Reading: September 2008 Archives

"We all have a tendency to complacency with our own ways..."

A brief conversation I had yesterday illuminated this argument well:

"I don't want to talk to you because you always have a way of making me want to be vegetarian."

"Why?", I asked politely.

"Because it's not right what we are doing. I was a vegetarian for about three months but a friend made some food one time, and well...I just don't think about it anymore."

Consider for yourself what this response reveals, and if it parallels your own arguments against those who ask, "Shouldn't the suffering of everyone capable of suffering count?"

Simon Blackburn writes in Being Good,

"We do not like being told what to do. We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience. People who disturb that equilibrium are uncomfortable, so moralists are often uninvited guests at the feast, and we have a multitude of defenses against them. Analogously, some individuals can insulate themselves from a poor physical environment, for a time. They may profit by creating one. The owner can live upwind of his chemical factory, and the logger may know that the trees will not give out until after he is dead.

Similarly, individuals can insulate themselves from a poor moral environment, or profit from it. Just as some trees flourish by depriving others of nutrients or light, so some people flourish by depriving others of their due. The western white male may flourish because of the inferior economic or social status of people who are not western, or white, or male.

Insofar as we are like that, we will not want the lid to be lifted."

We exist in an ethical environment:

"This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live," Blackburn writes. "It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible...It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame...what can be forgiven and what cannot. It gives us our standards - our standards of behavior...It shapes our very identities (emphasis added).

This environment enables the monster of a paradigm animals-as-property. It justifies our collective speciesism. We avoid, because of the prevalence of this standard, the question begging nature of making species membership - a human genetic code - the necessary requirement for membership in the moral community. This, then, results in fallacious reasoning and undefended assumptions that are generally accepted, often unconsciously, as perfectly valid.

These are stories we tell and re-tell to defend our actions to ourselves. Therefore, when the pattern is interrupted our intuition responds with A) anger, B) "I don't want to talk to you because...", or C) mere dismissal, which is made possible by the majorities' position of numerical and power superiority.   

As Blackburn argues, "Ethics is disturbing."

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox

Thanks go out to Vegan Soapbox and PETA

"This video exposes the cruelty that goes into every piece of leather, fur, wool, and exotic skins used for 'fashion'."  

Or rather, our culturally defined, and thus wholly arbitrary, understanding of what accounts for beauty.

Below is Gary Francione's pithy response to a "happy meat" peddler.     

From Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach:

Earlier today, Anna and I went to Whole Foods...On Sundays, there is an outdoor market in the Whole Foods parking lot. Local vendors sell fruits, vegetables, baked goods--and animal flesh and products.

One vendor had decorated her "organic meat" stall with pictures of her "free-range" chickens, pigs, and cows. We stopped to look at the pictures. I pointed out to her that there were no pictures of the slaughtering process.

"Oh, well we slaughter our chickens on the premises and our cows and pigs go to a slaughter facility that is only six miles away. They don't stay overnight and we try to make it as stress free as possible."

Another shopper had appeared and said, "I feel so much better about buying this my meat from farms like this."

The vendor remarked, "Oh, yes, these animals are our dear friends."

I responded, politely but seriously: "That's an odd thing to say; I hope that you don't treat your other 'dear friends' this way." (emphasis added)  

The vendor laughed. She thought I was joking.

"These animals are our dear friends." Think about that. Think about what terrible confusion such a statement reveals.

This is where the happy meat/animal products movement is leading us.

This is where the PETA-KFC controlled-atmosphere killing campaign is taking us.

We are moving backward. (emphasis added)  

Go vegan. It's the baseline of the abolitionist movement and is nonviolence in action.

Such a response could be employed when discussing ethical veganism with those individuals who argue that they "love" their horse companions while simultaneously forcing them to compete with others in events that are inherently dangerous. As these events occur for the humans' financial gain and "entertainment" alone, the horse is forced to accept their potential harm and death because we enjoy doing so. Therefore, this begs the response: "I hope you don't love your mother in this way."  

To what extent we are "moving backward" is contestable in my opinion. However, as an anecdotal matter, I have experienced first-hand Mr. Francione's fear: "Humanely" murdered nonhumans are more palatable - morally speaking - to otherwise compassionate - and therefore potential vegans and vegetarians - humans, which directly challenges the realization of our end: A vegan world.

Mr. Francione assumes a sort of hierarchy of importance. We have a) the premise: suffering is inherently evil, and b) the conclusion: a vegan world. Abolitionists often exist in the conclusion while forgetting the premise as a very thoughtful individual once said. Therefore, efforts to reduce suffering, which is an empirical matter of course ("Does X actually reduce suffering?"), are derided because they don't sufficiently address the conclusion: ending the property status of nonhumans. I agree in the abstract. However, in the practical, we cannot forget the suffering. Indeed, this, in my opinion, accounts for Mr. Francione's unjustifiable challenge to direct action campaigns by the ALF, for example. As such, holistic approaches are defensible and necessary.

I wouldn't, however, argue that Mr. Francione is harmful to the AR movement in his manifest divisiveness. This discourse is necessary and has been an important impetus for animal welfare organizations such as PETA to articulate an explicitly abolitionist platform: "Animals are not ours to X, Y, and Z." That means nonhumans are not our property.  

The effectiveness of PETA turns on the empirical matter motioned above and on the extent of the issue raised by Mr. Francione about "happy meat" = people feel better about killing nonhumans unnecessarily. Therefore, criticize and disagree; substantive dialogue is important. Perhaps Mr. Francione is correct and the death and suffering of nonhumans is more acceptable today than ever before, which suggests the failure of welfarism. Could be true, indeed. But veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages are being phased-out as well. This may only lead to more rational measures to exploit nonhumans, but it allows us to broach the subject on a national platform, which is important. Coupled with "new environmentalism," and informed, principled information campaigns, it could be a paradigm shift.       

I'm not implying that the abolitionists, a group that I self-identify with, forget the suffering. I am saying, explicitly, however, that they prioritize the conclusion and thus fail to truly consider all the wretched evil on the farm and in the lab.

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox   

Thanks go out to Vegan Soapbox.

It's unimaginable...until you see it. And then it's unbelievable. But, indeed, you saw it and thus it must be believed. It cannot be denied.

Eccentric Vegan correctly writes,

"...if it's good enough for your stomach, it's good enough for your eyes. If you eat pig(s)...you have a responsibility to watch this video."

From PETA:

"PETA's latest undercover investigation, at an Iowa pig factory farm that breeds and supplies piglets to be grown and killed for Hormel products, reveals cruelty to animals. During the investigation, sows were beaten, spray-painted in the face, and left to suffer from painful wounds and other conditions, and workers attempted to kill piglets by slamming their heads against the floor."

Creature Talk has an excellent post about this, with many additional details that will disturb even the coldest amongst us.

Get active here.

P.E.T.A.

"...health officials have known for decades that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease..."

I learned that from my mother when I was 15. It would appear, however, that some people haven't yet realized this:

"...yet R.J. Reynolds and the tobacco industry continue to conduct cruel experiments in which constrained animals are forced to inhale smoke every day - for hours at a time - through their noses, holes in their necks, or masks strapped to their faces."

Also,

"Tobacco industry documents state that new additives and products...are currently being tested on animals. R.J. Reynolds killed more than 1,000 mice and rats to test the effects of adding high fructose corn syrup to cigarettes."

Why?

"...to mask the actual taste and smell of tobacco."

Given the existing wealth of knowledge and the reality that people choose - they are not forced - to consume what they know to be harmful substances, isn't it reasonable to argue that experiments such as these, which try to better re-understand the harmful effects of cocaine on human beings, for example, are not defensible? Is it ethical, I wonder, to shift all this suffering from the individuals actually doing the action to hundreds of thousands of innocent, feeling animals?

Surely we can't defend this without appealing to blatant prejudice. And these experiments are funded by us, to the tune of billions of tax and consumer dollars, which, if mum continues to be the word, amounts to tacit acceptance of these practices.   

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox

Thanks go out to Ahimsa!

"...even if you walk to the burger joint, your food will have its own set of wheels--and an exhaust pipe."

The Institute for Ecological Economy Research performed a comprehensive study on the issue of environmental degradation, including, for example, global warming, and the food we eat.

"The researchers have reduced their results to numbers that reflect the distance driven in a mid-sized car that would produce the same amount of greenhouse gas over the course of a year. They took into account the energy used to produce feed for livestock, all transportation involved in the process, and even the methane produced by animals themselves."

The results are familiar:

"Vegetarians and vegans, well... drive less."

"Following an omnivorous diet for one year is comparable to driving 2,956 miles. Meanwhile, vegetarians travel half as far at 1,508 miles, and vegans rank a mere 391 miles."

Their policy recommendation is,

"While an omnivorous diet heavy on organic foods certainly reduces the toll on the planet's odometer, the researchers insist that the production of beef and milk--organic or not--ought to be curtailed" (emphasis added).  

I might suggest something far simpler: Go vegan!

Albert Einstein said,

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."  

It's as simple as A.B.C.: P.E.T.A.

This is an important campaign that concerns all of us. In the brief moments it has taken me to write this post, 253 companion animals have been abandoned at animal shelters. How many of them will be killed I wonder? For capricious reasons to be sure: Our fickle selfishness unnecessarily causing pain and suffering to those few animals we claim to love.    

 

For more on this issue, there is a lively ongoing debate between H.S.U.S. and Gary Francione (and others) on the issue of the institution of "pets." Click here.

A participant in an ongoing debate surrounding the question "Should we eat meat?" asked: "What do you mean by "unnecessary suffering?" Who decides what is unnecessary?" The commenter apparently takes issue (or understands what we mean but insists on being obstinate) with the term "unnecessary." I wonder, then, what do we mean by unnecessary?

Terms such as "needless," "superfluous," "excessive," "uncalled for," and "avoidable" are said to be appropriate synonyms according to my English thesaurus. But this isn't really helpful when we are considering an issue - like ethics and nonhumans - so distorted by an all-pervasive prejudice.

For consider: we generally accept the premise that causing another to suffer is only acceptable if the action is necessitated by some general understanding of what constitutes "a need." This would exclude, then, me harming you because it is more convenient than not doing so. You hurting me because you find it entertaining to do so would seem to violate this constraint. The racist, as another example, who causes a black American to suffer because the tradition in which he exists seemingly demands it would be considered unethical. Similarly, it would be wrong, on this premise, for a sexist to harshly "punish" his girlfriend when she expresses an opinion because his father did the same to his mother.

Cutting to the core of this issue then, I think we could reasonably agree that "Because of convenience, entertainment, or tradition I do X to you" would be considered inappropriate given our belief that something as terrible as suffering is only acceptable within a system of strict ethical limits. (See Gary Francione for more.) Avoidability is assumed here too: It's basic, ethically speaking, if I can complete action X without harming you, I ought to do so.

What about something as arbitrary as "I like how it tastes"? It seems to follow from our belief that pain is intrinsically evil that eating animal's because their body parts taste good would violate this premise. We eat animals (and wear their skin and fur, for example) because it is convenient to do so, because most everybody else has done so and continues to do so (i.e., tradition), and because we have learned to enjoy how they taste. And further, we watch the torture of bulls during rodeos and spectator events in Pamplona, Spain because it entertains us. We even insist on forcing bunny rabbits to consume massive quantities of "botox" injections in an effort to find out if it's safe for the Hilton's to use when trying to even out the wrinkles under their eyes because it's what we have always done. (Actually, these torturous experiments - LD 50 - are attempting to find out how much of something it takes for a bunny rabbit to commit suicide by overdoes.)

Ask yourself: Do you believe that we can do anything and everything to animals? Or are their some constraints that we all kind of accept? Consider Michael Vick-esk treatment, or those images of worker's pulling "downer" cows with a forklift. Is it possible that we simply haven't asked ourselves those uncomfortable, but perfectly logical questions, such as: Vick tortured dogs because it entertained him to do so, and we chastised him for it. But what's the difference between that wholly unnecessary example of suffering and us torturing and killing a cow just because we have been conditioned to enjoy how he tastes? (Again, see Francione.) 

The term unnecessary at least implies "avoidable." As such, and I think it's unreasonable to argue otherwise, in this situation with killing the cow, as there are perfectly viable alternatives that many, many individuals have been re-conditioned to enjoy - including "faux cow" options - doesn't our insistence on killing the cow violate our own beliefs about ethics?

Taste, convenience, entertainment, tradition: Is it not intuitive that these impetuses do not provide a good justification for forcing another to suffer? When applied to human suffering, I doubt that I would receive an argument from anyone. Therefore, this raises the question: Why do we accept these justifications - and therefore okay wholly unnecessary suffering - when we are considering animal pain, frustration, harm, terror, or any other form that suffering may take? As Francione argues, if we allow these exceptions, doesn't the "exception swallow the rule"?  

It's clearly a prejudice that mirrors racism and sexism in form: The interests, even at their most fundamental level (e.g., not to be in pain), of X group of individuals doesn't count ethically because those in group Y have arbitrarily decided to make membership in their own group morally relevant and because the Y's have the power to enforce this discrimination. Might, in this case, make's right, as it did in Nazi Germany and pre- (and post-) Civil War America.

Isn't it obvious, however, that we simply haven't unfolded the logic of our own positions about suffering yet? We know what constitutes "unnecessary suffering" in every other case accept in our relationship with nonhumans. And yet, it is precisely this relationship that represents the largest portion of utterly unnecessary suffering being experienced in the world today. Why doesn't this at least deserve a mention? And why am I "extreme" for broaching the question? 

Going further: Doesn't our acceptance of needless suffering on such a massive scale (e.g., 10 billion animals annually in the U.S. alone for food) undercut our own belief that it's almost an ethical absolute that forcing another to suffer is something that should be avoided to the greatest extent possible? This raises another all-important question: What kind of society would we exist in if suffering could be forced on another so needlessly, in such a shockingly cavalier manner? Prejudices such as bigotry have been thoroughly discounted as valid ethical principles, as should our collective speciesism that say's a horses pain doesn't matter if it conflicts with my desire to force him to jump over something. It isn't a good reason and we know it; given our rather muddied ethical history, we need to know it.

So let's dispense with "What's unnecessary?" shall we. You know; I know; we all know.

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox