There are two schools of thought: animal welfare and animal rights. Whereas animal rightists seek to dismantle the institution of animal agriculture altogether, those in favour of animal welfare advocate a situation where farmed animals are treated well in life on family ranches and meet as quick and painless a death as possible before becoming the food on our plates.
In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer, who is himself a vegetarian, criticizes fellow author and professor Mike Pollan for grappling with the issue of welfare vs. rights in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, only to come to the conclusion that “locavorism” or eating locally produced foods is the best option for the environment.
Basically, Foer is a rightist and Pollan is a welfarist.
Here’s why the “animal welfare” stance doesn’t hold up.
1) There is no respectful way to kill.
Pollan, who simply does not want to give up meat, believes that farmed animals can be treated with respect in both life and in death, but there is nothing respectful about taking a life. To kill is the utmost act of disrespect. So-called “ethical” free-range, family-run farms are not only even more unsustainable than factory farms, but they are a myth. For as long as animal agriculture exists as an institution, animals will suffer.
Like patriarchy and even slavery, animal agriculture is an exploitative system. Because it is an entrenched, hegemonic ideology, it is often not given a second thought, simply seen as “the way things are.” However, it is an intrinsically abusive system. Is there such thing as ethical slavery, or does slavery as a concept evoke an abuse of power due to the profound hierarchical imbalance? The institution of slavery requires us to treat some humans differently than others, and now that the Transatlantic Slave Trade has been abolished, the practice of treating others differently based on status of birth seems not only outdated but uncivilized. Similarly, many animal welfarists own pets and vehemently profess their love for animals. As Melanie Joy notes, they never question why they are petting their dog with one hand and eating their steak with another. Both cows and dogs are intelligent, loving, sentient beings with a lot of character. Why is there this arbitrary divide between farmed animals and pet animals, just as there was once an arbitrary divide between a free man and an enslaved one?
I’m sorry welfarists, but if you love animals, you can’t eat them.
Supporters of animal welfare are lazy because they refuse to get off the fence. They are uncomfortable with the cruelties of agribusiness, but they insist that there must be a better way of rearing animals for food: a respectful, ethical way. It isn’t inherently wrong to eat meat, they falsely reason, it’s just the way that the corporations are going about it. Most of them do not truly fail to realize that animal agriculture is intrinsically exploitative, but they just refuse to confront the issue because they’re afraid of what comes next.
Confronting the issue means facing that they’ve been lied to for years by big business, that they’ve financed and participated in something cruel and wrong, and scariest of all, that they have to change their behaviour. Most of us have consumed animal flesh at some point or another, and this is something that we have to live with. But once we have recognized that something is wrong with the system, we must work from this point on to change it. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet.
2) It isn’t a zero-sum game.
As a welfarist, although Pollan acknowledges that the arguments put forward by animal rights activists are powerful and difficult to dispute, he tries desperately to refute them, resorting to illogical comebacks and non-sequiturs. He argues that since harvesting crops will also result in the killing of field mice and woodchucks, “if America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline,” (306).
Facepalm.
Although Pollan tries to treat our food choices as a zero-sum game, Foer’s not buying it. He recognizes that it’s impossible to make a completely blameless choice, but questions why we need to frame the conversation in absolutes at all. In his discussion with Alternet, he compares vegetarianism to environmentalism, saying that “the notion that the first time you drive in a car or fly in a plane that you should throw your hands up in the air and say, ‘Okay, well I give up. I’m not going to try at all anymore,’ is crazy.”
It’s not just crazy; it’s lazy. Deep down, those who support animal welfare over animal rights are too stuck in their ways and ruled by their tongues to take a cold, hard, look at facts objectively—hence Pollan’s strange obsession with steak.
Pollan also references Peter Singer, another welfarist who asks why the hunter who shoots a deer is up for more scrutiny than a ham eater, when the pig has likely suffered more.
The Alternet interviewer has actually asked Foer this very question: whether or not he believes hunting is more humane than factory farming. Foer questioned how it was humane at all—after all, in a slaughterhouse the animals die much quicker. Even if the hunted animal has had a good life up until that point, it doesn’t make hunting good. It isn’t for humans to decide when an animal dies.
“I’d rather get lethal injection than be hanged, but actually I’d rather have neither. People often set up these false choices, these false dichotomies, and it’s not like we have to do either of them,” Foer responds.
Spoken like a true animal rights activist.
3) Scientific fact outweighs sensory perception.
Moreover, Pollan thinks that being vegetarian would require a “highly industrialized” and fossil-fuel dependent food chain. Although animal agriculture contributes to greenhouse gases more than the transportation sector, Pollan ignores this fact. The best solution to him is to kill as few animals as possible by eating the largest ones: “grass-finished steaks for everyone.”
Further, Pollan’s section “Homo Omnivorous” is backed by pseudoscientific justifications: how can humans possibly be biologically inclined towards vegetarianism when we aren’t built like ruminants? He cites anthropologists and draws his own conclusion that our evolutionary history as meat eaters is “reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare,” (296).
Many scientists whose studies weren’t funded by agribusiness have found that meat is ill-digested by humans. Pollan appears to be unable to overcome his socially conditioned cravings for steak. There is nothing biological about it. Eating cows in some cultures is just as off-limits as eating a dog in America. However, there are other cultures that permit feasting on farmed dogs. Would Pollan’s mouth water at the sight of a golden retriever cooked medium rare? As Joy illustrated in the best book trailer I have ever seen, probably not.
During his experimental vegetarian stint in his book, which Pollan admitted that he hoped was temporary, he asserts that we should “at least acknowledge that human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed,” (296).
Is it, really? To compare the life-giving act of sex to the life-taking act of eating animals is absolutely absurd. And what is so “deep” about eating meat? Pollan never tells us.
An animal welfare proponent, Pollan thinks that we simply need “a different set of ethics” to guide interactions in the natural world, but humans are already a part of nature. This is what Pollan and a lot of welfarists don’t understand. He treats vegetarianism as a modern Western concept, industrialized and detached from Mother Earth, but vegetarianism isn’t new and it doesn’t entail what he has called transcending our “inheritance.” Our teeth are not built for ripping through animal flesh nor are our stomachs suited to digest flesh, and there are cultures outside of the Western world that have thrived on meatless diets for millennia.
We should all work towards not only decreasing the harm we cause but also consider ways in which we can benefit nature and live in harmony with animals. Turning the lights off when you leave a room, biking to work, and yes, not eating meat make an ecological difference. Humans are more intelligent than animals, but we should use our intelligence to protect and care for them, not abuse or kill them.
When it comes to animal rights, “welfare” will not do. We need to jump down from that fence and decide what we really stand for.
Pollan has been asked about his opinions on Foer’s critique, to which he responded, “Well, look, nobody is anti-meat enough for the animal-rights purists,” shutting down rather than addressing Foer’s viewpoints.
As I said, welfarists are lazy.
As a vegetarian for 35 yrs, with decades of experience around several different animal species — both wild and domestic — I find your statement, “Humans are more intelligent than animals” not only erroneous but quite arrogant. You are obviously judging based on a human yardstick.
Non-humans have myriad abilities which humans do not possess and these are based on intelligence and are not simply instinctual.
Mankind has spent millennia exploiting and killing, but little in the way of conducting unbiased studies regarding non-human intellect.
After all, why bother when it doesn’t benefit his bloodlust or greed?
I have years of personal experiences and observations to draw upon and I have come to the conclusion that not only are non-humans as intelligent as man, I am leaning toward them as superior.
Humans are the idiots who have raped, poisoned and destroyed the planet and are still so stupid that they can’t see how near to the end we are.
Thanks for reading, Rhonda.
Imi ocupam si eu timpul si am dat peste informatia de mai sus al dumneavoastra
asa ca mi-am zis ca e musai sa va felicit pentru ceea ce ideea din sait.
Hi,
Your article “3 Reasons ‘Animal Welfare’ Doesn’t Work” which I read on Huffington Post convinced me. I have long felt that, if I was really true to my own philosophical convictions, I should be (at the very least) a vegetarian. I love animals and live with three cats (P.K.–short for “Pretty Kitty”, Stumpy, and Marilyn Monroe), whom I consider to be my friends and not my “pets”. There’s just no logical way around it: it is hypocritical for me to be petting one of the cats while eating a steak. It’s time for me to bite the bullet and stop eating meat. I don’t need to have sentient animals killed to satisfy my appetite, and I shouldn’t do it. So, as of today, I’m a vegetarian. I’m 66 years old, but better late than never.
I grew up in rural Iowa, where eating meat (and raising cattle and hogs for food) is a way of life. My uncle had a farm in Northeast Iowa. He didn’t raise cattle, but one of his friends did. I vividly remember going with my father and brother to that man’s farm, watching the cattle grazing in the field, and then helping my dad pick one out. That’s what we ate for the next six months. It all seemed perfectly natural at the time (and it was quite a bit different from buying meat in a supermarket), but as I got older, I began to wonder. For a long time, I rationalised my meat eating by saying that, even though eating meat wasn’t a human necessity, eating was; so the animals were at least being killed to meet a human need (albeit one that could be met in some other way). My “logic” didn’t quite satisfy me, but I really did (and do!) enjoy eating steak, cheeseburgers, etc. I think it’s time for me to be as honest with myself as I would want others to be with me.
It does seem to me that animal products such as dairy products, eggs, etc., which don’t involve killing the animals, can be produced humanely. There is no humane way to kill a cow, but there are humane ways of raising and milking cows. “Rocky Mountain Oysters” (the byproducts of castrating cattle–common where I grew up) likewise do not involve killing animals. So I’m not (yet) prepared to become a vegan. Also, my cats (unlike humans) are obligate carnivores, meaning that they must eat meat in order to survive. So there is no way around the necessity of having animals killed in order to provide the food I give to them. The best I can do is try and ensure that the animals killed to produce the cat food are raised and slaughtered as humanely as possible.
Thanks for your article. I am writing this because it really did change my life.
Sincerely,
Doug Rees
Hi Doug,
Thank you so much for writing to me. I truly appreciate your thoughtful analysis of the way you grew up vs. your own philosophical convictions. I too was not born a vegetarian but deep down I knew that eating meat was wrong, and like you, one day I decided to act on my beliefs. It’s never too late.
Although I do think that eating meat can never truly be humane because even the most well-treated animals meet the same horrendous end in a slaughterhouse, I have hope for those industries that use animal products without the need to harm or kill them (such as dairy, wool). One day I would like to have a cow (or cows!) so that I can enjoy dairy products without funding the corrupt dairy industry. I think that the system of the family dairy cow who is loved as much as the family pets is a beautiful thing. There are ways to interact respectfully and even lovingly with these animals that we share our planet with, and I believe that one person at a time, our world will change.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts,
Samita
Well, it’s been almost three weeks since I made the switch, and I’m very glad I did. Sharing my life (and love) with those cats, I get a tremendous feeling of kinship with them–a sense that we’re all family. More than anything else, that impelled me to become a vegetarian. When I’m eating, Stumpy (my little “mischief maker”) almost always jumps up on the table and tries to muscle in and grab some of my food. She’s so wonderfully disobedient, I usually put some food aside and let her eat it. She looks up at me with such obvious love in her face, and now I feel so much better accepting and returning that love. It’s worth it.
I can’t honestly say that I enjoy eating as much as I did before. But I can honestly say that I still enjoy eating. I worked for Greenpeace for a number of years, and some of the people there told me I had to “retrain” my tastebuds. Well, my tastebuds adamantly refuse to be “retrained”. I can’t enjoy eating bean salad. But I can enjoy Hamburger Helper with meat substitute and green beans in place of the pound of ground beef called for in the recipe on the box. It still tastes good, and some cow hasn’t had to die to gratify my tastebuds. There is a book out there waiting to be written entitled “Vegetarian/Vegan Recipes for People Who Love Meat”. It would have things like “Eggs” Benedict, “Lobster” Thermidor, and “Beef” Stroganoff; and I think it would be a big help to those of us who are conditioned to be carnivores.
I don’t like PC liberalism any better than the next guy. But I’m not trying to be “Mr PC”. I’m just trying to be true to my own ethical convictions, express my love for animals, and live my belief that, since we’re all in the same boat together, we had best learn to respect our fellow passengers.