoring our rational assent to those irrational sentiments, beliefs or emotions that consume us as a species. But rather, as Bernard E. Rollin writes, "he was pointing out the fact that arguments alone do not move people; one must have an emotional pull toward actualizing the results of one's reasoning."

For Hume, then, 

"the ultimate basis of morality was feeling: we act on our moral positions because we are born with a psychological predisposition toward empathy or fellow feeling with other persons, because we are made uncomfortable by their suffering."   

As a vegan, the most common response I have when discussing our slaughter of 9 billion plus feeling animals for food is the following statement: "I don't want to hear about this...It will ruin my dinner." Doesn't this suggest that people do in fact feel uncomfortable because of the suffering that characterizes these processes, or about the way we treat animals more generally? Indeed, doesn't this reponse imply the validity of Hume's argument? I think yes.  

Gary Francione has argued that a refusal to be informed indicates an awareness of our moral schizophrenia when it comes to nonhuman animals. Moral schizophrenia can be characterized as follows:     

"Many of us live with dogs, cats, or other animals and regard them as family members. Yet we stick dinner forks into other animals who are no different from the ones we consider family members. This is odd behavior when you think about it. And on the broader social level, nearly everyone would agree that it is immoral to impose unnecessary suffering on animals -- which, by any definition of the term, means that it can't be right to impose suffering on them for human amusement, pleasure, or convenience. After all, a rule that says it is wrong to impose suffering on animals unless we find it pleasurable and amusing would sound silly. And yet, 99.9 percent of our use of other animals cannot be justified by any reason other than human amusement and convenience...No one maintains that we need to eat meat to lead an optimally healthy lifestyle. Indeed, an increasing number of health care professionals warn that eating meat and dairy is detrimental to human health. And animal agriculture is an ecological disaster...Our best justification for eating meat is that it tastes good. Our best justification for rodeos, circuses, zoos, hunting, and so forth is entertainment. In short, western culture claims to take animal interests seriously, and we all claim to eschew unnecessary suffering; yet we impose suffering and death on animals in situations that cannot be described as involving necessity of any sort (see Francione)."

Francione argues further that this response (i.e., "Don't tell me because it makes me sad") is an open invitation to continue the discussion further and try to educate the person. 

Paul and Linda McCartney said "If all the slaughterhouses were made of glass we would all be vegetarians." I think they were correct in so far as this statement appeals to the replacement of our unfamiliarity with knowledge, which if Hume is correct, will help to resolve our moral blindness in regards to various totally immoral practices. I wrote once, expanding on the McCartney's' statement:

"If slaughterhouses and animal testing laboratories, circuses, fur farms, puppy mills, zoos, factory farms, hunting events, etc. were made of glass (metaphorically) we would all be vegans."

I believe this is correct. One need not accept the philosophy of animal rights to decry unecessary, abject, suffering. I've argued that this is (or should be) the purpose of those well-funded organizations such as P.E.T.A. or the Humane Society of the United States: exposing all these animal abuse industries and distributing the message throughout the public sphere. (Spare us the self-defeating "happy meat" campaigns and show us the videos!)  

Make the videos, show people what is occuring and trigger that empathy that we have psychologically hard-wired into us. It's there just waiting to be found, or how else could we possibly explain the feeling that Francione's insight is premised on: the love we feel for our dog and cat companions.

We must appeal to our collective passions, which as I see it, is the only method to bring this discourse down from the abstract to the real - the concrete. 

Consider the outcome for a moment: If someone views a video of a flailing chicken going into a scalding bath of water - to be boiled while conscious of the experience - due to the speed and inaccuracy of the process, and yet finds nothing morally objectionable therein, they are implicitly approving of cruelty. They are as a matter-of-fact saying that such acts of cruelty are perfectly acceptable; "we are okay that this is happening," indeed, so okay "I'm going to continue to purchase and eat chickens that were possibly boiled to death."

Who's going to say that, either implicitly or explicitly?

And people believe that animal rights activists are "crazy," radical," "nuts," etc. Really? Who is the dangerous group here - those who say No! to slitting open the throat of a conscious hog who has been suspended upside down, or those who say Yes! and purchase their perfectly packaged ham?  

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox         

From Compassion Over Killing (COK) and Peter Singer.

According to a recent United Nations report, "Livestocks Long Shadow,"

"...raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of tansportation combined."

1. A single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day, which is equivalent to that of 20 to 40 humans. And unlike human sewage, cow waste is not processed or elaborately treated therefore its negative environmental impacts are not negated. 
2. Peter Singer writes in The Ethics of What We Eat,

"An adult pig produces about four times the amount of feces of a human, so a large confinement operation with, say, fifty thousand pigs, creates a million pounds of pig urine and excrement every day." These factory farmed pigs amount to about 90% of the pigs killed and eaten in the U.S. today.

Singer continues,

"...a University of Delaware study found that Sussex County, Delaware, which produces 232 million chickens annually...only has enough land to cope with the manure from 64 million chickens. Up to half of the nutrients in the excess manure washes off into the rivers and streams, or gets into the groundwater. A third of the shallow wells in the Delmarva Peninsula, including those going into the underground aquifer used for drinking water, have nitrate levels above the federal safe drinking water standards, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In the rivers and bay, these nutrients stimulate too much algae growth. The algae decomposes, sucking oxygen out of the water, and fish and other forms of water life die. The bay now has "dead zones" that cannot support fish, crabs, oysters, or other species of ecological significance. In July 2003, a dead zone stretched for 100 miles down the central portion of the bay."    

Researchers from the University of Chicago came to a similar conclusion, reporting that when all levels of production are factored in - from livestock crop production (i.e., feed) to shipping animals to slaughter - a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating meat, eggs, and dairy than by switching to a hybrid car.

It also takes more land, water, and energy to produce meat than it does to grow foods for a vegetarian diet. Eating plants directly is more efficient than growing and harvesting them in order to funnel them through farmed animals.

• 70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry.
• It's estimated that it takes between 15-25 pounds of plant protein to produce a single edible pound of meat protein.
• On average 990 liters of water are required to produce one liter of milk.
• More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock.
• A 2007 journal published by the American Dietetic Association states that researchers found "meat protein production required 26 times more water than vegetable protein on rain-fed lands."
• "Feedlots thrive because in the U.S.," Singer writes, "bulk corn sells for about 4 cents a pound - less than the cost of production, thanks to the billions of taxpayers' dollars the government gives in subsidies to the growers. (Most of the cash goes to people who are already very wealthy). The corn in turn requires chemical fertilizers, which are made from oil. So a corn-fattened feedlot steer is...the very last thing we need: a fossil-fuel machine...[It is estimated that] 284 gallons of oil went into fattening 534 [steer] to their 'slaughter weight' of 1,250 pounds."

These are just a few examples that prove my point: environmentalism ought to be analogous with veganism if environmentalism is to be taken seriously. "Radical environmentalism," or a Green Movement more generally, that does not take veganism as a necessary (not just a sufficient) condition is a contradiction on its face.   

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson writes in his great book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals,

"Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They (nonhumans) are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making."    

This was said in a different context, however, it's apt. I might add, our children, and future generations alike, will also be condemned to hell on earth if we continue along this path of ours.

Fuel efficient vehicles? Clean energy? Public transportation? Regulate carbon? Clean air? Pollution tax? Re-forestation? Yes!

But what about that which stares you in the face every morning, noon, and night: your meal. The question is, do you really care or are you just pretending?   

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox  

Over at Unpopular Vegan Essays, the author comments on several fallacies and other underlying problems inherent within the so-called "compassionate carnivore" movement. The essay is so commonsensical that I felt it necessary to reproduce it in its entirety here. Enjoy!

The Compassionate Carnivore

Recently, there has been a stream of authors writing about how wonderful it is to be a "compassionate carnivore" and be "shameless" (in the non-pejorative sense) in consuming animal products.

First, let's look at the term "compassionate carnivore." The first error that jumps out from that expression when applied to humans is that humans are not carnivores; not even remotely close. Consumption of animal products in the percentage of total caloric intake that carnivores consume gives us serious diseases and sends us to our grave very early. The second mistake that jumps out is that even if humans were carnivores, carnivores aren't compassionate. Real carnivores who are living in the wild need to kill and eat flesh to survive. Carnivores are neither compassionate nor uncompassionate; they are merely doing what they need to do to get through the day or week. If they don't kill, they die. It is that simple. The case of domestic carnivores, such as cats, the situation is more complex due to the possibility of finding adequately nutritious plant-based and/or synthetic alternatives to flesh. We humans, however, are a clear-cut case of a species that can live optimally and find all the gustatory entertainment we want on a well-balanced vegan diet.

So why have some of these authors chosen such a nonsensical term as "compassionate carnivore" with which to describe themselves? For one thing, by using the word "carnivore", it seems that they want to imply, and perhaps even self-deceptively believe, that their consumption of animal products is a necessity, if not physically or nutritionally, then at least psychologically. In fact, however, from a nutritional standpoint, the reverse is true: animal products are detrimental to health in direct proportion to the quantity as a percentage of caloric intake as soon as that percentage reaches 3-5%. From a psychological standpoint, going vegan is just a matter of changing habits. Once the habit is broken, being vegan takes no psychological effort; only an effort to avoid food items with animal products. The longer we're vegan, the less we're tempted by the flesh and bodily fluids that we used to think we couldn't live without. Indeed, many vegans, me included, are nearly as disgusted by the thought of consuming animal products as we would be with cannibalism, including breast milk and menstrual fluids (equal, of course, to the chicken's menstrual fluid: the egg).

The other reason for choosing terms like "compassionate carnivore" is to camouflage the not-so-pleasant reality that is an essential part of consuming animal products: cruelty and unnecessary, intentional killing. Unfortunately for the self-styled "compassionate carnivore", however, such qualifying terms have the same effect as dousing an unpleasant odor with perfume: you can smell both the cover up and the underlying stench equally well, and the combination smells worse than the bad smell alone. The self-deception is transparent, and the more convinced the "compassionate and shameless carnivore" is that he or she has accomplished a respectable cover-up with the "compassionate" or "shameless" labels - just like the perfumed fetor - the more of a spectacle it is.

For about six months to a year prior to going vegan, I remember that I experienced cognitive dissonance, mostly trying not to think too much about the ramifications of my diet for the sentient and innocent (in particular: What, exactly, was the difference between my beloved dogs and a pig or chicken?), and wondering if I could ever pull off becoming a permanent vegan. The "compassion" was there to a small degree, as evidenced by the cognitive dissonance, but it obviously wasn't there to the degree that I could label myself "compassionate" with respect to the animals and their flesh and bodily fluids that I was consuming. I could have legitimately called myself "compassionate" with respect to my dogs or to humans in general, but with respect to those animals whose parts and fluids I was purchasing at the store? No way. My speciesism was still quite strong at that time and never subsided until I went vegan. For even a few months after I went vegan, some speciesism remained with me until I realized that it is also justice - treating similar cases similarly, and not merely compassion, which nonhuman beings deserve from rational, moral beings as much as any other sentient being born innocently into this world deserve it.

Perhaps some of those people who fashion themselves "compassionate carnivores" or "shameless carnivores" might soon take the "compassion", "conscientious", and "discerning" parts seriously and go vegan. In that case, there will be no need for swanky words like "compassionate" and "shameless" as a façade to dress up uncompassionate and ignoble behavior, because actions speak much louder than words. If phrases like "compassionate carnivore" and "shameless carnivore" are oxymoronic, then phrases like "compassionate vegan" and "shameless vegan" are redundant.