The Meat We Eat: Part Three

My partner and I used to be vegetarians, coincidentally for the same exact amount of time- 12 years.  I began my vegetarianism as a college freshman working in the dining hall of my dormitory, horrified by the ingredients in the chicken nuggets and other 'meat-like' processed foods they offered there.  It didn't help that I was putting on the dreaded 'freshman 15' so I thought cutting meat out of my diet would help for weight control (little did I know that my fake meat and carb-loading ways would actually fatten my up quicker!).  I was getting into the whole hysteria over the destruction of the Amazon, which was being fueled by expanding cattle and soybean production around Brazil.  At the time, I did not even enter my mind that there might be grassfed cattle operations within the same county as my university that were struggling to find buyers of their meat.  I thought, meat was meat was meat and there were no choices, at least at the grocery stores I knew of.

I don't know what drew my partner to vegetarianism in the first place, but he too thought he would avoid meat to improve his health.  However, with his limited cooking skills, he didn't exactly fill the meat void with steamed kale and lentil stew.  He ate more starches, empty carbs, and found his energy lagging throughout the day.  At the time he was even an ultramarathoner, fueling his body with weird energy elixers and gels to keep his body moving.  He now thinks he would have performed even better and won more races had he been gnoshing ham and cheese sandwiches or beef jerky for his 6-8 hour runs.

When we started raising our own animals and killing our own animals, we felt like we could participate in eating them again.  We have a reverence for our animals that people who pick up their identity-less 'meat' products at the grocery store or fast food restaurant will never know.  So what about the morality of killing animals?  Again, I turn to the next installment of The River Cottage Meat Book and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's thoughtful words:

"Such determined adherence to the vegetarian cause, at whatever cost, only brings us back to the irreducible, absolute moral position with which we started: that killing animals to eat them is always, and absolutely, wrong.  Once the vegetarian position is reduced to this fundamentalist tenet, it becomes hard to counter rationally.  But you can have an intuitive objection to such a moral absolute.  Who says it's wrong?  What makes it wrong?  It doesn't strike me as in any way obvious that killing animals is, in itself, morally wrong.  Particularly if we are killing them for food.  We are not outside the natural order of things.  And if we don't kill them for food, then somebody else, or something else, will.

    That may sound trite, but it is an important point in this discussion.  That animals kill other animals for food is a fact of nature.  That all animals will eventually die is another.  A less obvious fact is that, of all the available deaths an animal can face in the wild, the most common, and probably the least traumatic, is death at the hands of another animal who wants to eat it.  "Dying of old age" barely exists in nature.  An animal suffering from injury or illness is likely to be killed by a predator before it finally succumbs to weakness or disease.  And it will be eaten by something- the jackal, the vulture, or the maggot.

    Humans and the animals they raise for food do not operate outside this natural sphere.  We kill animals for food that would otherwise die another death.  We are not taking life from the immortal.  There are differences, though, between ourselves and the other potential killers of our livestock.  One is that we tend to kill animals that are in the prime of life, whereas othe predators favor the young, the weak, and the sick.  But our preference for the healthy isn't a moral perversion: every predator would prefer a healthy animal to a diseased one, if it could catch it.  And by killing animals before they begin to degenerate or get sick, we are arguably minimizing their pain and suffering, not increasing it.

    Another difference is that we are, uniquely among meat eaters, not compelled to kill animals for food (although, as I have argued above, our ancestor probably had an irrefutable instinct to hunt prey).  Another way of putting this is that we are the only predatory species with the capacity to refrain from doing what comes naturally.  But does that mean that we should refrain?  Not necessarily.  After all, if the fate meted out by humans to the animals they kill for food is no worse, or perhaps demonstrably better, than that on offer from other potential killers, then isn't it morally preferable?

    As it happens, the way in which we kill animals for food is quite different from that of other predators.  We don't chase them down and tear them to death with our teeth and claws.  We don't crush them to death, or swallow them alive.  We corral them into groups, load them on to trucks, prod and poke them into a reasonably orderly queue, and then shoot them in the head with something called a captive bolt gun (We also do a little hunting- mainly with guns.  Saved for another chapter...)

    It is ironic, and also fairly astonishing, that the killing methods of many nonhuman predators are considered such a fascinating aspect of the natural world that films displaying them in graphic detail, often replaying the process several times in slow motion, are considred to be at the classy end of prime-time entertainment, fit for children as well as adults.  Whereas the final moments of human predation of our farmed livestock are considered too disturbing and shameful to be made available even for information.  In fact, such limited footage as does exist has often been filmed undercover and is more likely to be used to fuel the rage of the militant vegetarian than to educate us dispassionately about the way our meat is made.

    There is no doubt that Western society is very confused about death- both human and animal death.  Human death as dramatic entertainment in movies and on television has, like animal-on-animal predation, never been more familiar.  Yet the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it- by eating meat every day- are entirely protected from thinking about it.  Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes.  By the time meat reaches the consumer, its animal origins have been all but obliterated."

Just typing in this last paragraph made me feel guilty for not showing all you readers the rest of the sequence of photos that began with the table of knives above.  Here they are:






The first picture is killing the pig, second picture is scalding it, third picture is scraping the hair off, fourth picture is getting all the last hairs off, fifth picture is removing the guts.  Normally we don't kill too many pigs on the farm (especially in the muddy winter), but as you may have noticed, this one had a hernia that was getting near the point of bursting, which is an agonizing way for a pig to die.  We also took this series of photos for a workshop we gave on slaughtering and butchering your own animals.  Over 100 people squeezed into the small classroom to see our presentation, indicating the interest and need for people, especially beginning farmers, to learn these skills.

Comments

[sage]

Thanks for your blog and this perspective. I really appreciate all the work done by small scale pasture raised livestock raisers.

Check out my post about visiting Highland Hills in (currently) Petaluma. What a great experience. I think more farmers should have "open office hours" for people to make a connection to their food.

[Louche]

Good lord, I hope you didn't slit that pig's throat while it was alive. (RT: NO-WE SHOT IT WITH ONE BULLET TO THE BRAIN FIRST, THEN BLED IT OUT WITH A KNIFE TO THE THROAT)

Many if not most humans choose to live through old age, no matter how painful it might be, due to their interest in living. I wonder why you consider nonhumans to be different? I can certainly empathize with the idea of euthanasia, bizarre as it is in a community in which the majority of members may live through malthanasia (my euphemism). And if the animal dies naturally or, possibly, through euthanasia (a concept that confuses me on multiple levels), then I don't see any problem with eating its flesh. But I cannot wrap my head around the concept of euthanasia for beings who are our property, around the idea that the happiness of another species should be dependent upon its economic value to a species that does not necessarily depend on that species.

I want to know why you think that exploiting animals is better than setting them free - on a large scale. Why is it only sufficient to coexist with other animals if we can use them economically?

"Here's a moral question that many opposed to meat don't consider: Most of the animals we raise for meat would not ever have been born if they weren't intended for meat. Is it better for them never to have existed, than to have been raised to the age of slaughter?"
I think this is something that most vegans consider. I hear this argument all the time coming from meat-eaters - how could I not consider it? It's not a black and white question. Who gets to decide who lives and who doesn't and why? Obviously I think it's better if factory farmed animals did not exist. How dangerous it has proven for one species to dominate another so completely.

This is an interesting post. I am vegan, and I intend to stay vegan for the rest of my life for plenty of reasons. However, I am still struggling with the idea of what should be our relationship with other species on a large scale. It seems to me that, no matter how you argue it, we need to be consuming far less animals than we are. Six billion humans, many in poverty themselves, are simply not capable of taking care of 53+ billion animals.

Furthermore, with regard to the concern about why humans have trouble seeing animals killed by other humans vs animals killing animals, I believe that once you decide that an animal is a part of the human community, you begin to want to see it treated with some sense of equality. It's not just "the circle of life" anymore. Why is it that with regard to the self-interest of our own species, we never mention "the circle of life," but when we begin talking about the self-interest of other species, suddenly it's all about "the circle of life"? I think that the tension comes from the fact that we are talking about two vastly different spheres of existence. On the one hand, we deeply value life itself and see the damage caused by destroying it through killing or other means. But on the other hand, we see that nature itself is brutal and destructive to begin with. And we are trying to find a place in our world - our human dominated world - for these beings to exist. What can they contribute to the world community? Can they contribute something other than their flesh and bodily functions and skin? Should they need to contribute anything to humans? How do you share power with a species that cannot have power in the ways that our society values? How do you make the decisions for them that they'll never be able to make, in a world in which democracy is our most widely cherished value - equivalent to self-direction, "people power," etc.?

Yet find it interesting that you choose to eat meat for health reasons. Vegan or not, the diet can be healthy, so this is a bizarre starting point to an extremely complex moral issue.

I believe veganism is a powerful starting point for not only getting beyond the idea that economic utility to another stands above and beyond a being's own interests, but also for reducing the overall consumption of animals. But I respect your perspective. I respect honesty.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to speak on the same terms when your very lifestyle is being debated, and when that lifestyle, for practical and psychological reasons, dictates the course of your intellectual learning on the entire subject. It is difficult to speak honestly when so much is at stake. Meat-eaters are generally not invested in understanding why anyone would go vegan, in part thanks to the extreme power of habit, and vegans are only marginally (if that) more invested in understanding the merits of continuing to consume meat, in part because our marginalized vegan world is so fragile. So I think it's important to step back for a moment and distinguish our personal decisions from our understanding of world politics. Otherwise, it will just be people running into walls trying to understand each other forever.

[kate]

Thank you for your thoughtful blog!

I really appreciate knowing that there are conscientious people raising meat.

Given the usual industrial feed lot meat options I chose not to eat meat. But it seems like there are actually some ethical choices and I can eat occasional meat and not be contributing to environmental destruction or to animal abuse.

Thank you for providing more information!

[Throwback at Trapper Creek]

I'm late to this post, but the Sara Palin newscast was a huge joke, we got so much traffic on our blog about our turkey butchering post it was laughable. A few nasty grams as well. The public is so sheltered, that some people thought the killing cones were grinders. As if you would stick an animal in a grinder, guts, feathers and all and expect meat to come out the other end. Too much Chicken Run, I believe.

Your series is great Rebecca, and your blog title says it all. Thank you.

[adam]

Sara: Some scientisits propose "farming" and "harvesting" human organs as a rescource for the living. If corporations were to clone human beings so that they'd have a pseudo-utopian colony of human organ "crops," would this be better than not having such a colony because otherwise these humans would not get to experience a brief pleasurable life? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)

Why is it that we are comfortable "harvesting so-called (other-than-human) "animals" for resources but are horrified if anyone to "harvest" human animals? Perhaps you wouldn't farm humans because you do not have a taste for their flesh, but perhaps they could be "humanely" raised and culled--would you be morally opposed to such?

The reluctance to treat social animals (especially those who are dependent upon us and part of our immediate environment) with equal moral consideration is odd since so much of environmental rhetoric is about the "circle of life." It seems that many still believe humans are an exceptional animal, better and more worthy than the rest. You might even classify such sentiments belonging to moral "Creationists" since their ethics are more consistent with Abrahamic belief systems than Darwinism and his theory of animal sentiments. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1142&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

This sseems to be a consistent prejudice within the green/arcadian environmental movements. It's always the deer and the rodents and the geese who are "overpopulated" not humans. And when one believes there is a human overpopulation, it is usually women, the poor, or foreigners, the "they," who are to blame. This type of logic emerges from institutional oppression of those who are not fully human. Veganism operates as the anithesis of such an oppressive.

[adam]

Tana: The intentions of the caps were to differentiate the quotations from my critique of their arguments. Perhaps the caps were a bad means of doing so. I wasn't sure whether html tags for bold would work [and they don't; I just checked]. Still, however distracting the caps are, I think the critiques make good food for thought.

Barabara: I, and many other veg*ns, am well aware that death is inevitable and no one can ever be purely innocent. The position of veganism is that of anti-oppression in pracitce. As moral agents we ought not privilege one group of moral patients above another so that they become valued as little more than a mere means to the ends of the privileged. See more on this idea here: http://theveganideal.blogspot.com/2008/05/veganism-and-anti-oppression.html

This is also why vegans promote veganic farming: http://www.goveganic.net/

[Sara DowntoEarth]

Rebecca: I applaud you for addressing this subject so well (and so bravely).

Here's a moral question that many opposed to meat don't consider: Most of the animals we raise for meat would not ever have been born if they weren't intended for meat. Is it better for them never to have existed, than to have been raised to the age of slaughter?

We name all our animals. They all are respected and treated as well as we can. I say a small prayer of thanks to them and the web of life from which they came when we harvest them and again when we eat their flesh.

[Barbara Lamar]

Adam,

To eat, one has to kill. To avoid killing at all, one would have to lie down and die.

To produce eggs, one must cull the roosters. To produce milk products, one must breed cows who give birth to calves, not all of which can live out the full bovine lifespan.

Even if you eat no animal products at all, you are involved in killing. Obviously, you kill the plants you eat, but perhaps you only object to killing animals.

In order to grow plant food crops, thousands of acres of animal habitat have been destroyed, which causes living animals to starve or, in their search for a new habitat, to be run down by cars. Pesticides are routinely used to kill off insects, arachnids, rodents, etc. that compete with humans for plant food crops. Even organic farmers sometimes use various kinds of pesticides or mechanical means of killing animals that compete for the food.

Just because you do not personally kill the animals who compete for your food does not mean you are completely innocent of their deaths.

[Tana]

I doubt that there is only one vegan reader of this blog, first of all.

I think the flap about Sarah Palin's turkey was the juxtaposition of the "pardoned" bird and the fate of the bird in the scene playing out behind her. It wasn't the clueless media, it was her clueless handlers who set her up for that particular bit of ridicule (amidst so many others of her own creation).

(Is that my photo of the beloved Manchita?)

To Adam: it surely is difficult to "listen" to someone who is "shouting" in all capital letters. I don't know how long you've been online or how old you are, but if your eyesight is bad, you can bump up the font size by typing either "Control +" (PC) or "Command +" (Mac). It's considered bad manners to type in all caps: the internet equivalent of yelling at the top of your lungs. Thanks.

[Rebecca Thistlethwaite]

Adam- thanks for your input. I appreciate your perspective. Regarding health, yes I agree that a well-planned, whole-foods based vegan diet can be exceptionally healthy. However, I was in my teens and twenties when I was a vegetarian and was an awful cook. So for me, and many vegetarians/vegans that I know, our health suffered because we were not replacing the animal protein in our diets with the appropriate foods like legumes, fiber, and other nutrient-dense foods.
Also, keep in mind that most of this series was text taken from a cookbook of mine, The River Cottage Meat Book, so they were not my words. However, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a unique, honest perspective that I have rarely read or see, and that is why I used his words instead of mine.

[adam]

As one, if not the only, vegan reader of your blog, I thought I'd comment on several points you have argued:

1) I agree that "meat," an already violently homogenous term, is further homogenized by veg*ns who do not discriminate between different modes of "production."

2) A low-fat, whole foods veg*n diet is at least as healthy as a diet containing animal flesh, if not healthier (see _The China Study_)

3) Many of the best athletes on the planet, especially long-distance runners, are veg*ns (see http://www.veganathlete.com/vegan_vegetarian_athletes.php>

4) The ancestors of humans were primarily vegetarians until 100-40kya with advent of symbolic culture. The hunt and meat eating during this perior came to signify spiritual significance. Before that, flesh-eating was subsitantive (see Joseph Campbell's work and _Man the Hunted_). That fewer and fewer people today are hunting and consuming flesh suggests it is not in our natural instinct to kill animals (see _A View to a Kill_). In fact, in many non-Western cultures women nurse and raise nonhumans as their own children and cry when their husbands slaughter them (see _In the Company of Animals_). Our ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years ago were most likely chimp-lke in behavior--that is, they sometimes went on tribal murderous and rape raids and even cannibalized each other (see _The Most Dangerous Animal_). I hope you don't think men should act on that instinct today.

[adam]

-----
Now, let's examine some of your statements by inputting nouns that signify different categories of sentient beings and see whether the statements are quite perverse:

A) "Once the vegetarian position is reduced to this fundamentalist tenet, it becomes hard to counter rationally. But you can have an intuitive objection to such a moral absolute...
--IF ONE CANNOT COUNTER A RATIONAL ARGUMENT AGAINST THE MORAL IMPERMISSABILITY OF AN ACT, SHOULDN'T THAT BE A SUFFICIENT REASON NOT TO COMMIT THAT ACT?

B) That [MALES] [RAPE] other [INDIVIDUALS] for [PLEASURE/POWER] is a fact of nature...[MALES] and the [WO/MEN] they [RAPE] for [PLEASURE/POWER] do not operate outside this natural sphere.
--THE POINT IS THAT ONE CANNOT LOGICALLY DERIVE AN IS FROM AN OUGHT, NOR IS IT CLEAR WHAT IS "NATURAL." FURTHER, IF RAPE WERE "NATURAL", AS ANIMALS WHO ARE MORAL AGENTS AND MEMBERS OF A SOCIETY, MEN OUGHT TO REPRESS/SUBLIMATE SUCH AN INSTINCT JUST AS WE SHOULD ABSTAIN FROM OPPRESSIVE FORMS OF SUBJECTING NONHUMAN ANIMALS TO CREATE A LESS-VIOLENT AND MORE JUST COMMUNITY.

C) We kill [CANCER PATIENTS] for [THEIR MONEY] that would otherwise die another death. We are not taking life from the immortal...And by killing [CANCER PATIENTS] before they begin to degenerate or get sick, we are arguably minimizing their pain and suffering, not increasing it.
--THE POINT IS THAT BUTCHERS ARE NOT ULTIMATELY CARING FOR ANIMALS/CANCER PATIENTS, BUT INSTRUMENTALIZING THEM AS AN EXTRACTABLE RESOURCE AND THEN RATIONALIZING IT AS COMPASSIONATE. IF ONE KILLS AN OTHER, ONE CANNOT "REVERE" THAT OTHER INDIVIDUAL, BUT ONLY THE *IDEA* OF THAT INDIVIDUAL, JUST AS MEN, WHO SAY THEY "LOVE [BEAUTIFUL] WOMEN," RAPE [BEAUTIFUL] WOMEN, NOT AS INDIVIDUALS, BUT AS SYMBOLS/IDEAS/FEELINGS OF WOMAN-NESS AS AN ESSENCE TO BE ACTED UPON BY MEN.

D) the way in which we kill [FOREIGNERS] for [NATIONALIST PRIDE] is quite different from that of other [NATIONS]. We don't chase them down and [SHOOT] them to death with our [GUNS] and [PLANES]. We don't [BOMB] them to death, or [BURN] them alive. We corral them into groups, load them on to trucks, prod and poke them into a reasonably orderly queue, and then [GAS] them in the [SHOWERS]
--THE POINT IS THAT THE ARGUMENT FOR SPECIES/RACIAL/CULTURAL EXCEPTIONALISM HAS BEEN USED TO JUSTIFY THE GENOCIDE OF OTHERS. FURTHER, ONE TAKES PRIDE IN THE "HUMANITY/HUMANENESS" OF THEIR OWN KILLING METHODS WHILE OTHERS ARE "BARBARIC" RATHER THAN QUESTIONING THE SUBORDINATION OF OTHERS AS MORALLY LEGITIMATE. THIS TYPE OF PRIDE IN ONE'S SLAUGHTER METHODS HAS ALSO BEEN USED TO PERSECUTE MUSLIM AND JEWISH SLAUGHTER IN EUROPE (see _Animals and the Third Reich_)

[Anna]

Glad to see those photos. We need to see them. I couldn't believe the fuss the media was making over the scene behind the post-election interview Sarah Palin that gave a few days before Thanksgiving. You know, the interview in front of the turkeys being humanely slaughtered at a local turkey farm. Even Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow (who I normally enjoy) got sort of hysterical about the graphic nature of what was going on behind the interview, like it's something we shouldn't see. All over the TV, warnings about the "graphic" footage prefaced the broadcasts, and some even blurred out the turkey's identity, like it was in the witness protection program or something. Honestly, sometimes I have no hope for people, especially those in the media, who make a mountain out of a molehill while displaying their immense ignorance.