Most people just don’t care about the lives and fortunes of animals?
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
In a recent op-ed, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable, in the Washington Post, Gary Steiner examines this question and the ethics of eating meat.
Following in the footsteps of James McWilliams last week and Jonathan Safran Foer a few weeks earlier, Steiner puts meat-eating—rather than vegetarianism—on the defensive, arguing that it is problematic to brand vegans/vegetarians as moral snobs when uncritical carnivores/omnivores feel they have a sense of entitlement to meat regardless of the ethical implications of their food choices.
LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?
Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)
None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways…
Continue reading here…
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckirkman/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in: behavior, environmental ethics, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
One Response to “Most people just don’t care about the lives and fortunes of animals?”
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I’d like to talk back to Gary Steiner. A full defense of meat eating would take more space and time than I have here, but I would note first that most of the animals we raise for meat would cease to exist as species if we didn’t eat them. They are sensitive and (in their own way) intelligent beings, and therefore deserve the highest level of care from us. But it’s simple arrogance to assume that farmers who raise livestock humanely, as humans have done for thousands of years, are simply callous, unthinking and selfish. And I’m deeply suspicious of people who think that the way to deal with an ethically demanding and ethically problematic relationship (between humans and livestock) is simply to eliminate the creatures on the other end. We are called to live up to the responsibilities of that relationship, not to end it.